The Life of Mise-en-scFne ― Visual Style and British Film Criticism, 1946-78

The Life of Mise-en-scene offers a critical history of key debates about visual style in British film journals in 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. It 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-scene in melodrama criticism, and considers what happened to detailed criticism as major theoretical movements emerged in the 1970s. In doing so, it provides a vital context for the contemporary practice of style-based criticism and challenges received notions of critical history, developing our understanding of a range of other key debates and concerns in the study of film.

John Gibbs is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Reading, UK.