Chapter 3: Mise-en-Scène

Learning Objectives

After reading Chapter Three, 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 elements to our sense of a movie’s characters, 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 onscreen 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 characters, narrative, and themes.