Metteur en scène

Cahiers du cinéma co-founder André Bazin coined the term, which is often referred to as 'the director of a film's mise en scène.' Metteur en scène also connotates that the director has an original aesthetic style that can be detected while watching his or her films. The expanded meaning of the term comes from American film critic Andrew Sarris's writings on 'the auteur theory' in the early 1960s, in which metteur en scène is the second of the three categories that define a director as an auteur.