mise-en-scene
Mise-en-scene is a complicated term, and its meaning is somewhat hard to pin down. David Bordwell’s definition is useful: “Mise-en-scene comprised all the factors that the director could control during shooting—the performances, the blocking, the lighting, the placement of the camera. Thus Hollywood directors, who may not have worked on the film’s script and might have no say in editing, could still decisively shape the film at the mise-en-scene phase. The term also referred to the result on screen: the way the performers fitted into the frame, the way the action exfoliated over time.”
For Bordwell, mise-en-scene is everything inside the frame. He would agree, though he doesn’t list them here, that mise-en-scene also refers to costumes, set design, and makeup. Special effects, especially in the age of CGI, are a more complicated case, but you could make an argument that if it appears in the frame, it counts. Computer generated images are, after all, carefully crafted and designed. Critics are less convinced about some other crucial storytelling techniques—editing (which doesn’t really appear in the frame, but joins shots together after the fact) and sound (which is a really complicated case because even though sound can come from within the frame, in the case of sound effects, dialogue, and diegetic music, it doesn’t really appear, because it isn’t visual). In sum, mise-en-scene is a complicated idea that is difficult to resolve.
But, as a place to start, you could do worse than thinking about all the things you see inside the frame. Imagine that you are a filmmaker on set, getting ready to set up a shot. You have to think about everything that’s going to appear in the frame. You have to consider how performers are going to stand (staging), but also the furniture they’re going to sit on. You have to think about what color the wall is going to be painted. You have to think about what the book the character is carrying is going to look like. You have to think about what lights to use, making the room bright or dark. And that’s all just at a practical level. Beyond these basic decisions, you have to consider how best to use what appears in the frame to capture the story’s themes, emotions, and ideas. Filmmakers have long used the contents of the frame to express the ideas they want to emphasize.
For instance, Howard Hawks, director of the original version of Scarface (1932), a gangster movie full of violence, gunshots, and death, used a repeated visual motif to express these ideas: throughout the set and lighting, Hawks repeatedly emphasized the letter ‘X’. The X appears when characters die, or before they die, or just after. The effect, which is subtle, but noticeable if you look for it, suggests that the characters’ violent nature is a product of the environment they inhabit, the threat of death looming everywhere they go. In the scene pictured below left, Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) has just shot his friend, who has been secretly dating Tony's sister. The X over Guino's (George Raft) shoulder is a lighting effect that underlines the violent moment through mise-en-scene. Below at right, you can see another moment, in which Hawks’s camera cranes up to a series of Xs at the top of a warehouse. Below, several men are being lined up and shot down with a machine gun—yet again, as is the case throughout Scarface, Hawks uses the mise-en-scene to comment on the appearance of death.
When Martin Scorsese decided to draw heavily upon the 1930s gangster film cycle for his 2006 police thriller The Departed, he paid tribute to Scarface and Hawks through his incorporation of the same technique into the mise-en-scene. Throughout The Departed, you can see Xs dotting the sets, cast on the wall in patterns of light, and even emphasized in some locations Scorsese found in Boston and New York, where he shot the movie. He uses the X for the same foreboding sense of violence as Hawks did in his gangster movie. A collection of the Xs in The Departed are visible in the shots below.
These examples illustrate how lighting and set decoration, two crucial aspects of mise-en-scene, can be used to generate narrative meaning. Other filmmakers rely on set design—how the spaces are actually built—to express meaning. In the image below at left from Stanley Kubrick’s World War I drama Paths of Glory (1957), Kubrick arranges his actors on a checker-pattern marble floor. The men are on trial for cowardice after their unit failed to complete an attack on the Germans; they are being tried so that the general who ordered the attack can save face. Kubrick’s set design makes the men look like pawns on a chessboard, about to be sacrificed so that the French army can win a game. War is also on Akira Kurosawa’s mind in the image at right from Rashomon (1950). The film is partially set amidst the ruin you see framed, which Kurosawa had built and drenched in rain. Though the film is set in the 8th century, it is not hard to see an image of ruined, post-nuclear bomb Japan in the destroyed gate.
For a more detailed examination of how the elements of mise-en-scene can be employed, watch the commentary at left, which focuses on its use in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner: 2049 (2017). Villeneuve inherits a world from director Ridley Scott, whose original Blade Runner (1982) was highly influential in its combination of science fiction and film noir, which contributed to its dark, futuristic, worn aesthetic. Villeneuve expands on that approach in his sequel, making the scale bigger and drawing upon images that echo climate change.
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Virtually anything inside the frame can qualify as part of a film’s mise-en-scene. In films like Blade Runner 2049, that mise-en-scene is harnessed to suggest an entire backstory about how the futuristic environment presented came to be. Clearly, the world inhabited by the characters has been ravaged by climate disaster, inequality, extreme poverty, crime, and other contributors to the dystopia. Each piece of set design, costuming, and visual effect represents a decision on the part of the filmmakers to express something about the narrative or the ideas contained within it.
What about actors? They appear inside the frame as well, often interacting with the other elements of mise-en-scene, like inhabiting the sets or locations, wearing the costumes, or handling the property. So, does this mean they’re part of the mise-en-scene?
In some ways, yes. In the quiet drama Paris, Texas (1984, Wenders), actor Harry Dean Stanton plays Travis, who begins the film wandering through the desert in a beat up brown suit and red baseball cap. Travis speaks no lines of dialogue until almost thirty minutes into the film, leaving the audience simply to interpret who he is from his clothes, the setting, and his general demeanor. Director Wim Wenders, writer Sam Shepard, and actor Stanton strip away spoken language, creating a mysterious character who can only be vaguely understood until he starts to open up a bit more as the film goes on. It’s an act of using the performance of the actor and other contextual information within the mise-en-scene to express the character.
In the commentary at right, you can see how the actors work with the mise-en-scene in a film called Clash By Night (1952, Lang). Based on a play by Clifford Odets, the film version of Clash By Night largely adheres to the tight setting of a single working class apartment, where the characters spend much of the running time of the film. Director Fritz Lang and the production designers pay close attention to the setting’s details, shaping them alongside the actors’ costumes to evoke the films themes—betrayal, jealousy, passion, and class anger.
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Individual elements of mise-en-scene appear in single scenes to express layers of meaning, but mise-en-scene can also reflect thematic patterns across entire films. Filmmakers can use significant objects or other elements of design to show character change by relying on repetition, which creates a motif—a reoccurring image or set of images that take on additional meaning the more often they repeat. Sometimes, these images or design elements even deepen beyond a single film, reoccurring in many entries in the same genre or style. For instance, the film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s were dark thrillers about existential dread, in which characters were often literally or figuratively trapped, pushed towards their terrible fates by the universe. In noir, characters were headed for doom almost without fail. Filmmakers began to express this idea through a repeated motif in mise-en-scene—the shadows cast into a room by window blinds, which formed a pattern of bars that seemed to imprison the characters. Other geometric shapes performed the same basic function.
Filmmakers are also undeniably attracted to images and objects that carry suggestions of the visual. Because they work in cinema, a visual medium, these kinds of ideas have inherent appeal. One common tool that filmmakers use to express duality is the mirror. The inclusion of a mirror in a scene underlines several thematic possibilities, including that a character is contradictory, or lying to someone while telling the truth to someone else, or fracturing somehow emotionally. On the left below, an image from The Wrong Man (1956, Hitchcock) shows the psychological torment of Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), a jazz musician whose life and marriage are destroyed when he is accused of a crime he did not commit. In this moment, an argument with his wife Rose (Vera Miles) leads to a violent confrontation, and she first hits Manny with a hairbrush that then swings wildly into their dressing table mirror. On the right, a moment from The Three Faces of Eve (1957, Johnson), in which Eve (Joanne Woodward), who suffers from multiple personality disorder, looks in the mirror. There are two Eves, literally, in this shot.
Watch the commentary at right on the opening sequence from The Moderns (1988). In it, director Alan Rudolph leans heavily on mirrors to express the film’s themes, many of which have yet to be made clear by the unfolding of the narrative or experiences of the characters. Set in a restaurant in 1920s Paris, the opening scene of The Moderns features a number of mirrors as a part of the set design, which invites us to consider the many lives of the characters introduced in it—chief among them, painter Nick Hart (Keith Carradine), who specializes in forgeries.
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Of mise-en-scene specifically, critic Adrian Martin argues that “it can transform the elements of a given scene; it can transform a narrative’s destination; it can transform our mood or our understanding as we experience the film.” As you watch the films we will study going forward, add the elements of mise-en-scene to your list of cinematic tools that help make film an art.
Clip quiz - Mise-en-scene
PORT OF SHADOWS (1938, Carne)
What mood is established in this scene from Port of Shadows? What specific elements of mise-en-scene create that mood? Be specific about particular shots where you see these elements on display. |
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THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1963, Demy)
What uses of color dominate the mise-en-scene in this sequence from the musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? What kind of coordination do you see between the colors? What emotional or thematic value do they have? |
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BATMAN RETURNS (1992, Burton)
What overall impression is the mise-en-scene in this sequence from Batman Returns meant to communicate? How do the individual parts of the film’s design add up to a larger whole? Make connections between elements of set, costume, lighting, makeup, and other design pieces and the larger ideas it seems interested in. |
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THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2013, Anderson)
Describe the mise-en-scene in this scene from The Grand Budapest Hotel. What characteristics stand out most to you about it? Be specific about particular elements that seem significant. |
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mise-en-scene in children of men
Science fiction films in particular are highly dependent on mise-en-scene, because they must conjure up an entire world, making ideas, especially if they are adapting a work of fiction, that were previously only imaginary, and now must be made actual in the process of filmmaking. Science fiction films have long relied on a series of special effects, some accomplished in camera, some achieved practically, and, more recently, with the aid of computer generated imagery (CGI). All of these tools are available to filmmakers looking to create a particular kind of mise-en-scene with their science fiction films.
When conceiving of a very near future, as the filmmaking team behind the dystopian thriller Children of Men (2006, Cuaron) had to do, the director, production designer, costumer, and other members of the crew had to decide what kinds of technology have advanced and which ones have stayed the same or fallen into disuse. Set mostly in England in the year 2027, when humanity has been experiencing a decades-long crisis of infertility that has rendered newborn babies non-existent, Children of Men is deeply indebted to the aesthetic approach of the science fiction classic Blade Runner (1982, Scott), which hybridizes the past and the future to create a series of architectural muddles. In Children of Men, the streets of London are lined with giant flickering screens that show regular news updates, but bags of trash are piled high on its sidewalks. These details suggest contradictions—this is a world that is advancing in time and in some aspects of technology, but it is hard to say that it is advancing.
The accumulated details of production design throughout Children of Men tell us a great deal about the setting, but also the conditions of the society that the film’s characters live in; when the protagonist Theo (Clive Owen), a cynical former radical who is drawn back into political activism when he is approached by Julia (Julianne Moore), his ex-wife, who is harboring a pregnant woman called Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), walks through the streets, the placement of soldiers with automatic weapons suggests a city living under martial law, communicating an entire history without ever explaining the film’s exposition through dialogue. It’s all in the details of the things that appear inside the frame, which say more than the characters ever really would say to each other realistically; look at the details of the environment to know what this terrible future is really like.
Mise-en-scene choices also say something about individual characters. Theo’s old friend and mentor Jasper (Michael Caine) lives in a small hideout in the woods, which reflects his disordered, freewheeling, philosophical mind. He is surrounded by packed bookshelves and framed by green plants, which both reveal his values—he cares about knowledge and the natural world, both of which he uses to cut himself off from the problems of the city space where Theo lives.
Contrast the ruined street level scenes of the working class with the spacious, cavernous, elegant abundance of the penthouse apartment where Theo’s cousin Nigel (Danny Huston), a well-positioned government minister, lives a wealthy day-to-day existence free of the ground level problems that plague his fellow Londoners.
A key aspect of the second half of Children of Men, when Theo and Kee go on the run from the radicals who want Kee’s unborn baby for their own political ends, is its portrayal of a ruined world that is common to dystopian stories like this one. Theo, Kee, and their companion Miriam (Pam Ferris), a midwife, take refuge in an abandoned school, the contents of its classrooms not only a marker of societal collapse and a culture fallen into disrepair, but also thematically resonant—a society with no children has no need for schools, which is why this one has become little more than a memorial of days gone by.
By contrast, the police state infrastructure built to control flows of refugees and keep people subjugated turn a later section of the film into an oppressive, stifling immersion into the violence of this film’s governmental authority. Prison bars fill the frame, a stark contrast to the openness and relative sanctuary of Jasper’s forest hideaway.
The most striking uses of mise-en-scene in Children of Men come in its final act, as Theo tries to navigate a war-torn city space with Kee and her newborn baby. Here, the film’s visual style, which relies on shaky camera, handheld long takes, uses the full extent of the environment to its full narrative potential. As Theo tries to escape the corrupted radicals who are chasing him while dodging random acts of combat violence, the camera follows him through a catastrophically destroyed city space. The collected details of ruin sell the dystopian vision on offer in Children of Men, and the camera’s refusal to cut away makes the whole thing feel lived in and real.
The use of mise-en-scene dovetails with the visual style to achieve a bracing authenticity. You buy the illusion because of the careful attention to detail in the mise-en-scene; the whole thing feels horrifyingly real.
Mise-en-scene presents tremendous opportunities for filmmakers to extend the reach of their meaning-making into every facet of the story. There is almost no end to the possibilities for creating ideas and emotions inside the film frame.