Mise-en-Scene

[Kristian Fino]

I have found out about this term in film style called, "Mise-en-Scene". When I looked at photos for example, they look like the same kind of shots that I've seen in my favorite films like Suspiria, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Outsiders, Pet Semetary, Apocalypse now, Clockwork Orange, Psycho, Fright Night (80's version not the modern), and John Carpenter's Vampires. This is one of the those styles that I've admired for a long time. As a film-goer and all, I'm right now making up the film story idea of mine. I was wondering, how do you work on this kind of style? Dario Argento has been my major influence because of this style. and what kind of camera should I use that would make my film look like a mid-seventies giallo film in-depth?

[Simon Wyss]

Dear student friend, mise en scène means nothing else than directing. Forget style and dingsbums. Dingsbums is German and means thingamabob.

 

Believe me, I speak French, fluently.

[David Mullen ASC]

The term is pretty vague, it generally just refers to the placement of people and things within the frame or stage space, i.e. staging and composition for the camera. But the term has some narrower definitions for some, according to Wikipedia:

 

The term is sometimes used to represent a style of conveying the information of a scene primarily through a single shot—often accompanied by camera movement. Two academic papers, Brian Henderson's Essay on the "Long Take" (1976) and Lutz Bacher's MA thesis entitled "The Mobile Mise-en-Scène" (1976), discuss the use of mise-en-scène in long shots and shots that encompass a whole scene. Neither conflates its meaning with how the term was originally applied to film in the Cahiers de Cinéma, which was expressed in 1960 by critic Fereydoun Hoveyda as follows: "What matters in a film is the desire for order, composition, harmony, the placing of actors and objects, the movements within the frame, the capturing of a moment or look... Mise en scene is nothing other than the technique invented by each director to express the idea and establish the specific quality of his work." This recent and limiting redefinition of the term makes it synonymous with a "oner" or a single shot that encompasses an entire scene. This use of the term displays some ignorance of both the traditional use of the term in French theatre and film and its actual translated meaning, which is, broadly, "to put in the scene".

As for the type of camera used, that is unrelated to the concept.