Mise en scène
Everything placed before the camera — and the discipline of reading it as deliberate.
- mise en scène
- film-language
Literally "putting in the scene": setting, décor, props, figure placement and movement, costume — the arranged contents of the frame, as distinct from how the camera treats them. The analytical discipline is to treat everything in a fiction frame as chosen, because it was.
Canonical case
Psycho — the parlour scene, where the stuffed birds narrate what the dialogue cannot — worked through in Norman among the birds.
Boundary note
Keep this code separate from setting (where are we?) and from camerawork (how are we shown it?). Axis of Action draws the same lines (codes/setting ↗).
Sources
Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art has the cleanest definition and the standard checklist; Durgnat models what a maximal mise-en-scène reading looks like in practice.