06 Nov - 12 Dec at 18:30
Film Program Four of a Kind
The Mise-en-Scène of Fascination and the Fascination with Mise-en-Scène
For the French critic Michel Mourlet (b. 1935), the essence of cinema lay in its mise-en-scène.
The uniqueness of cinematic art was rooted in materiality in service of technique.
A person's position before the camera was mediated by the organization of their own private universe, their aspirations as a work born from a product of fascination.
Such fascination could only be achieved if the balance between reality and illusion was meticulously translated onto the white screen of cinema, captivating the spectator—not as part of this world, but as a distant observer, fully aware of their condition as an individual before the spectacle.
Mourlet expressed his cinematic ideals in the controversial article Sur une Art Ignoré, written amid the many debates on what is cinema? (it is worth noting André Bazin’s enormous influence on these discussions) that permeated Parisian cinephilia in the 1950s and 1960s.
At the heart of these debates were the Hitchcock-Hawksian critics of Cahiers du Cinéma (Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol) and their auteur theory, which placed the director above the form.
On the opposite side, the Mac-Mahonians (Pierre Rissient, Georges Richard, Michel Fabre, Jacques Serguine, and Michel Mourlet—also a critic at Cahiers) took the opposite approach, advocating that form (mise-en-scène) should be the primary and sole authority in a film.
When introducing the emergence of this concept and the breadth of thought that led to Mourlet’s essay, it is impossible to do so without revisiting the history of cinema that gave this select group of critics and cinephiles their name.
Active since the late 1930s, the Mac-Mahon cinema, located at 5 Avenue Mac-Mahon in Paris, near the Cahiers du Cinéma offices, was dedicated to screening American films exclusively in their original subtitled versions.
Its single 150-seat, art-deco-style auditorium became a meeting point for Rissient, Richard, Fabre, Serguine, and Mourlet, who frequented the cinema religiously.
It was through the symbiotic relationship between cinema and audience that Rissient persuaded Emile Villion, the director of Mac-Mahon, to program They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948). Following its successful screening, Rissient went on to curate other films, including Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (1950).
In 1955, he programmed Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950) and M (1951).
In the following years, he featured films by Fritz Lang (particularly his American period), Raoul Walsh, and additional works by Preminger, which had previously been little known to French audiences.
The preference for these four directors, combined with the audience’s enthusiasm for their works, led to Villion’s formal recognition of them—displayed in the cinema’s lobby in the form of four black-and-white portraits of Preminger, Losey, Walsh, and Lang. Thus, they became known as la quadra de ases—the four aces.
Using the context of Mac-Mahon and Mourlet’s essay—both historically and inherently connected—this film cycle aims to present and discuss the role of mise-en-scène through films that embody Mac-Mahonist thought.
This is not intended as an endorsement of Mourlet’s theoretical solidity but rather as an exploration of how this fascination manifests in the spectator and a reflection on the act of staging itself.
Through this controversial and enigmatic text, Michel Mourlet directs his gaze toward the exaltation of the sensory experience in cinema’s grand kinesthetic writing.
In it, we may ponder the inexplicable fascination evoked by Gene Tierney’s mesmerizing performance in Whirlpool.
At the same time, we might reject the near-fascist imposition of an idolization of bodies—primarily white and standardized—as the only fully cinematic form of expression.
At the intersection between beauty and dogma, between the mystique of aesthetics and formal rigor, the films in this cycle emerge to illuminate this scenic hypnosis through the works of the four favorite directors of Mac-Mahonism’s followers.
More than simply presenting the historical conditions that led to this concept of fascination, the cycle seeks to draw parallels in how these same bodies exist within the diegetic world, how the world responds to them, their actions, and how they are orchestrated by the hand of their director.
The exercise lies in an attempt—perhaps premature—to understand what makes Robert Mitchum’s melancholic, Oedipal cowboy in Pursued, Raoul Walsh’s pseudo-noir western, resonate with David Wayne’s character in the remake of M, which in turn dialogues with the conspiratorial uncertainties of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, all culminating in the literal hypnosis of Whirlpool.
If, as Mourlet so vehemently states in his manifesto, everything is in the mise-en-scène, then it is from there that we begin our search for fascination.
For now, these films may serve as a gateway—or rather, an exhibition of what may or may not work.
Ultimately, through trial and error, we seek to locate that confluence of energies that dominate the cinema hall.
That magical element that invades us, seizes our attention, places us in another time at its command, absorbs us—or nearly so.
Gabriel Luna (Master’s student in Cinema at the School of Arts)