2.3: Mise-en-Scène

Mise-en-Scène. And even if you don’t frequent erudite cocktail parties, and who does these days (a shame), it’s still a handy term to have around. It’s French (obviously), and it literally means “putting on stage.”

Allow me to introduce a word destined to impress your friends and family when you trot it out at the next cocktail party: Mise-en-Scène. And even if you don’t frequent erudite cocktail parties, and who does these days (a shame), it’s still a handy term to have around. It’s French (obviously), and it literally means “putting on stage.”

Why French? Sometimes, we like to feel fancy, and let’s face it: to an American, French is fancy.

But the idea is simple. Borrowed from theater, it refers to every element in the frame that contributes to the overall look of a film. And I mean everything: set design, costume, hair, make-up, color scheme, framing, composition, lighting… Basically, if you can see it, it contributes to the mise-en-scène.

I could have started with any number of different tools or techniques filmmakers use to create a cinematic experience. The narrative might seem a more obvious starting point. Cinema can’t exist without a story; chronologically speaking, it all starts with the screenplay. Or I could have led off with cinematography. After all, we often think of cinema as a visual medium. But mise-en-scène captures much more than any one tool or technique in isolation. It’s more an aesthetic context in which everything else takes place, the unifying look, or even feel, of a film or series.

And this is probably as good a time as any to discuss the role of a director in cinema. There’s a school of thought out there, known as the auteur theory, that claims the director is the “author” of a work of cinema, not unlike the author of a novel, and that they alone are ultimately responsible for what we see on the screen. Cinema requires dozens, if not hundreds, of professionals dedicated to bringing a story to life. The screenwriter writes the script, the production designer designs the sets, the cinematographer photographs the scenes, the sound crew captures the sound, the editor connects the shots together, and each of them has whole teams of experts working below them to make it all work on screen. But if there’s any hope of that final product having a unified aesthetic and a coherent, underlying theme that ties it all together, it needs a singular vision to give it direction. That, really, is the job of a director. To ensure everyone is moving in the same direction, making the same work of art. And they do that not so much by managing people – they have an assistant director and producers for that – they do it by managing mise-en-scène, shaping the overall look and feel of the final product. While mise-en-scène has many moving parts and many different professionals in charge of shaping those individual parts into something coherent, it’s the one element of cinema that is most clearly the responsibility of the director.

This talent for shaping mise-en-scène is one reason we can readily identify great directors' work. Think about the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Agnes Varda, Wes Anderson, Yosujiro Ozu, Claire Denis, or Steven Speilberg (and if some of those names are unfamiliar, seek them out!). If we know their work at all, most of us could pick out one of their films after just a few minutes, even if we had never seen it before. This is not just because of some signature flourish or idiosyncratic visual habit (though that’s often part of it) but because their films have a certain look to them, a certain aesthetic that saturates the screen.

Take the films of Claire Denis, for example:

Denis’s films generate an enveloping atmosphere that you can almost taste and feel, and all of that is part of her consistent (and brilliant) use of mise-en-scène.

Or how about the films of Wes Anderson:

Anderson’s films consistently use symmetrical compositions, smooth, precise tracking shots, and slow motion, but it’s the overall effect, the mise-en-scène that makes the impression (check out more break-downs of Wes Anderson’s style here and here).

Because mise-en-scène refers to this “overall look,” it can feel rather broad (and even vague) as a concept. So, let’s break it down into four elements of design: setting, character, lighting, and composition. We’ll tackle each one in turn.