ABSTRACT
In the theater, the director positions actors on a carefully designed set, organizing the
on-stage space. This staging of the action was dubbed, in French, mise-en-scene. The
mise-en-scene of a play, then, is all the physical objects on the stage (props, furniture,
walls, actors) and the arrangement of those objects to present effectively the play’s
narrative and themes. “Mise-en-scene,” the phrase, was adopted by film studies in the
1960s and broadly used and sometimes misused. For some film critics the term carried
almost mystical connotations, while for others it vaguely described any component of
visual style. For our purposes, we will adopt a much narrower understanding of the term.
Mise-en-scene will here refer to the staging of the action for the camera. Mise-en-scene
