That Which Is Arranged, Illuminated, and Moved Around
Black madness and Mis-en-scene in Saint Omer
“I make cinema because I have certain obsessions—not to be visible, but because I need to.” — Alice Diop, The Guardian Interview with Jonathan Romney, Jan 29, 2023.
We are re-discovering and seeing with new eyes the term mise-en-scene (pronounced: “meez-ahn-SEN”) and its application in films during the second and third weeks of Film Analysis. Mise-en-scéne is what makes our film-viewing experience pleasurable.
“A film’s mise-en-scéne is everything we see in every shot: every object, every person, everything about their surroundings, and how each of these components is arranged, illuminated, and moved around.”1
Mise-en-scéne is cinematically expressed in four ways: through lighting, design, composition, and movement. Here’s a quick breakdown of each element:
LIGHTING
Lighting's quality, ratio, and direction help to express mood, tell a story, and convey characters.2
DESIGN
Design is the process—which begins at the previsualization stage—by which the look of the settings, objects, and actors is determined in a film. It includes set design, decor, costuming, make-up, and hairstyle design. 3
COMPOSITION
Composition is the organization, distribution, balance, and general relationship of objects and figures, as well as light, shade, line, color, and movement within the frame. 4
MOVEMENT
Camera movement also affects mise-en-scéne. What we see in the frame, and how we see it, changes as the camera moves. The camera can move independently, functioning as a narrator leading us through a setting or situation. 5
Film scholars and critics consider how these individual and specific components of the filmmaking process work together to create meaning across the narrative arc of a film. Mise-en-scéne allows us to differentiate an Ava Duvernay film from a Wes Anderson film—both directors use distinctive cinematic and narrative elements to present their stories and characters in recognizable ways.
Anderon’s approach to mise-en-scéne creates balanced compositions, stylized settings and costumes, choreographed action, and coordinated color schemes.6 Duvernay’s approach is more naturalistic in movements, costumes, soft lighting, and rhythmic camera movement to invite viewers into the world of Queen Sugar.
Students applied their knowledge of mise-en-scéne by watching Alice Diop’s stunning debut feature film Saint Omer (2022). We asked them to notice how composition, design, lighting, and movement contributed to the film's themes, meanings, and impact.
Plot Summary: Rama, a literature professor and novelist, travels from Paris to Saint-Omer to observe the trial of Laurence Coly and write about the case. Coly is a student and Senegalese immigrant accused of leaving her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to be swept away by the tide in Berck…7
In what follows, I will highlight Diop’s use of color, composition, and lighting to show how Laurence is simultaneously on trial for the death of her child and to defend her humanity. What follows is not a perfect—nor a complete—analysis but an attempt to dig beneath the surface of Diop’s two-hour-long masterpiece.
That Which Is Arranged
Laurence Coly is introduced to us as two white male bailiffs bring her into the courtroom. Her hands are cuffed behind her back, with one of the police walking behind her. One of his hands is grasping her shoulder, directing her forward, while the other is firmly holding the rope that secures her cuffed hands. Rama watches from the jury bench as Laurence walks onto the stand, unwavering in her gaze. Once the officers leave, Laurence transforms from a human into a spectacle.
You can watch this moment in the clip below:
The way this moment unfolds, I cannot help but see the ghosts of a not-so-distant past. In my mind’s eye, the white male bailiffs transform into slave auctioneers, and Laurence, the Black woman slave, is being sold. In this scene, Alice Diop uses the power of composition and physical movement to connect slavery with modern-day mass incarceration as it relates to one of her characters. Due to her crimes and the various projections forced onto her by spectators—judges and jurors alike—Laurence is expected to defend her actions, sanity (and/or insanity), and humanity.
Throughout the trial, Laurence is asked to recount her life, from childhood to the night she committed infanticide. In her defense of her action, she claims sorcery as the only “logical conclusion.”
That Which Is Illuminated
In addition to composition, Diop uses color to communicate meaning for the characters in the film. Whenever we see Laurence, she is almost drowning in the color brown. She almost fades into her surroundings, from her skin to her wardrobe to the wooden walls and partitions around her.
According to color psychology, brown represents ‘sensation, earth, reliability, comfort, endurance, stability, simplicity.’8 The words that most resonate with me in relation to this film are sensation, simplicity, and endurance. A fourth word, invisibility, also comes to mind. Diop taps into color psychology to intensify the invisibility that Laurence represents. This experience of invisibility is confirmed during the monologue of her attorney, who calls Laurence, a “phantom woman. A woman whom nobody sees. Whom nobody knows.”
While Laurence attempts to recount her life in her own words, she combats—spiritually and emotionally—the projections from others. She combats her parent’s pressure to be successful. She combats her family’s judgment due to her difference. She combats the invisibility enforced on her by Mr. Dumontet, the older white man with whom she was having an affair and, subsequently, a child.
She defies their projections by proclaiming her desires when moving to France: “I dreamed of becoming a great philosopher.”
That Which Is Moved Around
Laurence’s only defense of her premeditated murder of her 15-month-old baby is sorcery. When attorneys continually demand she explain her actions more specifically, she replies: “There are some things we can’t be clear about.”
While watching, I had two questions swirling in my mind: How do you apply human law to spiritual occurrences? How do Black neurodivergent folks combat the ways systems and society pathologize their madness?
In summation, Diop presents this case to audiences to define for themselves what justice is for Laurence and her baby Elise.
I asked my students during class: “But is Laurence just a sociopath? A killer?”
In a class full of 19 students, only two young Black women responded: “No, she is so much more than that.”
Some Links & PDFs on Mad Studies & Disability Justice
“Palestine is Disabled” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Excerpt: “Disability justice, for me, has always been about this kind of fierce, real, risk-it-all crip love. When I think about crip resistance, I think about everything from my friend’s friend who snuck a ham radio in his ass into the psych ward and pulled it out in front of the nurses to freak them all out to disabled Palestinian and Indigenous friends involved in Block the Boat actions and highway lockdowns where they offer prayer and organize while sitting down. There are a million more, including many that you reading this may create that don’t exist yet.
Mad Blackness*: Rage, Resistance, Rufusal (Virtual Panel)
Summary: A discussion featuring La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Kelly Baker Josephs, Théri Pickens, and JT Roane, moderated by Kaiama L. Glover. This panel brings together scholars delving into the myriad ways that radical black creativity confronts quotidian anti-black violence and its ensuing traumas.
La Marr Jurrelle Bruce in Conversation with Farah Jasmine Griffin (Virtual Discussion)
Black Madness::Mad Blackness (all chapters & bibliography):
Description: In Black Madness::Mad Blackness Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive.
How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurrelle Bruce (all chapters)
Description: “Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly.” So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as “rage,” and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms.
Disturbers of The Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (full book)
Description: In drawing connections between madness and literature, gender, and religion, this book speaks not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to colonial and postcolonial literature in general. The volume closes with a study of twenty-first-century literature of the Caribbean diaspora, demonstrating that Caribbean writers still turn to representations of madness to depict their changing worlds.
Looking At Movies, “Chapter 5: Mise-en-Scéne,” pp. 146.
Looking At Movies, “Chapter 5: Mise-en-Scéne,” pp. 158.
Looking At Movies, “Chapter 5: Mise-en-Scéne,” pp. 147.
Looking At Movies, “Chapter 5: Mise-en-Scéne,” pp. 162.
Looking At Movies, “Chapter 5: Mise-en-Scéne,” pp. 167.
Looking At Movies, “Chapter 5: Mise-en-Scéne,” pp. 147.
Jon Fusco and Jason Hellerman, “The Psychology of Color in Film,” No Film School (website)