In a West German TV studio, 1964.

L'Amérique vue par un australien / Reckless Kelly (Yahoo Serious, 1993)

Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933; photographed by Hideo Shigehara)

Ozu's von Sternberg-influenced silents are full of these kinds of still lives, usually coupled with a backwards dolly -- as though the objects carefully placed in the frame at the beginning of the shot are an entry-point into a world, a world which becomes more and more visible as the camera moves away from the objects.

Affinity

Waiting for Love (2007)

A few sentences typed in the middle of the night in January and never expanded upon. But maybe they don't need expansion.

A director is responsible for both mise-en-scene and mise-en-abyme. I don't mean the literary definition or the facile application of the term that leads to discussions of structure or plotting, dream sequences, "framing stories," pictoral effects and other nonsense. I mean that every movie has both qualities. Mise-en-abyme can be defined as how a film reflects on the world of images and on its own production. That hall of mirrors we call the history of cinema. In the present, the need to define this aspect is increasingly relevant.

Physical Evidence

The movies Sidney Lumet makes now are the best he's ever made. I'll take Before the Devil Knows You're Dead over Dog Day Afternoon and Find Me Guilty over 12 Angry Men any day of the week. Nothing wrong with being an "actor's director" when it produces images like these.

No one else uses the 1.85 frame now like Lumet does. You couldn't cut an inch off of any of the image in Find Me Guilty. A little cropping, and the whole dynamic is lost. It's like removing a letter from a word: a joke would no longer be funny, a line of dialogue would lose its meaning.

Lumet's relationship to the frame (and his relationship is always to the frame and not the image; the image is not what's he's after -- it's just the result of his work with the frame) is like a director's relationship to a stage. It's a way of presenting these people, who in a Lumet film are always costumed actors, and not figures, bodies, ideas, etc. This is mise-en-scene as presentation of evidence. Every object, face, reaction is evident of something. In Lumet's cinema, the director's job is to prove that the script and the actor's performances are true.

The courtroom drama, as a form, is full of interesting possibilities. The action is confined to a single room but also spread across a very large group of people -- judges, bailiffs, lawyers, defendants, prosecutors, jury members, onlookers, stenographers -- each one of whom must speak in turn and has a very specific set of actions.

We should remember that there's a difference between the trial and the court. Directors interested in the mechanics of the court (and in the form of the courtroom movie) are also usually the ones least interested in passing judgment. Lumet, like Preminger, isn't interested in verdicts or victories. As in Anatomy of a Murder, the verdict in Find Me Guilty (though presented as a surprise) is pretty underwhelming. It's the evidence and the testimonies, and how Vin Diesel's characters undermines them, that form the film.

Two Close-ups in One Wide Shot

This shot comes from the Christmas dinner scene early in André Téchiné's I Don't Kiss. Four figures, arranged symmetrically across the 'Scope frame. If you connected the lines between their heads, it would form a sort of subtle valley. The heads aren't quite symmetrical, though -- they're more like opposites -- two focused on the activity of one of the others, the other two only interested in their objects: a book, a cello. Two are silent, and the other two are "heard," though it's only the objects that we hear, in absolute, clear close-up: the crisp turning of pages, the perfectly-recorded cello. Two simultaneous close-ups on the soundtrack, one wide shot in the image. Outside the windows, snow falls silently.