A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO ASSEMBLING THE PERFECT TV CREAM FILM

6 - THE MISE-EN-SCENE

Now hang on a minute, let us explain ourselves here. The thing is, compared to a genuinely complex and highly-skilled craft like, say, organising a pools panel or cooking a senior stew, film criticism is somewhat of a piece of piss. Hence, since the fifties, those self-appointed "scholars" of so-called "cinema" (from whom we're subtly distancing ourselves, do you see?) have come up with all sorts of arcane verbiage with which to garnish and obscure the often very straightforward business of discussing films, to keep their jobs safe from the layman. And since men don't come much layer than your hapless Creamguide (Films) team, who better to demystify the post-structuralist cant and replace it with the happy sound of people who blatantly don't have a clue what they're on about?

Mise-en-scene is in essence a flowery, dandified, look-at-me-riding-my-stowaway-shopping-bike-around-Bedford way of referring to what happens between the script and the screen, ie. the stuff the director is responsible for (or delegates to cameramen and designers and then takes all the credit for himself later on). Scenery, staging, lighting, framing the shots, editing, costumes, haircuts, badges, everything you end up looking at down your Warner Google Odeoplex in between the mobile phone reminder and the post-credits montage of hilarious outtakes is, in theory at least, ultimately under the control of the man with the megaphone. How much of all that they actually bother with themselves does, of course, vary. Terry Gilliam, for instance, painstakingly sketches and plots each of his films in the minutest detail, while, say, Bob Kellet probably didn't stay up all night agonising over the authenticity of the hotel lobby set on ARE YOU BEING SERVED?: THE MOVIE.

So, which directorial style will best serve our Nestle's Ideal Film (which, older viewers will recall, features Rodney Dangerfield living one day over and over again, with a possible Kurt Vonnegut coming round for tea halfway through)? Let's start with the dusty old Euro-classics, as exemplified by the Parisian likes of Francois 'Cahiers Du Cinema' Truffaut and Jean-Luc "careful with that razor blade" Godard, who shook up the staid old guard of Proper Editing by chopping out feet of film at random and inserting it somewhere else, in between hopelessly drawn-out longeurs with a bloke and a bird in an upstairs room being slow very unfunnily. A triumphant, ground-breaking celluloid two fingers to the ruling Master Shot elite at the time of course, and Truffaut's JULES ET JIM is a damn good film, but those revolutionary times are gone, and all that jump cutting (especially in the context of God-o's later bouts of self-pleasure like the intolerable KING LEAR) seems irreparably dated to us now. Besides, us being comfy, waistcoat-darning types, we don't really think we qualify as Angry Young Men. Well, we're a bit miffed at the decline of the National Milk Bar, but having some bored-looking chap in a mac puffing on a Capstan and delivering a glum monologue about Webb's Wonder lettuces isn't going to be much help there, we reckon.

Not that we're puritanically averse to a bit of time-fiddlage, of course. Some may find they need a stopwatch and a slide rule to sit and watch a film by Laughing Nicholas Roeg, but we're always up for a bit of his "meanwhile, two weeks earlier" temporal chicanery, as long as there's not too much of Oliver Reed's red arse on show. In fact, poncing about with editing benches should come back into fashion once everyone gets as heartily sick of Laughing Lars Von Trier and his Dogmatix '73 school of cinema as we are. It all sounded admirable enough - CGI films are largely boring rubbish (though we'd argue not necessarily due to the CGI, more the boringly rubbish people who produce the things) so why not throw out the Hollywood glitz and high-tech horsefeathers, along with fancy lighting, soundtracks, make-up, tripods and decent on-set catering while you're at it? All sounds decent and sober enough. Then you find yourself sitting through BREAKING THE WAVES and wishing a five-pronged CGI dragon would fly out of the North Sea and bite Emily Watson's mithering head off. It's surely never a good idea making a film in direct reaction to what's currently flavour of the month, as next month that flavour will most likely have faded away and you'll be left forlornly holding up your spoon of artistic truth and looking quite the arse. Just tell us a story! Preferably about a talking bear.

Ironically, old Lars started off making big, showy, highly-polished, effects-heavy films like the walking Athena poster that was EUROPA, an over-slick homage to another no-frills genre, Film Noir. Now the cutback aesthetic going on with your original noirs stemmed more from postwar "make do and mend" than any lofty artistic ideal - can't afford massive, elaborate sets? Turn off half the lights and give the lady a fag to make exciting smoke trails in the gloom. And while we're a bit so-so on the To Kiss a Deadly Double Crossing Dame plots that a lot of noirs throw up, we do think they look fantastic. We wish we could remember the name of that film where cinematographer Jack "genuine real proper genius" Cardiff convincingly created an entire airport by sticking a bloke up a pole with a searchlight in the fog - stuff like that demands respect.

Then again, rain-lashed sidewalks and snub-nosed berettas aren't perhaps the most timeless of emblems. Let's go back a bit to noir's immediate ancestor, as perfected by a generation of spooky European directors with initials instead of first names, in a South African apartheid president stylee - German Expressionism. That is to say, creaky old black-and-white grainathons full of long shadows, lop-sided sets and hideous bald arthritics lit from below. This sort of stuff is still mightily effective, in that it still gives us the yellow creeps. Like a lot of great horror, it seems RENTAGHOST-silly in the light of day, but when you're sat there in front of it it's grasp-the-hot-water-bottle time. Not sure how flexible it is as a format, though, beyond the whole top-hatted hypnotist vampire milieu (and we can't see Rodney fitting in here at all), although early episodes of DR WHO have pretty much the same quality. Besides, its memory has been dulled of late by various annoying alcopop ad campaigns.

One hangover from all this that we certainly don't want cluttering up our Dangerthon is the Blue Light Bouncing off a Strut School of sci-fi. Many loooong years ago, a man called Ridley Scott made a film called BLADE RUNNER, which allied a huge production budget to what was basically a detective noir homage. It didn't half homage, in fact. It practically haemmoraged homage. All fair enough, of course, but as the eighties cranked slowly along, lots of other sci-fi films started looking the same. The same rainy nightscapes, the same harsh blue lighting through dry ice, the same neon and backlit chrome. Only, of course, nowhere near as good. And if you're not pastiching an old Raymond Chandler romp, what's the point, exactly? Thus equipped with a third-hand look lifted by default, loads of bloody rotten films trampled over the rest of the decade in a permanent midnight future seemingly set round the back of the TOP OF THE POPS studios just after they'd thrown out all their neon roundels and shiny scaffolding for a mid-series revamp. It got to the point where a sci-fi flick that dared to set its action during daylight hours was a welcome respite from the Trocadero gantries, even if it was campy old rubbish like CHERRY 2000.

One of the better exponents of the Equinox title sequence knock-off aesthetic was James "King of Town" Cameron, who graduated from the smoke 'n' lasers workhouse to the rolling vistas, massed crowds and dirigible-mounted cameras of the Epic. We're all for a good epic (hence we can't stand TITANIC). Give us panoramic landscapes, marauding hordes and brows earnestly furrowing under a variety of military headgear and we're incommunicado till Songs of Praise. Thing is, the necessary massiveness of the enterprise often stymies the fun. The director gets so wound up marshalling the massed ranks of extras, sets, low loaders and chuck wagons that the sheer gruelling industry of turning two hundred sheets of badly-Xeroxed pink paper into fifty yards a minute of sprocketed celluloid often takes over from a sense of perspective on the story being told, hence so many epics have a sort of bitty, half-mast quality in between the sweeping set pieces.

And with the promise of epic visual spectacle comes the risk of sidelining the people. The scenery embalms the actors, as we found out all over again trudging through DOCTOR ZHIVAGO last week. No-one can photograph a snow-bound palace like David Lean, for sure, or a blizzard or an army marching on a frozen lake. It all looks wonderful (and gazing at Bethnal Green's own Julie Christie is hardly the equivalent of six months in borstal either). There are a lot of great moments where these pauses to take in the scenery work brilliantly - that swooping pan down a tranquil cornfield to settle on a Gatling gun which then blasts the crap out of assorted women and pensioners, for instance. But for every one of those, there's a too-long pan up footprints in the snow, or a lingering look at the lovingly placed icicles on Omar Sharif's tache that elbows its way in front of the Bolshevik biography with all the subtlety of a grocer's "LOOK! BANANAS!" sign with little eyes drawn in the "o"s.

Stepping further up the access ramp of the "less chat, more 'look at that!'" style, you have your Kubricks, directors that can so rarely be arsed sorting their actors out that performances often go over the top or fail to materialise at all, the actors being beaten into the ground by a hundred takes of a slamming car door, or left to their own devices while the disinterested maestro coos over his new Steadicam kit. Again, we don't deny it looks great, but after the umpteenth portentously silent and stealthy tracking shot down a deserted corridor, the child's-trip-to-Cornwall cry of "Are we there yet?" rings out from our mental back seat. We're not being Philistines here (we don't think) - we love SOLARIS and SECONDS and LA DOLCE VITA and old episodes of THRILLER and loads of stuff that Takes Its Time, but there's a difference between building a naturally slow momentum and just bunging in loads of shots of the scenery because you can. Worst offender in this superficial folderol is controversial photographer "Fifteen" Peter Greenaway, a man who's clearly looked at a lot of paintings but seems to hate stories with a nutter's passion. He'd film crosswords if he could, and in DROWNING BY NUMBERS he very nearly does. Again, yes, it all looks highly spiffy (though the cream horn should go to cameraman Sacha Vierney for that) but it's like watching the holiday slides of an undeniably talented but pathologically dull nudist photographer while he drones on and on about the number of steps in the cathedral in background. It's not what we call a film.

All right then, let's vault clumsily to the other side of the camera-wielding fence, and consider the referential minefield that is "faux-documentary", or more properly "cinema verite", or even more properly "merrily papering over cracks in the credibility of a script by wobbling the camera and having the actors' speech tail off into little non-sequitirs and mumbled banalities". Well, it's the easiest thing in the world to poke childish fun at the whole overused concept, and punctuate some poor sap's painstakingly crafted pseudo-doc with derisive hoots of "Oooh, when's he going to do a funny dance with paint on his head?" But the fact remains that no-one who's seen DOG DAY AFTERNOON or minimal Sellers PoW classic THE BLOCKHOUSE is going to forget them in a hurry, THIS IS SPINAL TAP and TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN are precision-crafted ottomans packed with hilarity, and THE SPONGERS is one of the most emotionally wrenching pieces of television you'll ever see. It's only a cheap trick when it's done cheaply. It's not the pastiching of a documentary per se we're so bothered about here, more the inescapable, enveloping atmosphere that arises when action is presented "as live", so to speak.

Two films represent the peak of this atmospheric for us, and coincidentally they're both set primarily on boats. JAWS is full of this marvellous stuff, the pervading sense of foreboding and menace just as endemic in the quiet scenes where ver lads are getting pissed in the cabin as when that cello-playing fin hoves into view. It's a weird kind of claustrophobia, not just in the tiny space they're confined to but in time as well. You long for Spielydraws to just cut to the chase - we know there's sharks a-coming, put us out of our misery, etc - but instead he lingers on nothing much happening, ramping up the suspense and bringing you closer to Scheider and co as a result. Of course, he borrowed this off the more expansive Hitch masterpieces like NORTH BY NORTHWEST, but the great trick was shaving off all the Old Hollywood pizazz and polish and keeping it tight and tiny.

One film takes all this and runs the full length of the counter with it, though - yes, the mighty bomb-on-boat brilliance of JUGGERNAUT comes top of our catalogue of claustrophobia. On the surface it looks ho-hum - no dramatic devices of note here, or at least none that leap out at you. Which is of course where the mastery lies. Director Dick Lester, raised on Spike Milligan shows and Beatles runarounds, knew daffy in-camera tricksiness (notwithstanding its merits) for the bolt-on gimmick it was, so he pared everything back to let the cast of massively flawed characters (and Alan Plater's despondent dialogue) bask on the film's grotty surface. Where silly disaster films of the same period pile on the set piece effects and dramatic score, "Juggers" is shot so matter-of-factly that, even at the tensest moments, you half expect John Pitman's voice to start lugubriously commentating over the top ("Another day, another wire for Richard Harris. He's been in this game for decades now..."). This sounds like a bad thing, but it's not - what Lester never does is push that grocer's sign in your face, be it for the bananas of meticulous costume detail or the Israeli Maris Pipers of melodrama. The film's story takes the strain, and all additional trappings are pruned away, giving you the opportunity to take it in on your own terms, as if you'd stumbled across Harris, Sharif, Kinnear and their tribulations yourself, rather than have some upstart filmmaker lob them at you with all the tiresome "ta-daa!" he can muster. If you'll forgive the lapse into Paul Ross-ese, it's a down-at-heel disaster movie for power cut Britain ("Doesn't anyone work in this bloody country anymore?"). Obviously it's perfect. Laughing Lars clearly had a point, but there's no artful preciousness here, just fantastic storytelling.

So, that's our look. Of course, Lester quit directing for good after Kinnear's untimely death on the Musketeers set, so Mr Cohen will have to shop around for a decent replacement. Can't say we envy him. We doubt legitimate, state registered, having-us-tea-on-us-lap film critics would be too impressed with all this. Unless, of course, we adopt an important-sounding piece of jargon to sum up this shabby, cramped, nervous and massively British style. How about "council uneasiness"? Or, if you're feeling particularly Bedford, "malaise du conseil". Thus armed with fancy terms, we can plan our own revolution. Greenaway's got some film about Rembrandt coming out next year, so let's all book back row seats for the inevitable NFT showing with his nibs in attendance. Then, about ten minutes of tedious tableaux in, we can all leap to our feet as one and yell: "Arretez cette projection de diapositives pretentieuse! Vive la malaise du conseil!" Then we can storm the projection booth and put on Roy Kinnear singing Roll Out the Barrel. Or get ignominiously chucked out on our arses, either option's good. Who's with us?

See, this is how it's done, Jean-Luc...

... whereas this clearly ain't. King Lear, slab of indulgent piffle extraordinaire. Watch out for the random bird noises!

Feeling queasy yet? Under hypnosis with Dr Caligari's wizard woodwork.

Cherry 2000 - and not a blue back-light in sight. A bit of a red one, we admit, but you can't have everything.

Immaculate icework from David Lean. And of course he'll linger on it for about a minute to make sure you appreciate every single icicle.

"Come in number 79, your artistic licence is up!" Drowning By Numbers plays host to yet another tableau de pretension.

Three men in a boat (er, Scheider not pictured) - Spielberg ratchets up the suspense.

It ain't Triangle, it's just the apotheosis of cinematic atmosphere (for us at least). Dick Lester, take a bow.