Mise en scène

My research on 'mise en scène:

• Mise-en-scène is a French term and originates in the theater. It means, literally, "put in the scene.
• For film, it has a broader meaning, and refers to almost everything that goes into the composition of the shot, including the composition itself: framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set design and general visual environment, even sound as it helps elaborate the composition
• Mise-en-scène can be defined as the articulation of cinematic space, and it is precisely space that it is about.
• Cutting is about time; the shot is about what occurs in a defined area of space, bordered by the frame of the movie screen and determined by what the camera has been made to record. That space, the mise-en-scène, can be unique, closed off by the frame, or open, providing the illusion of more space around it.
• In Travelling Players (1975), a film by the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, a group of people move into the past by taking a long walk down a street in one shot; time moves backward as they walk. There is a sequence in the film Grand Illusion (1937) by the director (and son of the Impressionist painter) Jean Renoir in which a group of World War I POWs receive a carton of gifts.
• or something else in the scene. If a mistake is made, the entire shot has to be made again. The economics of Hollywood production frown on such methods. For the viewer, a film that depends upon mise-en-scène and long shots makes special demands. Without editing to analyze what s important in a scene by cutting to a closeup of a face or an object, the viewer is required to do the looking around in the shot, to be sensitive to changes in spatial relationships and the movements of camera and actor

Robert Kolker, Film Form and Culture

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~landon/Local_Information_Files/Mise-en-Scene.htm