Anthony Mann’s Film Westerns: Mise-en-scène and the Total Image in Bend of the River

Abstract

This paper will explore innovations in mise-en-scène exhibited by the film Westerns of Anthony Mann. We will argue that Mann’s Westerns introduce an imagistic mise-en-scène that shifts the Western genre from theatrical staging of narrative action found in the classical-realist style of films such as Stagecoach and Red River, to a mise-en-scène that foreshortens landscape into a surface of hyper-real filmic affects. We follow Jeanine Basinger’s proposal to read Mann’s films in terms of what she calls the “total image.” The total image is a fusion of form and content so that meaning is produced out of the composition of elements in the film frame. However, our argument deviates significantly from Basinger’s. Instead of reducing the total image to an expression of the psychological state of the hero, as does Basinger, we understand the total image to be the film as a whole so that its parts are always working to produce the whole in a constantly adjusting process of figuration at the level of mise-en-scène. The paper will focus on one of Mann’s films: Bend of the River (1952), analysing the way it unfolds as a series of tableau images. Transcendent meaning is produced out of the interaction between the viewer and this unfolding tableau as a continual adjusting and rebalancing of the mise-en-scène. Character actions appear directly linked to non-human elements and to the landscape itself. At the level of transcendent meaning, these linkages produce a mythic event concerning the struggle with nature in a quest to establish a new community of free yeomen farmers, prefigured through the actions of the hero in his quest for redemption from a fallen past. Our paper proposes a reading of Mann’s Westerns as distinctly modernist in style, thus moving beyond the classical-realist style of film Westerns.