The Life of Mise-En-SceNe by John Gibbs

The life of mise-en-scene offers a critical history of key debates about visual style in British film journals in the post-war 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 1960s, 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.

'Gibbs undertakes an ambitious, large-scale project of critical historiography that, despite its scope, nevertheless manifests a quality of attention to the fi ne grain of concrete detail befitting its primary subject: the best achievements of interpretive or expressive mise-en-scene criticism ... Gibbs's book is one of major scope and historical ambition, covering half a century, the origins of and obstacles to the gradual invention of a critical practice, and key developments in an emerging academic discipline. Yet at every point, the book's insights achieve precision and nuance through the deft way Gibbs builds this history almost entirely by sustained, meticulous analysis of primary sources, in which the critical developments outlined above took shape. His work here thus needs to be recognized as an extraordinary feat of scholarship.'
Elliott Logan, Projections Volume 11, Issue 1