Visions in the Frame

"James Walters' careful attention to mise-en-scène as visual style across film and television is refreshingly open-minded. Looking into the history of critical approaches to these media, he develops new ways of approaching and understanding everything from high drama to cooking shows. An indispensable guide for students and teachers." — Adrian Martin, author of Mise en scène and Film Style

"This book offers an account of how a single aspect of the moving image and a single focus of moving image criticism—mise-en-scène—has developed in film and television studies respectively. Its extraordinary range and depth of inquiry into the history of these disciplines is rendered with deftness and clarity, and it offers a powerful invitation for mise-en-scène criticism to be accepted more broadly within television studies." — Elliott Logan, author of Breaking Bad and Dignity: Unity and Fragmentation in the Serial Television Drama

"Visions in the Frame makes a compelling case that mise-en-scène has been foundational to the development of film studies, yet remains far less central—and differently articulated—within television studies. With elegance and critical precision, James Walters maps this disciplinary disparity and shows what becomes newly visible when we attend to style across both media. A vital contribution to contemporary screen scholarship, and a persuasive reminder of why close analysis still matters." — Sérgio Dias Branco, University of Coimbra

"Rich in both critical history and attentive close analysis, Visions in the Frame offers a compelling account of why mise-en-scène matters in the study of both film and television, and ultimately, the value of attending to the image and its composition for a range of approaches and perspectives in both disciplines. Walters shows great sensitivity in his rigorous tracing of attentions to (and away from) mise-en-scène, drawing together an insightful picture of how, and crucially why, investment in mise-en-scènehas and hasn’t developed across disciplinary developments; this is a story told through an engaging understanding of the connections and tensions between people, through their critical, ethical, and even prosaic concerns of writing about and teaching film and television. Modestly presented as a series of starting points, passages of mise-en-scène analysis deepen the argument, modelling readily and elegantly the critical rewards of engaging with the visual richness of television in all its variety as a medium." — Lucy Fife Donaldson, University of St Andrews