"What’s left out from these movies is as important and beautiful as what’s included. They’re exercises in doing as much as possible with as little as possible, implying whole swaths of narrative information by allowing the audience to extrapolate events, details, backstories and subplots from only the barest hints of their presence. In fact, what Mann is doing here (and why I am so obviously drawn to this sensibility) is designing these stories — not just their presentation but more fundamentally their construction, too — and doing so in a way that evokes many of the very same things that thrill me about design."
—
Subtraction.com: Minimalism, Michael Mann and Miami Vice - While I don’t think Mann is doing anything particularly unique among the works of other great directors (see the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, Stanley Kubrick, Wim Wenders, Michelangelo Antonioni, Terrence Malick, etc., and tell me their films aren’t “experiences”), I do like the correlation Vinh is drawing between design and cinematic storytelling.
A great film is great for what it excludes as much as for what it includes, exactly like great design. In that regard design is itself a kind of mise en scene—what is there is how it works, and how effectively it works is a result of how carefully and skillfully the processes that affected the design were refined and employed.
