172 CHAPTER 5MISE-EN-SCÈNE
and experiences while viewing it. A movie’s mise-
en-scène subtly influences our mood as we watch,
much as the decor, lighting, smells, and sounds can
influence our emotional response to a real-life place.
The two major visual components of mise-en-
scène are design and composition. Designis the
process by which the look of the settings, props,
lighting, and actors is determined. Set design, décor,
prop selection, lighting setup, costuming, makeup,
and hairstyle design all play a role in shaping the
overall design. Compositionis the organization,
distribution, balance, and general relationship of
actors and objects within the space of each shot.
The visual elements of mise-en-scène are all crucial
to shaping our sympathy for, and understanding of,
the characters shaped by them. As you consider how
a movie’s mise-en-scène influences your thoughts
about it, ask yourself if what you see in a scene is
simply appealing decor, a well-dressed actor, and a
striking bit of lighting, or if these elements have a
distinctive significance to your understanding of
the narrative, characters, and action of the movie.
Keep in mind that the director has a reason—related
to the overall vision for the movie—for each thing
put into a shot or scene (figures, objects, decor, land-
scaping, etc.), but each of these things does not nec-
essarily have a meaning in and by itself. It is the
combination of elements within the frame that pro-
vides the overall meaning to the shot or scene.
Although every movie has a mise-en-scène, in
some movies the various elements of the mise-en-
scène are so powerful that they enable the viewer
to experience the aura of a place and time. A list of
such films, chosen at random, might include histor-
ical spectacles such as Sergei Eisenstein and
Dmitri Vasilyev’s Alexander Nevsky(1938) or Andrei
Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966); conventional
dramas such as Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful
Laundrette(1985) or John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to
Heaven(1945); or the evocation of an unfamiliar
place or culture, such as Satyajit Ray’s The Music
Room (1958), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last
Emperor(1987), Lars von Trier’s Dogville(2003), orWhat Is Mise-en-Scène?
The French phrase mise-en-scène (pronounced
“meez-ahn-sen”) means literally “staging or putting
on an action or scene” and thus is sometimes called
staging. In the critical analysis of movies, the term
refers to the overall look and feel of a movie—the
sum of everything the audience sees, hears,^1Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be
able to
✔define mise-en-scène overall and in terms
of its constituent parts.
✔describe the role of the production
designer and the other personnel involved
in designing a movie.
✔understand the importance of design ele-
ments to our sense of a movie’s charac-
ters, narrative, and themes.
✔describe some of the major historical
movements in film design.
✔explain how composition is different from,
but complementary to, design.
✔describe how framing in movies is different
from framing of static images such as
paintings or photographs.
✔describe the relationship between
on-screen and offscreen space, and explain
why most shots in a film rely on both.
✔understand the difference between open
and closed framing.
✔accurately distinguish between the two
basic types of movement—that of figures
within the frame and that of the frame
itself—in any film you watch.
✔describe not only the details of any movie’s
mise-en-scène, but also the effects that
the mise-en-scène has on the movie’s char-
acters, narrative, and themes.(^1) As a scholarly matter, some critics and instructors, including
us, consider sound to be an element of mise-en-scène. Other
scholars consider mise-en-scène to be only the sum of visual
elements in a film. Because of its complexity, we will discuss
sound separately in Chapter 9. In this chapter, we will focus on
the wholly visual aspects of mise-en-scène: on those filmmak-
ing techniques and decisions that determine the placement,
movement, and appearance of objects and people on-screen.