Mise-en-Cadre
Mise-en-cadre means “placed within the frame.” Filmmakers have exploited the use of screen positions over the course of whole movies. This chapter presents examples of how luminance, motion, and clutter are distributed across movies. In each case, the center of the screen is most important. It has the most light, the most motion, and the least amount of clutter in the frame, and this is where viewers have a strong tendency to look when watching a movie. The chapter then explains shot scale, a measure of the size of characters in the image, and notes that filmmakers strongly tend to place their characters’ faces at or near midscreen, regardless of scale, reinforcing the gaze tendencies of viewers. Moreover, when they do not, filmmakers follow the focal content of one shot with the screen placement of the focal content of the next shot.