concept

Setting

Where and when, and the argument over whether a place expresses its people or acts on its own account.

setting
reference
symbolic-code

Setting is the time and place of the story world, geography, era, weather, architecture, and the assumptions those import before a character speaks. It is distinct from Mise en scène: setting is where we are; mise en scène is what has been arranged in front of the camera once we are there. It is also the code most often mistaken for background. A student who writes "the film is set in New York" has recorded a fact and read nothing. The question is what the place is doing: whether it explains the people in it, or acts on them, or is only ever seen through them.

Extension or protagonist

Giannetti and Boggs give setting to the characters. For Giannetti, "settings are not merely backdrops for the action, but symbolic extensions of the theme and characterization". Boggs is more literal. "The environment in which a person lives may provide the viewer with clues to understanding his or her character", above all "the aspects of their environment over which individuals exercise some control. Houses, for example, may be excellent indicators of character." Read the house and you have read the occupant.

Bordwell and Thompson, quoting Bazin, give setting a life of its own. "Setting plays a more active role in cinema than it usually does in the theater", and "it need not be only a container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action". Bazin goes further: some films "use man only as an accessory, like an extra, or in counterpoint to nature, which is the true leading character". The difference is one of direction. For Boggs the arrow runs from person to place; for Bazin it can run the other way, with the place shaping, threatening or outlasting the people in it. Giannetti adds the question of manufacture. "The main appeal of studio sets is usually their lack of reality", while real locations can be shot to look baroque: Eisenstein's Winter Palace interiors "are never just picturesque backgrounds to the action". Real or built is a separate axis from active or expressive.

On the bench

Nancy is the only poor one is Boggs's rule at work. The school uniforms flatten four very different homes into one frame, so production design is the only place the class difference is stated: Sarah's house against Nancy's trailer. Three girls want something about themselves changed; Nancy wants out of a place. The film reads the house and then punishes the occupant for it.

Alice — the prologue is Giannetti's studio set with the lack of reality as the point. Monterey is not a place but a memory of cinema, a set that declares itself a set, and the production spent $85,000 of a $1.8 million budget to build one day of it (The $85,000 backdrop). The artifice is the argument: Alice's childhood was furnished by the movies, and the film says so by building her past on a soundstage.

Psycho — the opening stamps Phoenix, a date and a time over a skyline in the manner of a police report, then chooses one window at random. The city is an alibi for the camera, not a character. And Bickle sees through glass shows a setting that exists only as one man selects it: Taxi Driver's New York arrives through a windscreen and a rear-view mirror, and the film shows the fares that feed Travis rather than a representative sample. The selection is the characterisation: Boggs's rule, made to feel like Bazin's.

Mean Streets (1973) is the case for setting as a handful of true details. Most of its Little Italy is Los Angeles with garbage added; the tenement hallways, the skyline and the feast are real New York, and the audience fills in the rest (New York was Los Angeles).

After Hours (1985) is setting with a date stamp: SoHo at night in 1984, a few blocks from the Little Italy of Mean Streets and a different country, where the uptown visitor is the intruder (SoHo before the money, 1984).

What to look for

Real location or built set, and does the film want you to know which?
Does the place explain the people, or do things to them they cannot explain?
What does the setting let you assume about class, safety and possibility before anyone speaks, and does the film later confirm or revoke the assumption?
Through whose eyes is the place seen, and what would it look like through anyone else's?

In the books

In a film, the setting can come to the forefront; it need not be only a container for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action.

— Film Art, fa 115

In the best movies and stage productions, settings are not merely backdrops for the action, but symbolic extensions of the theme and characterization.

— Giannetti, um 304

The environment in which a person lives may provide the viewer with clues to understanding his or her character. This is especially true for the aspects of their environment over which individuals exercise some control. Houses, for example, may be excellent indicators of character.

— Boggs, awf 86

The main appeal of studio sets is usually their lack of reality

— Giannetti, um 304

Deepest on this in the library

Measured across the 72 books indexed in Reel — how much denser each one is on this concept than the library average. A place to read next, not a claim about quality.

2.6× Justus Nieland — David Lynch 213 passages · cite as dl
2.4× Roger Silverstone — Television and Everyday Life 210 passages · cite as tel
2.3× Christopher Kenworthy — Master Shots 157 passages · cite as ms1
2× David Morley — Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies 262 passages · cite as tacs
2× Donna Kornhaber — Wes Anderson 131 passages · cite as wak
1.7× Dixon & Foster — A Short History of Film 270 passages · cite as shf

Go on, then

concept Acting Performance as a symbolic code: who authors it, how the cut and the casting shape it, and why realism is the wrong yardstick.
concept Colour Palette as meaning, and the argument over whether colour speaks by instinct or by rules a film teaches in its first minutes.
scene After Hours — the keys A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.
film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
idea Bickle sees through glass The windscreen and the rear-view mirror are the film's two apertures. Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and the film is careful about which passengers he is allowed to see.