Mise en scène

Mise en scène is the arranged content of the frame: setting, décor, props, costume, lighting, and the placement and movement of the people in it. The discipline it names is simple to state and hard to keep: treat everything in a fiction frame as chosen, because it was. The interesting question is where the concept stops. Does it end at what was placed in front of the camera, or include the camera's treatment of it? The books do not agree, and this site's boundary, which keeps mise en scène apart from Camerawork and Setting, is a decision rather than a fact.

Where the boundary sits

Bordwell and Thompson draw the line at the theatre. Mise en scène is "the director's control over what appears in the film frame", and it covers "those aspects of film that overlap with the art of the theater: setting, lighting, costume and makeup, and staging and performance". Framing and movement belong to a separate chapter.

Giannetti refuses the separation. His mise en scène has four elements: the staging, the setting and décor, "the manner in which these materials are framed", and "the manner in which they are photographed". Then the sentence that marks the disagreement: "The art of mise en scène is indissolubly linked with the art of cinematography." A composition is what the camera makes of the arrangement, so the arrangement cannot be read without it.

Hayward adds the reason the word matters. The Cahiers critics used it to argue that Hollywood directors were authors even without the script: "they had no control over the script but they could stage their shots and so be deemed to have a discernible style". The concept, for her, is a signature a critic can read.

The site keeps the narrow definition because it makes better questions, with Giannetti's objection in view: the birds in the parlour mean what they mean partly because of where the camera is when it sees them.

On the bench

Psycho — the parlour scene is the reference case. The taxidermy narrates what the script withholds: an owl mid-strike over Norman, a raven at his shoulder, Marion among soft light and rounded forms. Norman among the birds works the inventory through to the surname Crane and the final frozen grin; Durgnat models the maximal reading.

The Craft — Nancy's turn carries an argument the dialogue never states. Nancy is the only poor girl of the four, and the film says so entirely in production design: the trailer against Sarah's house, sodium and brown against the cold blue-white of the apartment the insurance buys (Nancy is the only poor one). Taxi Driver — the phone call is the minimal case: an institutional corridor, a payphone, a door, nobody. The set does no work except be empty, and that is the work.

What to look for

• Name three objects in the frame the story does not need. What are they there to say?
• Where are the people placed relative to each other, and who has the light?
• What would change if the same arrangement were shot from another position?
• Is the space real, dressed, or built, and does the film want you to know which?

In the books

Film scholars, extending the term to film direction, use the term to signify the director's control over what appears in the film frame.

— Film Art, fa 113

The art of mise en scène is indissolubly linked with the art of cinematography.

— Giannetti, um 48

In more general terms, however, mise-en-scène refers to what is visible in the frame (décor/setting, lighting, costume, the actors) and how the interaction of these elements provides meaning which the spectator interprets.

— Hayward, ckc 255