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Mise en Scene Analysis of Woody Allen’s Manhattan Important concepts to note in the sample paper:
It is early morning. The light of the rising sun suffuses the Brooklyn Bridge with a romantic grandeur. A tiny couple sits chatting on a bench along the riverbank. The lyrical beauty of the shot strikes the viewer. Beyond its aesthetic value, the famous Brooklyn Bridge shot in Manhattan, directed by Woody Allen, encompasses several central themes of the film: the romance of the city, its dominating presence, the inconsequence of its inhabitants and their problems, their anonymity, and the isolation of two people in love.* The shot appears approximately twenty-eight minutes into the film. The viewer has been introduced to Isaac (Woody Allen), a successful New York television writer who quits his job to write a novel. Isaac’s married friend Yale (Michael Murphy) confides in Isaac that he has been cheating on his wife with a woman named Mary (Diane Keaton). When Isaac and his teenage girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemmingway) run into Yale and Mary at a museum, Isaac is immediately put off by Mary’s opinionated and intellectual demeanor. He complains about her to Tracy after they leave Mary and Yale, but later when he meets Mary at a party, he strikes up a rapport with her. Knowing each other through Yale, they decide to share a cab after the party and end up spending the night walking together through Manhattan. As morning begins to break, they continue their talk sitting together beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.* The dominant in the shot is the Brooklyn Bridge itself. It immediately attracts the viewer’s attention because of its positioning within the frame and its relative size: it takes up the entire upper half of the frame. Also, although not artificially lit, the bridge is much brighter than the darker figures below. After the bridge, the eye focuses on the main subsidiary contrast, the characters on the bench, searching them out because of the intrinsic interest characters hold. They are also striking because that are almost pure black in a shot dominated by shades of gray. The eye then travels to the left towards the other subsidiaries, a centrally located lamppost, which seems to divide the frame in half, and a large brick wall on the bottom left, which balances the weight of the couple on the right. Like this balance, the density, the angle, and the lines of the composition of the shot suggest stability. The density of the shot is medium with the viewer having to take in about four major elements: the Bridge, the couple, the lamppost, and the wall. While an odd number of elements suggests tension, an even number diffuses that tension. Furthermore, the neutral, eye-level angle creates a calmness in the scene and does not create a sense of the director’s presence intruding on the shot. Finally, the lines of the shot are primarily horizontal and vertical. The horizontals include the bridge, the wall, and the slats of the bench on which the couple is sitting; the verticals include the lamppost and the bars of a guardrail along the river. However, the character placement contrasts with this seeming stability. The shot is an extreme long one and loosely framed; the characters occupy only a small portion of the bottom right corner, the Bridge looming over them. Not only does this make the shot top heavy—the Bridge seems to oppress the characters—but the central lamppost seems to push the characters further right toward the edge of the frame into oblivion. Also, the form of the shot is open, the camera arbitrarily stopping on two people in one area of a much larger world. With this placement, the characters seem inconsequential and minute in comparison with the city in which they live. They are merely a small portion of a picture dominated by the Bridge, which can be read as representing the vastness and oppressive presence of New York City itself. Additionally, the staging position of the characters negates any individual personality they might have. Both characters face away from the camera, and, unlit, they appear as silhouettes on the screen, just black faceless beings, stripped of individuality. As the viewer tends to identify with the camera’s lens, the back-to-camera positioning makes the characters seem inaccessible; they remain isolated from the viewer. Yet, the viewer is able to discern some information from the character proxemics. The distance between Isaac and Mary is intimate (under eighteen inches). This suggests that during the course of the night on their walk the two have grown close and certainly have gotten past Isaac’s initial dislike of Mary. Thus, their isolation from the audience suggests contrasting ideas: on one hand, they are just anonymous people within sprawling New York City; on the other hand, they are isolated together, privately developing feelings for each other. The romance of the moment is highlighted by the use of black and white and a soft focus lens, giving the shot (and the film as a whole) an unreal, almost magical quality similar to the sophisticated Paramount romantic comedies of the thirties. In contrast, the lighting of the scene is naturalistic. There seem to be no artificial splashes of light, all the light in the scene coming from a source that seems to be beyond the horizon. Another naturalistic aspect of the shot is the use of a wide-angle lens, which creates a deep focus similar to the way the eye would focus on the scene. However, because of the use of a widescreen format, the depth is somewhat negated by the breadth of the frame and not as readily apparent as in many deep focus shots. Overall, the shot is one of contrasts, containing elements of both realism and formalism. Additionally, the objects and people depicted in shot contrast with each other. The lightness and enormity of the bridge contrast with the darkness and diminutive size of the couple in the corner. The thematic associations of those objects and people contrast as well. The city is both romantic and oppressive, and the characters are both isolated in and dwarfed by the outside world. This collection of contrasts reflects the difficulty Isaac has in characterizing the city in the opening voice over of the film. Indeed, the entire film seems to celebrate the city while at the same time portraying a complex and ambivalent vision of it.
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