Mise-en-scene
Constructing Historical Distance
Hollywood continuity style editing works to create seamless spectatorship, but this cinematic construction also sutures the audience into the reduced narrative of the film. Richard Dyer questions, “does not film either exacerbate [fragmentation] or seek to disguise the reality of it…is there not danger in the hypnotic quality of the film image, an inherent danger because it is a lure to passivity?” (6). Such a question should be asked of the cinematography in Hidden Figures and other films about civil rights because they risk creating cultural work that rests on passivity rather than action. Tiyi Morris states that “when scholars, documentarians, and directors fail to provide an accurate representation of American racism and racial oppression and the means by which Blacks challenged and resisted these systems, they do a disservice to those individuals” (408). In Hidden Figures, mise-en-scene and subsequent suture contribute to this kind of progressivist narrative; the gaze constructed by the camera does little to place the spectator in an empathetic view of the characters, instead opting to create a sympathetic and removed perspective, assuring audiences that “things are better now than they used to be.”
Examples of these shots constitute instances where the audience is fully observing from a distance, rather than closely incorporated into the characters’ perspectives. These shots most often construct Katherine’s plotline as she navigates the Space Task Group.
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(Hover for analysis of each shot)
Katherine is framed in the center of the shot, distinguishing her from her colleagues. Absolutely, she sets herself apart in her work and deserves to be recognized on her own. However, the framing of this shot does little to place the spectator within her perspective, and the shot is constructed so that Katherine takes up less of the frame, diminishing the closeness of spectator and the story.
These elements, therefore, fail to promote empathy within the audience or suggest that our metaphorical gaze as a society needs to be changed.
This scene, where Katherine discovers the formula needed to take the capsule from orbit to descent, demonstrates the work of the camera and mise-en-scene to emphasize removed spectatorship. The audience is not only removed from the action throughout this scene, but also, by extension, from the emotional struggle of the characters throughout their journeys.
Katherine is framed in the center of the shot, distinguishing her from her colleagues. Absolutely, she sets herself apart in her work and deserves to be recognized on her own. However, the framing of this shot does little to place the spectator within her perspective, and the shot is constructed so that Katherine takes up less of the frame, diminishing the closeness of spectator and the story.
Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures, ©2016, Fox 2000 Pictures.
This shot comes very close to satisfying an emotive response to the characters’ fights against discrimination; Katherine looks at her reflection in the mirror after just publicly releasing her frustrations in the Space Task Group. As the narrative demonstrates, her anger is completely valid in the face of her colleagues’ ignorance, and the audience, therefore, sympathizes with Katherine as we see the toll that the white patriarchal nature of NASA has taken on her. However, by framing the gaze behind Katherine and seeing only her reflection, mise-en-scene still removes the audience from her struggle.
Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures, ©2016, Fox 2000 Pictures.
A sense of sympathy, rather than empathy, is exactly what distances modern mainstream audiences from fully grasping the social and political implications of the story. While these scenes include dialogue and didactic narratives which indicate the rightness of Black women and the wrongness of the White patriarchy, they fail to place the audience within a frame that captures the injustice of these actions and transposes them to present day struggles. Without a modern, contextualized, and emotional significance, the film fails to address struggles today, and only depicts the egregious injustices of Jim Crow-era Virginia. Because the audience is removed from the action taking place, this film does not create a cultural call to action that adequately addresses a need for societal awareness about racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.