Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging

[1] Introduction

[2] Revising Our Sense of Feuillade

[3] Mizoguchi the Inexhaustible

[4] Cheerful Staging: Hou’s Early Films

[5] Staging and Stylistics: Some Further Business

[6] Misprints, Mistakes, and Missed Opportunities

In the early 1990s I became keenly interested in cinematic staging, the ways directors arrange and move their actors within the frame. Staging is a powerful part of filmmaking, but there is very little written about it, even by practitioners. Andrè Bazin gave us many powerful indicators of what to look for, and Sergei Eisenstein, in his concept of mise-en-shot, also offered intriguing suggestions. In the last chapter of On the History of Film Style, I sought to develop these theorists’ ideas and to trace some major norms of depth staging across the history of cinema.

This account remained rather general, so I wanted to refine my analysis of those norms and to explore how particular directors had innovated or consolidated particular usage of them. The result was this book, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging, published in early 2005 by the University of California Press.

What artistic resources does cinematic staging afford? The first chapter is an introduction to the problem, reviewing efforts to think about staging as an integral part of the director’s craft. The technique is at once theatrical (involving acting and ensemble-performance factors) and pictorial (demanding an effective two-dimensional composition). Here I propose a systematic way to think about style in cinema, arguing that in narrative filmmaking, the directing of attention to key information in the frame is a crucial concern (although not the only one). My effort is to trace out some primary functions which style performs in cinema. I conclude by examining staging in contemporary U.S. cinema, both Hollywood and off-Hollywood, as constrained by what I’ve called “intensified continuity” style.

The central chapters examine four filmmakers, considered in chronological order: Louis Feuillade, master of the French silent serial; Kenji Mizoguchi, the great Japanese director; Theo Angelopoulos, the Greek filmmaker who rose to prominence in the 1970s; and Hou Hsiao‑Hsien, the distinguished Taiwanese director. Each chapter analyzes the director’s principal staging strategies, situated in relation to the norms of his time, both national and international.

The book is mostly an effort in theoretically guided film criticism, but a final chapter broadens out to ask how analyzing cinematic staging can contribute to the theory of style in film. Once more, this project is part of my ongoing effort to explore how a “poetics of cinema”—one attentive to craft practice, design principles, and aimed-for effects—can enlighten us about movies.

While writing the book, I made notes on issues which might be of interest to readers but which would break the flow of the argument on the page. It occurred to me that a website would be an ideal vehicle for these supplementary ideas. Thanks to the Internet, I can expand the book in what I hope will be fruitful ways.

[1] Introduction

[2] Revising Our Sense of Feuillade

[3] Mizoguchi the Inexhaustible

[4] Cheerful Staging: Hou’s Early Films

[5] Staging and Stylistics: Some Further Business

[6] Misprints, Mistakes, and Missed Opportunities