Mise-En-Scene

Mise-En-Scene

It is early morning. The light of the rising sun suffuses the Brooklyn Bridge with a romantic grandeur. A tiny couple sits chatting on a bench along the riverbank. The lyrical beauty of the shot strikes the viewer. Beyond its aesthetic value, the famous Brooklyn Bridge shot in Manhattan, directed by Woody Allen, encompasses several central themes of the film: the romance of the city, its dominating presence, the inconsequence of its inhabitants and their problems, their anonymity, and the isolation of two people in love.*

The shot appears approximately twenty-eight minutes into the film. The viewer has been introduced to Isaac (Woody Allen), a successful New York television writer who quits his job to write a novel. Isaac’s married friend Yale (Michael Murphy) confides in Isaac that he has been cheating on his wife with a woman named Mary (Diane Keaton). When Isaac and his teenage girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemmingway) run into Yale and Mary at a museum, Isaac is immediately put off by Mary’s opinionated and intellectual demeanor. He complains about her to Tracy after they leave Mary and Yale, but later when he meets Mary at a party, he strikes up a rapport with her. Knowing each other through Yale, they decide to share a cab after the party and end up spending the night walking together through Manhattan. As morning begins to break, they continue their talk sitting together beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.*

The dominant in the shot is the Brooklyn Bridge itself. It immediately attracts the viewer’s attention because of its positioning within the frame and its relative size: it takes up the entire upper half of the frame. Also, although not artificially lit, the bridge is much brighter than the darker figures below. After the bridge, the eye focuses on the main subsidiary contrast, the characters on the bench, searching them out because of the intrinsic interest characters hold. They are also striking because that are almost pure black in a shot dominated by...