Research: Mise en Scene (Setting and Iconography) - Ms Begum

Mise en Scene

Setting and Iconography

What is setting?

- Setting is the location of where a film is being set to make it conventional to the genre it belongs to.

- Setting is important in thriller because it makes the movie more conventional to its genre and creates numbers of different connotations and denotation based on just one location and how it looks.

For example, when a movie is being set in the forest with a house in the middle of nowhere, an old isolated looking house, this would make the audience understand the genre of this movie and have different connotations just by looking at the location. For example, the connotations of the house would be haunted, abandoned, isolated, death, rape etc. This helps to make the audience to have different thoughts and ideas in their mind that this is a thriller movie and expect to see something bad to occurs even though the denotation of it is just an old scary looking house. 

The typical thriller setting are:

- Old & deserted house, the connotations from the audience of this location would be haunted, isolated, ghost, spirit. This helps to creates fear towards the audience and makes them feel uncomfortable. This leads the audience to have ideas of bad things to happen in this location such as spiritual, suicidal etc but denotation wise, it's only an old house.

- Forest, the connotations from the audience of this location would be intimidating, mysterious, patronising, and dangerous. This helps to make the audience to anticipate different ideas of what bad things could happen in this place such as rape and murder etc. This helps to create a chill-excitement towards the audience and makes them feel frightened just by thinking about this location even though the denotation of it is just a dark forest at night time.

Setting and sub-genre

- Setting also dependent on different sub-genre to make the movie more interesting and engage more actions to build up tensions and create sensational/ suspenseful actions.

- Action thriller: the setting would be in the bank, street, underground, air plane & club etc...

- Sci-fi thriller: the setting would be in the lab, space station, factory, military base etc...

- Crime thriller: the setting would be in the street, home, basement, bank, forest etc...

- Psychological thriller: the setting would be in the hospital, church, house, prison etc...

 

What is iconography?

- Iconography is the objects that cause significant to the scene.

- Iconography is important to thriller because it helps to highlight its genre and make it more conventional to thrillers. Iconography helps to creates many different connotations and denotation in thrillers.

For example, if the antagonist is holding a knife, this would make the audience understand the intentions it creates from the antagonist and the connotations from this would be murder or suicidal. This helps to make the audience to anticipate bad things to occurs within the use of this iconography such as killing, robbing or self harming etc. This helps to creates fear and build up tension towards the audience as they will expect to see something disturbing even though the denotation of it is just a knife.

Iconography in thrillers normally are blood, mirror, weapons, money & scary tree etc. Iconography in thrillers are also mixed with other iconography from different sub-genre to creates more meaning to the movie and makes the movie more enjoyable. For example:
- Knife
- Machete
- Saw
- Smokes
- Guns
- Drugs
- Toys

This is scene from a thriller film called 'Saw'. As we can see this scene is being set in a factory basement, just by the location this already give the audience ideas to suggest the feelings of isolation and that this movie is thriller related and helps to create fear. This also helps to make the audience to anticipate something horrific would occurs and tension is being created. As we can also see the iconography in this scene are blood and make-up, the use of these iconography connotates that the character is being torture or brutally attacked. This makes the audience to feel uncomfortable and sympathy towards the victim due to his horrific injuries and helps to create chill-excitement. This makes the scene look more realistic and engage the audience attentions towards the movie. 

Conclusion

- All the information above has helped me to develop a deeper understanding of how setting and iconography could creates different connotations and denotations towards the audience. The type of setting I'm planning to use are street, underground, or ceremony and the type of inocography are blood, weapons and make-up. I am looking forwards to use as many type of setting and iconography as possible to gain as many marks as necessary.