Mise en scène

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Mise en scène, or mise-en-scène, is a French expression literally meaning that something or someone is "positioned in a certain scene", and that's related to a theatre stage, as not every theatre spectacle is performed onto a stage, but most are. A scene, by the way, is a time/space unit. The mise en scène is directed by a "metteur en scène", actually, a director, a person whose duty is to place actors/actresses and also objects inside a scene, while having a general sense of continuity, especially in terms of intensity of feelings and dramatic performance, that is, considering the spectacle mood and its increasing and decreasing, pauses etc.

Originally, mise en scène was a theatre characteristic, and was intended to be a coordination of choreographic movements undertaken by the actors/actresses. This "orchestration-like" of characters moving around the scene was the first and main meaning of mise en scène.

See that i don't use "mise-en-scène" but "mise en scène" instead, because one of the main academic references about the study, investigation, and theorization of mise en scène in Filmmaking is a French scholar called Jacques Aumont (2001). And if a French scholar studying this peculiar originally theatrical characteristic rather writes "mise en scène" than "mise-en-scène", well, even if other French scholars write "mise-en-scène", excuse me, but i follow the master, and Aumont is my man, as i've cited him on my Master degree thesis which became a book and is on sale on Amazon: Documentário e Mise en scène: Um estudo analítico sobre três clássicos da história do cinema não-ficcional (Portuguese Edition): Migliore, Riccardo: 9786130166571: Amazon.com: Books. Another renowned scholar who's been studying and theorizing about mise en scène in filmmaking for a good while is David Bordwell (2007).
As i said, mise en scène was born as a specifically theatrical technique. In theatre, as it had been highlighted by Pudovkin and also Stanislavski, there was a certain need for the actor to be seen even by the person who sat on the last bench or row of chairs, i mean, quite far from the stage. By the way, Pudovkin's book "Film Technique and Film acting" (i own an ancient version in English) is an important reading for those students willing to understand the passage from theatre to cinema and from silent movies to sound cinema, through the experience of a theatre actor/director who became a film actor/director, so i deeply suggest that you guys find this book somewhere as i did, in order to read it carefully. I already published a book chapter about ...