Mise en abyme is a formal device in which a work contains a smaller copy of itself — a film within a film, a story within a story.
Mise en abyme — French for 'placed into the abyss' — describes the formal device in which a work of art contains within it a smaller version of itself. The term was used by André Gide in his 1893 journal to describe the shield-within-a-shield motif in heraldry. In cinema, mise en abyme appears whenever a film stages another film, a play, or a mirror reflection that comments on the larger work. François Truffaut's 'La Nuit américaine' (Day for Night, 1973) is a film about the making of a film. Charlie Kaufman's 'Adaptation' (2002) is a screenplay about the screenwriter trying to write that screenplay. Federico Fellini's '8½' (1963) is the supreme example. The device asks the viewer to think about what they are watching at the same time as they watch it — to step outside the spell while remaining under it. Used clumsily, it is mere cleverness; used well, it becomes a meditation on art-making itself.