The Life of Mise-en-scene

The life of mise-en-sc ne offers a critical history of key debates about the analysis of visual style. Concerned especially with British film journals of the postwar period, it reclaims an often ignored or misrepresented history, including: the concept of film poetry in the journal Sequence, changing attitudes in Sight and Sound during the 1950s, and the battle over the significance of film style which raged between a number of small journals and the national press in the early 1960s. The book examines 'the British school ...] first associated with Movie in the '60s' - which, in Adrian Martin's words, is enjoying a 'widespread, international revival' - but also other critical movements, more hazily remembered. It explores the role of mise-en-sc ne in the pioneering work on melodrama, and considers what happened to detailed criticism as major theoretical movements emerged in the 1970s.

The book provides a vital context for contemporary style-based criticism, uncovering material which challenges received notions of critical history, and presenting neglected ideas for a new generation. Criticism which recognises the significance of film style has been central to debates about popular forms and cultural value, and in tracing its history the book provides a cross-section of British culture and its attitudes to film. It also investigates a range of important contexts, from conditions of film viewing, to the cultural and political shifts of 1956, to the influence of French journals of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Mise-en-sc ne and related ways of conceiving visual style have been central to so many important debates that the writing considered here has shaped the field in enduring ways.