mise-en-scène • Literary Terms and Critical Theories • Eckleburg

Mise-en-scène originated in the theater and is used in film to refer to everything that goes into the composition of a shot—framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set design and the visual environment, and sound. (Columbia)

The authenticity of literary originals was not to be politically co-opted or visually truncated, but to be cinematically absorbed and elevated over all the limitations of literature. In this sense, the dichotomy of “auteur vs. metteur-en-scène” may not directly involve the schematic belief whereby the former’s greatness lies in theme and content while the latter’s function remains the formal, stylistic adaptation of a pre-existing text into cinematic codes. Rather, the point was whether or not the transcendent potential of cinematic materiality was excavated in all its aspects. When successful, this experiment established an original outcome of theme-form chemistry whose governing principle is nested as much in narrative structure as in mise-en-scène…. (Jeong)