Kitty Foyle dir. by Sam Wood, and: Summer Interlude dir. by Ingmar Bergman, and: The Rules of the Game dir. by Jean Renoir, and: Le Doulos dir. by Jean-Pierre Melville, and: The Servant dir. by Joseph Losey, and: Seven Years Bad Luck dir. by Max Linder, and: Possessed dir. by Clarence Brown (review)

Over the years, which elements of mise-en-scène have most inspired filmmakers? A case could be made for stairs, especially in the way they furnish banister-striped shadows and invite interestingly oblique angles for the camera, not to mention interestingly varied movements for the actors, upwards or downwards. No one who has seen Hitchcock's Suspicioncould possibly forget the high-angle shot looking downward at the stair-mounting husband played by Cary Grant. In the dark, suavely menacing, he carries up to his wife a strangely luminous and possibly poisoned glass of milk. Doors, too, figure importantly in the cinema, whether left ajar, creaking, slammed shut angrily, swinging to and fro in the dusty air of a cowtown saloon, gaping wide to project a sudden flood of light into darkness (this is how the Suspicionsequence begins), or battered open by the private eye on his way to rescuing the dame or discovering the corpse inside.

But in my view the most versatile item of furnishing is something less architectural and more personal, more human-scaled and perhaps more inherently cinematic: the mirror. Mirrors are optical devices. Like cameras they capture an appearance and like screens they reflect that appearance back to viewers. They produce a simulacrum of the world, just as films do. Beyond that, mirrors come accompanied by a wealth of cultural associations for filmmakers to draw on. These meanings may be traditional, superstitious, moralizing, or self-consciously artistic, but they are always cinematically developable. Jean Cocteau's Orphée, from 1950, reconceptualizes Death as a woman, a literal femme fatale dressed in black but also in the height of 1950s fashion, who emerges into or departs from the world of the living through a bedroom mirror. (Once, this magic portal shatters in the process; another time, in a lovely little special effect, it moves liquidly aside for Death.) Henrik Galeen's silent The Student of Prague(1926) makes great play with the ancient superstition that a reflection may free itself from a mirror, steal a soul, and create havoc. In Robert Wise's boxing drama The Set-Up(1949), the shiny glass face of a hotel-room clock becomes, just for a moment, a mirror. In it we see reflected the figure of the aging boxer's anxious wife. When will the fight be over? When will he come back? Will he come back at all? Her fretfulness and the time that is marching on for both of them: two crucial themes of the film brought together within a single mirrored image. Even at their most quotidian, mirrors have possibilities. Think of that side mirror of the fleeing Jeep in the first Jurassic Parkfilm, showing a toothy dinosaur coming up terrifyingly fast above the stenciled warning "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear."

In the cinema countless women have been portrayed standing or sitting before countless mirrors, beautifying themselves or pondering the lapse of their beauty. Such scenes bring with them a long iconographic history. In art generally, mirrors emblematize vanity, the fascinated self-regarding gaze, as well as hinting at the allure and deceptiveness of cosmetics. In Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond both loves and loathes the aging face she sees in her klieg-lit dressing-table mirror, but whether loathing or loving it she cannot stop looking at it, or...