What is Setting?
Setting consists of three elements: places, props, and times. Visually, it’s the where, when, and what of a story, and it’s one of the most powerful aspects of mise-en-scene.
The human being is all-important in the theatre. The drama on the screen can exist without actors. A banging door, a leaf in the wind, [...]
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There are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist and excessive. Above all, they’re full of [...]
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“Cinema is Montage.”—Sergei Eisenstein
While cinema was still only a toddler in the artworld, Sergei Eisenstein wrote several essays on his seminal theoretical concern: Montage Theory, and while he wasn’t the first to write about montage—Kuleshov had demonstrated his “effect” by at least 1921 and Pudovkin wrote about it in the mid-20s—Eisenstein’s definition of montage [...]
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Now that the Gears of War III beta test run has ended, I wanted to turn in a new direction here at Randomaniac—video games, of course.
Throughout human history, games of all types have held great artistic value—take chess: the concept, stratagems, and primitive narrative all merge with each unique piece/board design to create what can [...]
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The 2011 Cannes Film Festival is happening this week, and I wanted to give you a glimpse of Brian De Palma’s surreal 2001 Cannes Film Festival set-piece in Femme Fatale. This was the same Cannes where David Lynch won the Prix de la mise en scène [best director] for that year’s other Sapphically charged Noir dreamscape—Mulholland [...]
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