What Is Mise-en-Scène?
Mise-en-scène is right there on the screen in front of us, but approaching the subject can be
daunting because it encompasses so many interconnected components. Even the unfamiliar
sound of this hyphenated and accented French term ( pronounced “meez-ahn-SEN”) is
intimidating. But fear not. Like most things cinematic, the more you break it down, the more
understandable mise-en-scène reveals itself to be.
Mise-en-scène means literally “staging or putting on an action or scene” and thus is sometimes
called staging. In fact, the term originated on the theater stage. In a play, a bare stage must be lit
up, fitted out with constructed sets, and populated with actors wearing costumes and makeup,
all of which is arrayed according to the dramatic needs of each scene.
It is much the same in the movies. A film’s mise-en-scène is everything we see in every shot:
every object, every person, everything about their surroundings, and how each of these
components is arranged, illuminated, and moved around. And very little of this is left to chance—
virtually everything on-screen was carefully chosen and placed there by the filmmakers for a
reason.
Sometimes those choices are made for reasons of authenticity. If a director wants the viewer to
believe the events on-screen are happening in, say, a county courthouse in 1965 in Selma,
Alabama, during the civil rights movement (as in Ava DuVernay’s Selma, 2014), she may stage
her shots with objects and elements that reflect that specific situation, place, and era. Other
times those choices are driven by the filmmaker’s goal of creating mood, conveying character,
and telling a story. That same scene in Selma uses warm lighting on wood fixtures to evoke a
sense of Old South tradition, dresses a man page155poised to assault Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in
an innocuous cardigan sweater to misguide our expectations, and arranges the actors to
emphasize the tense division between the black and the white characters.
As you consider a movie’s mise-en-scène, ask yourself whether what you see in a scene is simply
appealing decor, a well-dressed actor, and a striking bit of lighting or whether these elements are
influencing your understanding of the narrative, characters, and action of the movie. Keep in
mind that the director has a purpose for each thing put into a shot or scene, but each of these
things does not necessarily have a meaning in and of itself. The combination of elements within
the frame—and the context in which they are presented—gives the shot or scene much of its
overall meaning.
While decisions about mise-en-scène are driven primarily by the needs of a film’s story,
mise-en-scène can also be highly personal and can help us distinguish one director’s work from
another’s. Genre formulas can also have a powerful influence on the mise-en-scène of individual
films within that genre. You may recall from Chapter 3 the specific kinds of dramatic lighting
associated with film noir and the horror genre or the wide open, big-sky settings typical of
westerns.
Mise-en- scène is made of four primary components: design, lighting, composition, and
movement (also known as kinesis).
Lighting
Illumination and shadow affect the way we see and interpret settings, makeup, and costumes, so
during preproduction, most designers include an idea of the lighting in their sketches. Likewise,
because lighting can help express mood, tell a story, and convey character, directors often
incorporate lighting into the storyboards they use to plan the film. When the movie is ready for
shooting, these sketches help guide the cinematographer in coordinating the camera and the
lighting. During actual production, the cinematographer determines the lighting once the camera
setups are chosen. As a key component of composition, lighting creates our sense of cinematic
space by illuminating people and things, creating highlights and shadows, and defining shapes
and textures. Both on a set and on location, light is controlled and manipulated to achieve
expressive effects; except in rare instances, there is no such thing as wholly “natural” lighting in
a narrative movie. Documentaries that capture events as they happen often have no choice but
to use whatever lighting is available, but events produced for the documentary, such as
re-creations and interviews, employ planned, and sometimes even expressive, lighting. Animated
movies also use expressive lighting, even when it must be drawn or modeled. We will return to
lighting as it relates to cinematography in the next chapter. Here in relation to mise-en-scène, we
will concern ourselves with three aspects of the lighting setup: quality, ratios, and direction.
Lighting and setting
A good way to understand how lighting influences our impressions of the setting is to compare
the lighting quality of two movies that were filmed in the same setting. Alexander Mackendrick’s
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) paints a cynical portrait of Manhattan as a cutthroat world of
schemers and powerbrokers. This scene shot beside the city’s Queensboro Bridge uses hard,
low-key light to throw sharp pools of light and cast deep shadows [1]. Woody Allen’s Manhattan
(1979) is a romantic and funny appraisal of relationships and the city itself. In its Queensboro
Bridge scene, the light is diffused and the edges are soft [2].
Quality
The quality of light used in any situation falls somewhere on a spectrum between hard light and
soft light. Hard light is direct: the beams of light shine directly from the source to the subject.
Hard light creates a clear, sharp border between areas of bright illumination and dark shadows.
Hard light is high contrast: details are crisp and defined, which can make hard light less flattering
for characters with wrinkles and other facial textures. Soft light is diffused: the beams of light are
broken up or scattered on their way from the source to the subject. This diffusion can be
accomplished by bouncing the light or by passing it through a sort of cloudy paper descriptively
dubbed diffusion. Soft light is low contrast: where illumination ends and shadow begins is less
distinct. Details are also less defined, and so soft light is considered more flattering. One easy way
to see the difference between hard and soft light is to compare the interplay between light and
shadow in direct sunlight (hard light), as opposed to how light and shadow appear on a cloudy or
foggy day (soft light). We can generally (but not always) associate hard lighting with serious or
scary situations and soft lighting with romantic or comic stories.
Lighting Ratios
The level of illumination on a subject, as compared with the depth of the corresponding shadow,
is called its lighting ratio. Filmmakers use a number of techniques to regulate this relationship
between light and shadow. The most conventional method is the three-point system. Used
extensively since the Hollywood studio era (1927–47), the three-point system casts a flattering
and natural-looking light on actors. The system uses three sources of light, each aimed from a
different direction and position in relation to the subject: key light, fill light, and backlight. The
overall character of the image is determined mainly by the relationship between the key and fill
lights. The key light (also known as the main, or source, light) is the primary source of
illumination and therefore is customarily set first. Positioned to one side of the camera, it creates
deep shadows. The fill light, which is positioned at the opposite side of the camera from the key
light, adjusts the depth of the shadows created by the brighter key light. Fill light may also come
from a reflector. The backlight, which is also known as a rim light or kicker, provides highlights in
the hair and along the edges of the subject. These “rims” of light help make the actor stand out
from the background.
When little or no fill light is used, the ratio between bright illumination and deep shadow is very
high; the high contrast effect produced is known as low-key lighting. Low-key lighting produces
the harsh, gloomy atmosphere that we often see in horror films, mysteries, crime stories, and
film noirs.
High-key lighting, which produces an image with very little contrast between the darks and the
lights, is used extensively in dramas, musicals, comedies, and adventure films. Its relatively even
illumination is unobtrusive and does not call particular attention to the lighting style. When the
intensity of the fill light equals page169that of the key light, the result will be the highest of
high-key lighting: no shadows at all.
You may have noticed that these terms — low-key lighting and high-key lighting — are
counterintuitive: we increase the contrasts to produce low-key lighting and decrease them to
produce high-key lighting. It would be easier to remember if the terms were low-fill and high-fill
instead. After all, cinematographers dim the fill light to achieve low-key lighting and intensify the
fill light to get lighting that is high-key. But the terms high-key and low-key are well entrenched
after a century of use in the film industry, so we’re stuck with them.
Direction
Light can be thrown onto an object or actor from virtually any direction: front, side, back, below,
or above. By direction, we also mean the angle of that throw, for the angle helps produce the
contrasts and shadows that suggest the source of the illumination and the time of day. As with
the other properties of lighting, the direction of the lighting can also create mood and convey
information or meaning regarding the subject being lit.
Backlighting can create dramatic lighting effects, especially when it is the sole light source. When
positioned between the light source and the camera, the subject is thrown into silhouette.
Eliminating recognizable surface detail by throwing everything we see of the subject into shadow
abstracts the character, which can make him or her (or it) more frightening or impressive,
depending on the context of the story at that moment.
Lighting from underneath a character (known as Halloween lighting, or bottom lighting) reverses
the normal placement of illumination and shadows on an actor’s face, which distorts the way we
see facial features. As you might expect from the name, Halloween lighting is often used in horror
films to emphasize that there is page170something unnatural about a character or situation. To
add to this eerie effect, placing the light source below the subject also throws shadows upward
onto walls, where we are not used to seeing them.
Top lighting (light cast on a character from above) usually looks comparatively normal, as the Sun,
our most natural light source, is usually in an overhead position. Overhead lighting can be
glamorous when it highlights the subject’s hair and cheekbones. But if the angle of overhead
light is taken to the extreme, the resulting shadows can obscure an actor’s eyes, causing the
character to appear threatening or mysterious.
When light is aimed at a subject from the same angle as the camera, no shadows are cast on the
actor’s face. With no shadows to indicate dimension, the actor’s features appear flattened. This
literal lack of depth can also convey figurative shallowness: a character lacking insight or courage
may be lit with frontal lighting.
Composition
rule of thirds
As a rule, our minds—and by extension our eyes—seek equilibrium and order. On the movie
screen, that order page172often takes the form of a balanced composition. The inclination
toward compositional balance is not limited to narrative movies. Documentary camera operators
usually seek balanced visual arrangements when shooting interviews or even while recording
impromptu events. Experimental filmmakers that seek to challenge expectations may
intentionally exaggerate or subvert balanced composition conventions such as the so-called rule
of thirds.
The rule of thirds breaks the frame into three vertical sections and three horizontal sections,
resulting in a grid. This grid acts as a guide that filmmakers use to balance visual elements in the
frame. It is not an exact science; art is never that simple. The basic idea is that composition is
built in basic units of three: top, middle, bottom; left, center, right; foreground, middle ground,
and background. Usually, for every visual element placed on one section, there will be a
corresponding element in the opposite section to counterbalance the composition. Of course,
like all good rules, the rule of thirds allows for a wide variety of applications.
Our gaze is drawn to the area along the top horizontal line of a composition. For this reason,
significant information, including the faces of characters, is often placed in this area. Because we
humans tend to focus our attention on one another’s eyes, close-up compositions often position
characters’ eyes along this upper line. This alignment has an added benefit. By framing a
character’s eyes at the level of the upper line, cinematographers can quickly and efficiently
establish a practical and aesthetically pleasing amount of space, or headroom, above the subject.
Sometimes, a story calls for composition that pushes the idea of balance to the next level,
resulting in compositions that are so perfectly balanced that one side of the frame mirrors the
other. This page173symmetry can—depending on the context in which it is used—convey a
sense of rigid order, ostentatious ritual, or formal elegance.
By purposely breaking the rule of thirds and denying our expectation of balance, filmmakers can
create compositional stress. This intentional imbalance can communicate many levels of meaning,
as always depending on the context in which it is used. A character can be made to appear
diminished or disturbed, or a moment can be imbued with a sense of tension or foreboding.
Sometimes what might appear to be imbalance is actually maintaining a different sort of balance.
When a character is looking across the screen, she is typically placed on one end of the frame so
that her gaze is balanced with what is called eye room (or looking room) on the opposite side of
the composition. In our innate visual vocabulary, just the act of looking carries the weight
necessary to stabilize a composition. Similarly, a character whose lateral screen movement is
tracked by a moving camera is almost invariably given lead room on the side of the frame toward
which she is moving.
Another application of apparent imbalance is something called negative space. We are so
accustomed to compositional balance that sometimes when we’re presented with a lopsided
composition, an expectation is created that something will arrive to restore balance. This
technique is often used to generate suspense in narrative contexts featuring someone (or
something) whose imminent arrival we anticipate—or fear.
The composition conventions we’ve just described are primarily concerned with only two
dimensions: height and width. After all, a movie screen is two-dimensional. But the world movies
depict features a third dimension: depth. Since the early days of film, filmmakers have innovated
ways to provide audiences the illusion of depth. In the 1930s, as new lenses and lights made it
possible to capture depth when photographing images, cinematographers such as Gregg Toland
(and page175his directing collaborators John Ford, Orson Welles, and William Wyler) began
regularly using depth as a component of composition.
Deep-space composition emphasizes depth by placing significant visual and narrative information
on two or more of the three planes of depth—foreground, middle ground, and background—in
such a way that not only emphasizes depth but also conveys information, mood, and meaning.
This meaning can take many forms, depending on how the levels of depth are presented.
Meaning about the situation and relationships presented can be communicated by the relative
placement of characters page176and objects, their relative size in frame, and whether or not a
character is in focus.
The way a camera frames the shots in a film can convey meaning in ways that are related to, but
go beyond, mise-en-scène and composition. We will discuss some of those ways, including point
of view, open and closed framing, and deep-focus photography, in Chapter 6.
Film Form
Chapter 1’s analyses of scenes from Juno and the Star Wars series
provided us with a small taste of how the various elements of movies
work. We saw how the filmmakers coordinated performance, composition,
sound, and editing to create meaning and tell a story. All of these
elements were carefully chosen and controlled by the filmmakers to
produce each movie’s form.
If we’ve learned nothing else so far, we can at least now say with
confidence that very little in any movie is left to chance. Each of the
multiple systems that together become the “complex synthesis” that we
know as a movie is highly organized and deliberately assembled and
sculpted by filmmakers. For example, mise-en-scène, one elemental
system of film, comprises design elements such as lighting, setting, props,
costumes, and makeup within individual shots. Sound, another elemental
system, is organized into a series of dialogue, music, ambience, and
effects tracks. Narrative is structured into acts that establish, develop, and
resolve character conflict. Editing juxtaposes individual shots to create
sequences (a series of shots unified by theme or purpose), arranges these
sequences into scenes (complete units of plot action), and from these
scenes builds a movie. The synthesis of all of these elemental systems
(and others not mentioned above) constitutes the overall form that the
movie takes. We’ll spend some time with each of these elemental formal
systems in later chapters, but first let’s take a closer look at the concept of
form itself, beginning with the correlation between form and the content
it shapes and communicate
Form and Content
The terms form and content crop up in almost any scholarly discussion of the arts, but what do
they mean, and why are they so often paired? To start with, we can define content as the subject
of an artwork (what the work is about) and form as the means by which that subject is expressed
and experienced. The two terms are often paired because works of art need them both. Content
provides something to express; form supplies the methods and techniques necessary to present
it to the audience.
And form doesn’t just allow us to see the subject/content; it lets us see that content in a
particular way. Form enables the artist to shape our particular experience and interpretation of
that content. In the world of movies, form is cinematic language: the tools and techniques that
filmmakers use to convey meaning and mood to the viewer, including lighting, mise-en-scène,
cinematography, performance, editing, and sound—in other words, the content of most of this
textbook.
If we consider the Juno scene analyzed in Chapter 1, the content is: Juno in the waiting room. We
could be more specific and say that the content is Juno thinking about fingernails and changing
her mind. The form used to express that subject and meaning includes decor, patterns, implied
proximity, point of view, moving camera, and sound.
The relationship between form and content is central not just to our study of movies; it is an
underlying concern in all art. An understanding of the two intersecting concepts can help us to
distinguish one work of art from another or to compare the styles and visions of different artists
approaching the same subject.
If we look at three sculptures of a male figure, for example—by Praxiteles, Alberto Giacometti,
and Keith Haring, artists spanning history from ancient Greece to the present—we can see crucial
differences in vision, style, and meaning (see the illustrations on p. 34). Each sculpture can be
said to express the same subject, the male body, but they clearly differ in form. Of the three,
Praxiteles’s sculpture, Hermes Carrying the Infant Dionysus, comes closest to resembling a
flesh-and-blood body. Giacometti’s Walking Man II (1960) elongates and exaggerates anatomical
features, but the figure remains recognizable as a male human. Haring’s Self Portrait (1989)
smooths out and simplifies the contours of the human body to create an even more abstract
rendering.
Once we recognize the formal differences and similarities among these three sculptures, we can
ask questions about how the respective forms shape our emotional and intellectual responses to
the subject matter. Look again at the ancient Greek sculpture. Although there might once have
been a living man whose body looked like this, very few bodies do. The sculpture is an
idealization—less a matter of recording the way a particular man actually looked than of visually
describing an ideal male form. As such, it is as much an interpretation of the subject matter
as—and thus no more “real” than—the other two page34sculptures. Giacometti’s version,
because of its exaggerated form, conveys a sense of isolation and nervousness, perhaps even
anguish. Haring’s sculpture, relying on stylized and almost cartoon-like form, seems more playful
and mischievous than the other two. Suddenly, because of the different form each sculpture
takes, we realize that the content of each has changed: they are no longer about the same
subject. Praxiteles’s sculpture is somehow about defining an ideal; Giacometti’s page35seems to
reach for something that lies beneath the surface of human life and the human form; and
Haring’s appears to celebrate the body as a source of joy. As we become more attentive to their
formal differences, these sculptures become more unlike each other in their content, too.
Thus form and content—rather than being separate things that come together to produce
art—are instead two aspects of the entire formal system of a work of art. They are interrelated,
interdependent, and interactive.
Movies Manipulate Space and Time in
Unique Ways
Some of the arts, such as architecture, are concerned mostly with space; others, such as music,
are related mainly to time. But movies manipulate space and time equally well, so they are both
a spatial and a temporal art form. Movies can move seamlessly from one space to another (say,
from a room to a landscape to outer space), or make space move (as when the camera turns
around or away from its subject, changing the physical, psychological, or emotional relationship
between the viewer and the subject), or fragment time in many different ways. Only movies can
record real time in its chronological passing as well as subjective versions of time passing—slow
motion, for example, or extreme compression of vast swaths of time.
On the movie screen, space and time are relative to each other, and we can’t separate them or
perceive one without the other. The movies give time to space and space to time, a phenomenon
that art historian and film theorist Erwin Panofsky describes as the dynamization of space and
the spatialization of time.1 To understand this principle of “co-expressibility,” compare your
experiences of space when you watch a play and when you watch a movie. As a spectator at a
play in the theater, your relationship to the stage, the settings, and the actors is fixed. Your
perspective on these things is determined by the location of your seat, and everything on the
stage remains the same size in relation to the entire stage. Sets may change between scenes, but
within scenes the set remains, for the most part, in place. No matter how skillfully constructed
and painted the set is, you know (because of the clear boundaries between the set and the rest
of the theater) that it is not real and that when actors go through doors in the set’s walls, they go
backstage or into the wings at the side of the stage, not into a continuation of the world
portrayed on the stage.
Camera as Mediator interactive:
Film
By contrast, when you watch a movie, your relationship to the space portrayed on-screen can be
flexible. You still sit in a fixed seat, but the screen images move: the spatial relationships on the
screen may constantly change, and the film directs your gaze. Suppose, for example, that during a
scene in which two characters meet at a bar, the action suddenly flashes forward to their later
rendezvous at an apartment, then flashes back to the conversation at the bar, and so on; or a
close-up focuses your attention on one character’s (or both characters’) lips. A live theater
performance can attempt versions of such spatial and temporal effects, but a play can’t do so as
seamlessly, immediately, persuasively, or intensely as a movie can. If one of the two actors in that
bar scene were to back away from the other and thus disappear from the screen, you would
perceive her as moving to another part of the bar; that is, into a continuation of the space
already established in the scene. You can easily imagine this movement due to the fluidity of
movie space, more of which is necessarily suggested than is shown.
The motion-picture camera doesn’t simply record the space in front of it: it deliberately
determines and controls our perception of cinematic space. In the hands of expressive
filmmakers, the camera selects what space we see and uses framing, lenses, and movement to
determine exactly how we see that space. This process, by which an agent transfers something
from one place to another (in this case, the camera transferring aspects of space to the viewer) is
known as mediation. When we watch a movie, especially under ideal conditions with a large
screen in a darkened room, we identify with the lens. In other words, viewers exchange the
viewpoint of their own eyes for the mediated viewpoint of the camera. The camera captures
space differently than do the eyes, which have peripheral vision and can only move through
space (and time) along with the rest of the body. The camera’s viewpoint is limited only by the
edges of the frame. It fragments space into multiple edited images that can jump instantaneously
between different angles and positions, looking through variable lenses that present depth and
perspective in a number of ways. And yet, because of our natural tendency to use visual
information to understand the space around us, the brain is able to automatically accept and
process the camera’s different way of seeing and use that mediated information to comprehend
cinematic space.
Cinema’s ability to mediate space is illustrated in Charles Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). This
brilliant comedy portrays the adventures of two prospectors: the “Little Fellow” (Chaplin) and his
partner, Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain). After many twists and turns of the plot, the two find
themselves sharing an isolated cabin. At night, the winds of a fierce storm blow the cabin to the
edge of a cliff, leaving it precariously balanced on the brink of an abyss. Waking and walking
about, the Little Fellow slides toward the door (and almost certain death). The danger is
established by our first seeing the sharp precipice on which the cabin is located and then by
seeing the Little Fellow sliding toward the door that opens out over the chasm. Subsequently, we
see him and Big Jim engaged in a struggle for survival that requires them to maintain the balance
of the cabin on the edge of the cliff.
The suspense exists because individual shots—one made outdoors, the other safely in a
studio—have been edited together to create the illusion that they form part of a complete space.
As we watch the cabin sway and teeter on the cliff’s edge, we imagine the hapless adventurers
inside; when the action cuts to the interior of the cabin and we see the floor pitching back and
forth, we imagine the cabin perched precariously on the edge. The experience of these shots as a
continuous record of action occurring in a complete (and realistic) space is an illusion that no
other art form can convey as effectively as movies can.
Fundamentals of Film Form
The remaining chapters in this book describe the major formal aspects of film—narrative,
mise-en-scène, cinematography, acting, editing, sound—to provide you with a beginning
vocabulary for talking about film form more specifically. Before we study these individual formal
elements, however, let’s briefly discuss three fundamental principles of film form:
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