[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Mise-en-scène, French for “placing on stage,” is the sum of what appears within a single frame: the staging and blocking of actors, set and production design, lighting, costume, and the spatial relationships between all of it. It matters because it is where a director communicates without cutting or dialogue. Where two characters stand relative to each other, who occupies the foreground, what the light is doing, often carries the whole meaning of a scene. It is one of the five craft channels a viewer can learn to read, and among the richest once the eye is trained, because everything in it is a deliberate choice competing for the frame. The concept is developed at length in Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art. Seeded from Becoming a Craft-Aware Moviegoer.