Assignment 3

I've chosen to look at The Royal Tenenbaums, specifically the mise en scene of the scene introducing Raleigh St. Clair (played by Bill Murray).  Raleigh is introduced after his wife, Margot of the Tenenbaum's, a chain-smoking playwriter who hides her true self from her husband and family.  She is an artist, which contrasts her husband, Raleigh, a scientific writer and neurologist.

I noticed aside from this scene, more generally, something about the film's characters.  There is sensible growth in the young and old versions of the Tenenbaum family.  After a few decades of screen absence, the kids believably aged linearly predictably. I mean to say that I think that the cute child actors greatly resemble their adult match. Each characters' simply effective dialogue movement points to their youth ties.  Every face in this film appears symmetrical, crisp and inviting.  The setting, uses aesthetic techniques like complementary coloring, symmetry, and depth. Here are a few of the shots:

Symmetry-Murray's head is framed.

Complimentary colors-Raleigh's purple undershirt, purple wall vs. boy's saturated yellow, dry yellow door.

Beige color theme to match old school props & costumes (phone, radio, tv, suit, glasses) & vintage soundtrack

Props are saturated like an eye-spy book, every figure is identifiable.

The wide frame creates tremendous depth perception for scenes with medium focus, allowing us to identify roughly every figure.  The narrow gap is subtle but between the arrows suggests about 10 ft of depth (tub and stool).  No camera movement or focus to stress the total mise en scene rather than a specific character or thing. 

  Mise en scene is the substance of cinema that the art aspect manipulates (through cinematography, sound, and editing).  Of course cinema has a narrative, and that narrative information sometimes isn't said, but can be seen in an actor or prop's presence or movement.  How the narrative is understood cognitively depends on elements of mise en scene. For instance, the impressions of different colors, items, clothes, facial expressions, and so on into days and days of preparing a set.