Mise-en-Scène

This is a French term meaning ‘what is put into the scene’ or frame. It is the director’s job to decide this and what is put in or left out can make a big difference to the signals we receive and the way we decode them.

The most obvious aspects are those elements of visual presentation which are organised before filming can take place: the pre-production work of art direction, set design, casting, costume and props.

The most common purpose is to create realism with regard to time and place. If the audience are to believe that they are looking at San Francisco in the year 2056, London 1872, or Middle-Earth in the Third Age, the mise-en-scene should construct this. Genre is also frequently reinforced by mise-en-scene. This is most obvious in genres like the Western, historical drama or Science Fiction, where a world is created that is very different from that inhabited by the audience.

Having established the broad messages, an analysis of mise-en-scene can then be refined to consider more specific meanings. Casting decisions, the costuming of actors, surrounding details can all communicate a range of messages to the spectator.

If a director wants to show that the story takes place in Victorian times, he or she will signal this by the use of period clothes and props. The specific inclusion of a bed and rocking horse will signify a nursery. They may take this one step further and include a window with a storm outside, thus creating atmosphere. They may sit a child on a low stool in the middle of the floor, her toys lined up formally against the walls, thus signalling that she is isolated and repressed by this room and the society she lives in. So the selection of specific objects and images carry broader ideas.

Like the words chosen to make up a poem, each item in a frame may be carefully chosen and positioned. The director can draw our attention to an object, a gun, say, by placing it in the foreground, near the camera lens. We then decode that the gun will be important in this scene.