Choose A Film Or Television Programme And Discuss How Its Mise-En-Scène And Cinematography Operate To Create Meaning For The Audience. How Does The Visual Style Contribute To The Text’S Overall Appeals And Meanings?
...By which it means everything that appears in front of the camera and thus everything the audience will eventually see. Beyond this, the mise en scene plays the role of creating the environment in which the film’s world is set in. While making a believable world, production designers can manipulate aspects of mise en scene to create focus, contrast or mood. I will look at the film Hero (“Ying Xiong” 2002, Yimou Zhang) to highlight how mise-en-scene can be manipulated for different effects.
Hero is an extremely visual film, with a reliance on several aspects within mise-en-scene to help portray plot and themes. One area which is fully utilised is colour. One can see that the film is broken down into several scenes all of which based around a single colour or hue. The purpose of which is not only to provide an aesthetic appeal but also to convey emotions and themes. For example an early scene is saturated in an intensely red hue. This fits the plot at the time, with impassioned characters fighting off an oncoming army. The nature of the film means that each scene is a recollection and therefore it can be interpreted that the director and production designer have use the red hue to suggest that the red scene is looked back by the protagonist with a certain “warmness”. The different colours can also be said to tackling differences between people’s interpretations and viewpoints. Although the action is exciting the director acknowledges that audience will respond to colour in different ways and as a result can influence our reaction to what is portrayed on screen.
If we were to compare the use of colour in Hero to that of the 1974 film The Conversation one could see a considerable difference. In The Conversation, the colours are unsaturated, resulting in a dull palette of greys, blues and greens, which corresponds to the blandness of the business world. In contrast...
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