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2020 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

4. Mise-en-Scène

verfasst von : Nayan Kulkarni

Erschienen in: Mediated Identities in the Futures of Place: Emerging Practices and Spatial Cultures

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Contemporary solid-state lighting combined with advanced networked control systems means that scenic effects, once contained within theatrical and cinematic production, have infiltrated urban space. Mise-en-scène provides a method to articulate the urban atmospheres that have emerged through the new relationships between media interfaces and the construction of urban space. At night, the techniques of ambient lighting, surveillance systems, media surfaces and architectural feature lighting coagulate with physical space. These processes amplify the spectacle of the nocturnal nightscape’s ‘total work’ through overdetermined, embodied subjective urban experiences. The tension between the analytic and productive dimensions of mise-en-scène is expressed in and through bodies. As an urban practitioner, I am implicated in the production of these nocturnal atmospheres. In attempting to locate an urban subject through mise-en-scène, this paper starts by turning a light on in the city of Kingston upon Hull; subsequently, it takes a walk along a fictional street, pauses by a wall in Whitehall and reflects an opera and a movie.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Personalising the Urban: A Critical Account of Locative Media and the Digital Inscription of Place

Nächstes Kapitel Expanded Architectural Awareness Through Locative Media

At least since the Baroque period, the proscenium theatre arranges the audience on one side of a frame, the stage on the other. The frame loosely correlates to the front elevation of a building. Often the ghost of the ancient Greek temple structures the scenic architecture with the applied image of columns and entablature.

The title refers to the hours where the sun is low over the horizon creating raking shadows and a redder and softer quality of light. The articulation of shadow and the angle of light are much favoured by cinematographers and photographers alike.

I am taking Matthew Wilson Smiths simple formulation of the iconic and crystalline. The iconic work conceals its production mechanisms. Conversely, the crystalline work ‘exposes and celebrates its technology’ (Smith 2007: 47).

Mise-en-scène is summarised by John Gibbs as the interpretation of cinematic visual style through analysis of a scene’s contents and its framing (Gibbs 2002: 5). In cinematic analysis less attention is brought to bear on what is excluded from the frame, out of shot in the space of the sound stage. The individual elements which form the composition and potential meanings of the city are not homogenous, neither do they arrive in space at the same time. Cities are compiled in layers of time and material. Instances of image making in the city are unable to hide production equipment in the occluded space of a sound stage. Rather, framing is constructed spatially, the production equipment de-emphasised with techniques of distraction, covering and amplification. Enveloped in the radiance of the night, the physical and the immaterial fold are together into images that, like in cinema, arrive to experience through the exposure of the urban subject to light. In this way light frames the scene, animates its contents and functions as actor and object.

City Councils, Private corporations, Housing Associations, etc.

‘I flatter myself, there can now be little doubt of the plan possessing the fundamental advantages I have been attributing to it: I mean, the apparent omnipresence of the inspector […] combined with the extreme facility of his real presence’.

Bentham does concede in letter 5 that the prisoner should be under actual inspection as much as is possible. ‘[…] but the greater chance there is, of a given person’s being at any given time actually under inspection, the more strong will be the persuasion—the more intense, if I may say so, the feeling, he has of his being so’.

However, if you walk regularly in and around Whitehall eventually a service maintenance engineer will turn up and expose the concealment.

Partial because, after all, a wall is always a means of defining an edge, separating a space, it can still also be simply prosaic. This seems to map in an approximate way to the successive ‘radical negation of the sign as value’ in Baudrillard’s (1998) successive phases of the image, the movement between ‘evil appearance: of the order of malfice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is the order of sorcery’.

The devices I am concerned with are not aimed at pedestrians. Rather, this mode of attack is aimed at buildings and their occupants, communication cables, the spatial and technical supports of the political infrastructure.

‘New norms are being established inside the systems—norms that emphasise a future-orientation involving control patterns over whole categories of people and which develop risk profiles for entire groups’ (Mathieson 2013).

Mathieson situates this ‘probably guilty’ directly within inbuilt error or uncertainty in the systems of surveillance and interpretation. In this sense the surveilled subject can produce the evidence of their own guilt, as Chamayou (2011) argues in ‘Drone Theory’, is erased in the moment of their own extra-juridical destruction, both subject and evidence erased in the ‘probable’.

At the root of this formulation we find a trace of Marx’s Grundrisse, where he marks a ‘pure loss’ in the temporal moment in the circulation of capital; the time that passes ‘before the commodity makes its transition into money; or the time during which it remains a commodity, only a potential but not a real value’. As long as the value remains suspended in commodity it cannot be realised: ‘Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus, the creation of the physical conditions of exchange—of the means of communication and transport—the annihilation of space by time—becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.’.

Landsec, the owner of Piccadilly Lights, has replaced the original patchwork of screens with a single state-of-the-art 4 K LED digital screen and live technology hub, which allows the screen to react to certain external factors, such as the weather or temperature. This feature enables brands to display creative and innovative content, such as weather-appropriate clothing (piccadilylights.co.uk).

‘Concentrated’ spectacle is characterised by Debord (1998: 31–33) as the mode of bureaucratic capitalism that ‘imposes an image which subsumes everything that officially exists, an image […] concentrated in a single individual, the guarantor of the system’s totalitarian control.’ ‘Diffuse’ spectacle seeks to articulate the ‘undisturbed development of modern capitalism’ in which commodities will always fall short of the ‘qualities attributed to the whole’. Each commodity instance (fragment) is ‘irreconcilable’ with the ‘absolute realisation’ of the ‘general commodity form’.

Bazin provides a basic formulation of seeming and being. For the cinematic and theatrical which locates for us the problem of a palpable and an empathic body. On stage, the real body acts as bar to the desiring male gaze; there is a desiring body on stage, it desires so I can only observe the desiring. The cinematic body conversely provides a geometry of gaze that allows an imaginative replacement, a space of empathy, I desire through the projected gaze, the physical bar of the actor’s body (an impediment to my fulfilment) is removed and thus I am calmed.

Seen by the author, live at the Royal Opera House and again on a large projection screen. Amphitheatre H-59, 25th June 2015. Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Libretto: Lorenzo da Ponte; Director: Kasper Holten; Set designer: Es Devlin; Video designer: Luke Halls; Costume designer: Anja Vang Kragh; Lighting designer: Bruno Poet; Choreographer: Signe Fabricius.

Citizen Kane’s sound stage and set: Stage 19, Paramount Pictures, Hollywood, USA, 1940.

In his article in American Cinematographer Tolland writes of a cinematographic ‘reality’ as an analogue to the world outside.

The heliotropic is the tendency of organisms to respond to natural light, this can be seen dramatically in mimosa pudica’s furling and unfurling as it changes. The phototropic is a generalisation of the phenomena, the same effect but with an attraction to any light source.

Most famously an Atlantic Portuguese Man O’War: Although a siphonophore may appear to be a single organism, each specimen is in fact a colonial organism composed of small individual animals called zooids that have their own special function for survival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae).

This can be seen in many recent design briefs for public realm projects. In the outline brief for Strand-Aldwich Public Realm Improvements specific references are made to these themes. The designer is tasked to consider: ‘developing new ideas for how the space is navigated by different users groups thinking primarily through light or sound; Interventions that cater for primarily for night time users of the space, creating an environment that feels safe and inviting to all user groups; Technologies that enhance opportunities for participation and contribution to the physical and visual environment with users somehow leaving a digital shadow or footprint in the space’ (LDA. Strand-Aldwych Artist Brief_Final, Appendix 2). The fixed surfaces of the public realm are proposed as the site for a responsive interactive media interface.

As the cost of large array external media surfaces decreases, we can observe that static passively illuminated advertising hoardings are rapidly being replaced with extremely large and bright screens. As the economics of media surfaces develop, we can speculate that entire building technologies could become simply the frames upon which media is served to the urban spectator. In this way the outward face of cities propel the luminous economy. This would mark a transition from signage that is added to built surfaces to forms of total surface signage in light where glass and concrete are replaced with embedded responsive technologies: all surfaces can dance.

Adorno T (2005) In search of Wagner (Trans. R. Livingstone). Verso, London

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Bazin A (1967) What is cinema? (Trans. H. Grey), vol 1. California, London

Beller J (2006) The cinematic mode of production. Dartmouth, USA

Bentham J (1791) Panopticon, or, the inspection house. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol IV. Simpkin, Marshall, & Co, London

Böhme G (2017) The aesthetics of atmospheres (Thibaud J-P (ed)). Routledge, London

Cameron J (2009) Avatar. Twentieth Century Fox

Chamayou G (2011) Drone theory. Penguin, London

Cubitt S (2014) The practice of light. The MIT Press, LondonCrossRef

Debord G (1998) Comments on the society of the spectacle. Verso, London

Foucault M (1977) Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (Trans. A. Sheridan). Penguin, London

Gibbs J (2002) Miss-en-Scene: film style and interpretation. Short Cuts, London

Holten K (2015) Don Giovanni. Royal Opera House, London. Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Libretto: Lorenzo da Ponte; Set designer: Es Devlin; Video designer: Luke Halls; Costume designer: Anja Vang Kragh; Lighting designer: Bruno Poet; Choreographer: Signe Fabricius

Jameson F (2012) The aesthetics of singularity: time and event in post modernity (unattributed lecture notes web published)

Kuleshow L (1922, 1988) Cinema as the fixing of theatrical action. In: Christiew I, Taylor R (eds) The film factory: russian and soviet cinema in documents. Routledge, London

Lam F (2015) Cities alive: rethinking shades of night. Arup, London

LDA Design (2018) Strand-Aldwych commissions brief. The Northbank Business Improvement District, London

Mathieson T (2013) Towards a surveillant society: the rise of surveillance systems in Europe. Waterside Press, Hampshire

Marx K (1857) Grundrisse, c10. Source: Grundrisse, Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973; Translated by: Martin Nicolaus; Notes by: Ben Fowkes; Scanned by: Tim Delaney, 1997; HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden, 2002; Dave Allinson, 2015

Mbembe A (2003) Necroplitics. Public Cult(Trans. L. Meintjes) 15(1):11–40. Duke University Press, New York

Pallasamaa J (2014) Space, place and atmosphere: peripheral perception in existential experience. Architectural atmospheres: on the experience and politics of architecture. Birkhauser, Basel

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos A (2015) Spatial justice: body, lawscape, atmosphere. Routledge, London

Schlör J (1998) Nights in the big city. Reaktion, London

Schivelbush W (1995) Disenchanted night: the industrialisation of light in the nineteenth century. California, London

Smith MS (2007) The total work of art: from Bayreuth to cyberspace. Routledge, LondonCrossRef

The congress: dual under the klieg lights. Time Magazine, USA. Accessed 18 Aug 1947

www.westminster.gov.uk/transportandstreets: Whitehall Scheme Board-11022080438.pdf

Titel: Mise-en-Scène
verfasst von: Nayan Kulkarni
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Mediated Identities in the Futures of Place: Emerging Practices and Spatial Cultures
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-06236-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-06237-8

Copyright-Jahr: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06237-8_4

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