A few words about mise-en-scene in 300. The major problem with the comic-book-to-movie transition in Sin City was a lack of awareness of how time flows differently in comics than in films. In film, generally, textual and visual time flow all at once. People speak and events occur simultaneously.
In comics, however, text and visuals are on very different temporal lines. Each panel is a slice of a moment. It's frozen, and achieves the illusion of movement and fluidity only because of this weird propensity, seemingly universal, of the human brain to take disparate images and connect them. McCloud calls it "closure," and Eisenstein called it "montage," but it amounts to the same thing. McCloud's symbol for comics, the open and then the closed eye, embodies that idea (and it's a nifty little graphic, too).
The textual line does not match the visual. Text, by its nature, isn't the same kind of snap-shot, at least not phonetic/Western text. Only a single letter can be as temporally stable as a panel. Anything more, any sequence of letters, involves linear processing of spelling and/or grammar. My point is, while the text can go off in various prosey directions--Miller's faux-Noir ramblings in Sin City (the comic book), for example--the panel remains the same. Comics can freeze a visual moment and allow text to keep going. They can also allow visual narrative to carry you without text, but film can do that, too, so it's not at issue in this discussion.
Not understanding those (hastily described) dynamics of film leads to such visually ridiculous shots as Clive Owen taking a good 15 seconds to leap out of a first-story window and hit the ground because they needed time for his Noir voice-over. The same problem crops up when he's in the car with del Toro's dead body. That police car seems to wait an awfully long time for him to pull over! These moments would not seem temporally incongruous in a comic book because the visual line can, and indeed will, wait for the textual line to finish its work. By containing text in a panel, you marry it to the visual.
300 is not a text-heavy piece. There's actually more text in the film than the book, and it's all really useless exposition, too. But they face a similar problem in representing the composition of the comic-book page/panel. The glory of action shots in comics is that they are frozen moments that we can drool over for as long as we want to, whereas in film, those moments go by all-too quickly (especially considering how much they cost).
The solution to that problem is and has always been to alter the flow of time. From the earliest days, camera operators realized that they could just crank the machine faster and the events would appear slower when projected. Sparta in 300 is the land of slo-mo. By going from full speed to slo-motion, fluidly and without cutting, 300 simulates the internal experience of reading comics. We look at the panels and fill the intervening action in ourselves, in our heads. In 300, that translates to a few moments of (unintentionally homoerotic) slo-mo glory bracketed by fast-motion shots that lead to the next glorious bit of slo-mo.
The parallel effect is the ultra slo-motion tableau effect of, for example, pushing the Persian soldiers off the cliff. Without even checking, I know for certain that that is a single panel in the comics, and they simply depicted it in ultra-slo-motion (and with an annoying voice-over to kill time) so that we could linger on the composition: the silhouetted bodies and the tumble of Persians falling off the cliff like a spilled box of crayons.
The ingenuity of the composition of the film is not to be dismissed, but much like watching Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation, it's hard to separate that ingenuity out from the horrifyingly offensive content (not that I think 300 is anywhere near as technically sophisticated as either of those two films, or as offensive, come to think of it.).
Posted by orion at March 19, 2007 5:01 PM