Comics are scenographic, not just because the terms from the book’s title, mise en scène, acting and space, are incorporated into contemporary discussions of scenography in theatre and performance studies. They are scenographic because the etymology of the term from Greek implies the stage and painting or drawing: scenographics, to allude here through its hyphenation both to the subject matter of the scene common to film theatre and comics and to the graphic, a key methodological mode in many comics. It is also an allusion to the theatrical theory of scenography, which ‘is concerned not only with the material constructions of theatre but how the performances relate to one another; relate to the performers; relate to the spectators’ (Hann 2019, 72. Original emphasis). As suggested by Rachel Hann’s Beyond Scenography, the scenographic describe traits which occur ‘in both art time and life time. This same modelling applies to film and filmic, dramaturgy and dramaturgical’ (2019, 70) and similarly in cinema and cinematic and any situation of life where we recognise the presence of artistic elements in the absence of the media themselves. Comics, this book argues, can possess elements of the filmic, the cinematic, the theatrical and of the scenographic without being any of the art forms it evokes. Scenographic in this book is an exploration of things comics have been suggested to possess: mise en scène, acting and spatial traits which disrupts notions of space more commonly associated with performance.
Mise en scène is a most frustrating term to define. If this book were to open with the definition, where by “definition” you require a clean meaning without contention and a straightforward statement which outlines or implies the ease with which to use it, it would be the quoted sentence that every undergraduate and scholar would use. However, mise en scène is fairly irreducible despite many attempts to do so. This book will of course add to those attempts and though it exasperates the situation in terms of a clear “definition” of the term, it certainly supplies a thorough interrogation of the concepts of mise en scène and the complicated relationship it has with the idea of acting and space in comics. The most commonly used definition, most often discovered as an undergraduate, is drawn inevitably from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: an Introduction, a staple of the film studies diet. Any contemporary work of mise en scène is remiss not to include this; it appears to be the crystalline definition that we want:
In the original French, mise en scène (pronounced meez-ahn-sen) means “putting into the scene,” and it was first applied to the practice of directing plays. Film scholars, extending the term to film direction, use the term to signify the director’s control over what appears in the film frame. As you would expect, mise-en-scene includes those aspects of film that overlap with the art of the theatre: setting, lighting, costume, and the behavior of the figures. In controlling the mise-en-scene, the director stages the event for the camera. (Bordwell and Thompson 2013, 112)
The whole passage is included here because part of why mise en scène is so contentious is implicit in this passage. Firstly the hyphenating is a frustrating thing to unpick, it is hyphenated because it anglicises the term (note also the loss of the accent), wrestling it from its French roots for fear of alienating English-speaking students, the hyphens also prevent formal laziness by assuming that because the words are separate they can be used separately as synonymous, that where “scene” has been used, “mise-en-scene” has been implied. The reference here is also to the scenes of stage performances dating from the first half of the nineteenth century, at around the same time that a concept of mettre en scène was being established, the “direction” of the play. To be clear though this is a modern translation of a difficult concept in itself. Mettre en scène means staging the play, literally “putting on stage”, and a set of production activities at that time carried out under the instruction of what was usually a producer or actor-manager, the person with the money who also often had a key role. In France, this role started to be replaced by the metteur en scène, the director, someone only interested in what was produced and not in the financial aspects or in being, as actor-managers so often were, also the stars of the production. To distinguish between these terms, mettre en scène is the activity of staging, metteur en scène is a now rarely used term for the director, French theatres now preferring realisateur as in the cinema, and mise en scène refers to how staging is achieved.
The single thread which runs through this book is based on the idea of staging comics action, and a thorough exploration of this idea requires three positions to maintain and answer. It must question the suitability of the concept of mise en scène for use in comics analysis and in answering that it has to address the outwardly simplified idea of mise en scène in common usage. The arguments must explore the most evident visual elements materially presented as part of the medium’s peculiarities, chiefly that of the décor, then come to the conclusion that a full discussion of mise en scène in comics must also include depictions of acting, which they do not normally do. Such a discussion forces a re-evaluation of the hierarchies of significance found in a study of mise en scène which incorporates the concepts of space and audience in comics because the function of acting is to bridge the gap between the narrative and the experience of the event. These interdisciplinary explorations, travel through territories of theatre and film, bring us back inexorably to the question: Why use mise en scène as a critical term for studying comics? Comics studies is a field which is expanding its critical base upon the unique properties of its media form, the presence of a term drawn most visibly from cinema seems ill-fitting.
The relationship between comics and film is not an easy one. As Hans-Christian Christiansen points out in “Comics and Film: A Narrative perspective”, the early critical methodologies for criticising comics academically were centred in the paradigm of critical film studies despite differing quite radically in form and substance (2000, 107). He argues that comics were, in the early years of cinema’s development, influenced in terms of ‘motifs, storyline structures and subjects’ (Christiansen 2000, 107) and occasionally stars of the screen would visit the little boxes of the comics page, though more often the ‘pilgrimage to Hollywood’ was made by the creators who wished to also be the designers and makers of cinema (Glassner 1990, 94).
This contentious relationship has been energetically fruitful, however, the influences between the forms may be many, but they are often not clear and ‘there are even more intriguing aesthetic differences’ (Christiansen 2000, 107) which have been unpicked in piecemeal in the earlier movements of comics studies, in particular through the ground-breaking work of Thierry Groensteen and Pascal Lefèvre who feature significantly in this book. In general though, references to the ‘cinematographic style’ of comics can be seen as contentious, and where the overlap of comic and film is ontologically fuzzy there are often philosophical issues which make that blurring problematic (Meskin 2007, 2011; Lefèvre 2007). One of the most persistent cinematic paradigms in comics is the idea of a comic’s mise en scène, a paradigm which indicates an approach that ‘concerns the representation of a scene by a specific organization of its virtual but figurative elements such as décor, props and characters’ (Lefèvre 2012, 73). It is on the surface a straightforward enough idea, and suggests that, like theatre and film, comics can be broken down into constituent visual components and analysed. However, the term does not exactly lack complexity in film and theatre and the unproblematised use of the term in comics, for example, in Randy Duncan and Mathew J. Smith’s “How the Graphic Novel works” (2017), seems like an opportunity to question its utility. The underlying thesis in this book questions at this moment in comics studies whether mise en scène is a suitable fit for a field of comics studies at its growth into a discipline. In order to understand what mise en scène can truly offer to the study of comics, it has to ask whether ‘the virtual but figurative elements’ (2012, 73). Pascal Lefèvre refers to, are actually relevant to the comics form?
An example of the contentions underlying the concept can be found in Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (1992) by theatre theorist Patrice Pavis, one of the few theatre theorists to deal with the concept in not one but several full-length works. For Pavis, mise en scène in theatre is a method which decentres the Eurocentric approach to theatre and allows a cross-cultural understanding which does not try to compare or make sense of performances of cultural difference through a lens it was not made for. It is the way, he argues, that we can understand what Bunraku—Japanese rear-rod puppets—and Italian opera have in common despite superficially appearing to be different cultural forms. In fact, the disparity between these forms is so great they could be considered entirely different media; the forms and conventions which underpin them are so unique, yet their historically high-cultural subject matter, narrative structures, heightened poetic performances and live production values ultimately make them look similar.
Mise en scène, for Pavis, establishes a few basic principles as an analytical approach: ‘its main options, the acting choices...