WHAT IS MISE-EN-SCÈNE? 173Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth(2006). These
movies challenge us to readtheir mise-en-scène
and to relate it directly to the ideas and themes
that the director is developing. Let’s take a similar
look at two such movies: Todd Haynes’s Far from
Heaven(2002) and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard
(1963).
In Far from Heaven(production designer: Mark
Friedberg), a melodrama about Cathy Whitaker’s
(Julianne Moore) personal and social problems,
director Todd Haynes uses the style of such Holly-
wood women’s melodramas as Michael Curtiz’s
Mildred Pierce(1945) and Douglas Sirk’s Imitation
of Life(1959)—a style in which mise-en-scène is
absolutely essential to the director’s defining (and
our understanding) of character and action. But
Haynes’s story, set in the 1950s, couldn’t have been
told in those years: it’s about Cathy, a “perfect”
wife, mother, and community member; a husband
who leaves her for a man; and the black man with
whom she falls in love. Once Haynes establishes the
ideas of perfection, regularity, and predictability
(reinforced by periodic references to the changes of
the seasons as reflected in the trees), he returns
again and again to setting key moments of the
action in the Whitakers’ Connecticut house,
located in a white suburb rife with racial prejudice.
But the excellence of Cathy’s house, clothes,
appearance, entertaining, and civic activities is
only surface perfection, because once it is shat-
tered by her husband’s confession that he loves a
man, it quickly falls apart, leaving Cathy in limbo.
Another dimension to mise-en-scène also con-
tributes to our responses to a movie: how its sur-
faces, textures, sights, and sounds “feel” to us.
There’s nothing particularly surprising about this.
Think about how real-life environments affect your
emotions. For people who have lived in a rural or
suburban environment their whole lives, for exam-
ple, their first visit to a large city is a memorable
experience that triggers an emotional response.
That response flows directly from what we might
call the city’s mise-en-scène: the scale of the build-
ings, the proportion of steel and concrete to trees
and grass, the appearance and demeanor of the
people walking the streets, and the multitude of
sounds. If you have ever experienced a city, your
memory of it is at least partly filled with impres-
sions of these sorts of details.
Similarly, nearly every movie immerses us in its
mise-en-scène. When the mise-en-scène in a movie
creates a feeling completely in tune with theMise-en-scène creates a sense of triumph in Pan’s
LabyrinthThis movie, which might be a political fable in
the appearance of a fairy tale, or the other way around, is,
however we interpret it, a work of cinematic magic. It tells
the tale of a young Spanish girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who
in a former life was Princess Moanna of the Underground
Realm. As the movie begins, the year is 1944 and the
location Spain, then under the harsh rule of the Fascist
dictator Francisco Franco. As her daily life becomes
intolerable, Ofelia escapes into her world of fantasy and
undertakes a set of challenges that, should she succeed, will
enable her to return to her father’s realm. Like other movies
in the quest genre (e.g., the Lord of the Ringstrilogy), this
involves magical tools and weapons and encounters with
highly imaginative creatures, including a kindly faun (who
may or may not be the Pan of ancient myths), a hideous
toad, and the equally hideous Pale Man, a child-eating
monster. Guillermo del Toro, a director who is very active in
the design of his movies, and Eugenio Caballero, the art
director, employ an exquisite combination of extraordinary
makeup, animatronics, and computer-generated special
effects to create creatures and the corps of fairies who lead
and protect Ofelia in her activities. When she fulfills the
challenges, she is transformed into the Princess Moanna and
reunited with her father and mother. Here, in this splendid
image of gold and red, we see Ofelia (back to the camera)
and (left to right) the queen on her pillared throne, Pan
stepping toward us (look closely and you’ll see two tiny
fairies on his left), the king on his throne, and an empty
throne waiting for the princess. Complicating one’s
interpretation is the unmistakable Christian imagery: the
stained-glass rose window in the background, the pillars that
in a cathedral would be topped by statues of saints, the
massive wooden columns defining an altarlike space, and
(out of range in this illustration) rows of pews filled with
people who joyously applaud this family reunion.