Mise en scène is everything placed within a film frame — composition, lighting, décor, performance.
Mise en scène (French: 'placing on stage') originally described theatre direction — the arrangement of everything visible on stage — but was adopted by film criticism, particularly by the French critics who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, to describe the totality of what a director places within the camera frame: set design, lighting, costume, actor positioning, depth of field, camera angle. For critics like André Bazin, a director's mise en scène was their visual signature, the expression of a personal vision independent of montage. Orson Welles's deep-focus compositions in Citizen Kane (1941) — in which objects close to the camera and figures far away are simultaneously sharp — used mise en scène to encode meaning in spatial relationships. The auteur theory of cinema, which holds that the director is the primary author of a film, is largely based on analysis of a consistent mise en scène across multiple works. French film criticism, especially the critics-turned-directors writing for Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s — including François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard before they began making their own films — used mise-en-scène as the central evaluative concept of their 'auteur theory,' arguing that a director's true artistic signature is visible not in the plot or dialogue but in exactly how they arrange bodies, objects, light and camera within the frame, shot after shot, across an entire career. Orson Welles's 'Citizen Kane' became the theory's foundational case study: his use of deep focus (keeping foreground, middle-ground and background simultaneously sharp), unusually low camera angles that included ceilings in the frame, and elaborately choreographed long takes let meaning accumulate through spatial composition rather than through editing or dialogue alone. Mise-en-scène is often distinguished from montage as two competing theories of how film generates meaning — André Bazin, the critic most associated with championing mise-en-scène, argued that composing meaning within a single continuous shot respects the ambiguity and reality of physical space, in contrast to Soviet montage theorists like Eisenstein, who believed meaning was properly generated through the collision of edited shots. In practice, virtually all films use both techniques, but the mise-en-scène/montage distinction remains one of film theory's most durable frameworks for describing how a director's choices, shot by shot, build meaning before a single cut occurs.