dehors de la scène (duh-OR duh lah SEN), n. [Fr. dehors ‘outside’ + de ‘of’ + la ‘the’ + scène ‘scene.’ Not to be confused with dehors de la seine, which would concern things happening outside a French river.] The spiritual antonym of mise en scène; the action, event, or spatial reality implied by a film’s composition but deliberately withheld from the frame — a cinematic sleight of hand in which the director, grinning quietly behind the camera, knows something you don’t.

1. The technique of implying off-screen action through framing, performance, or sound, such that the viewer becomes dimly, uncomfortably aware that something is developing just beyond what they are being permitted to see. Distinguished from simple off-screen space by its emphasis on temporally active concealment: something is not merely there beyond the frame, but happening there, and the filmmaker has decided you don’t get to know about it yet. You’ll find out when they’re ready. Not before.

2008 S. Spielberg, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: By holding on a close-up of Indy’s face — stoic, weathered, magnificently hatted — Spielberg withholds from the viewer the gathering of German guards entirely. The subsequent cut to a wider shot enacts the classic dehors de la scène reveal, the off-screen world arriving all at once with the quiet implication that it has been very busy while you weren’t looking.

Comb.: dehors de la scène reveal, the transitional moment — typically from close-up to medium or wide shot — in which previously concealed off-screen action becomes visible, and the audience experiences the particular humiliation of realizing they were being managed. ~ effect, the psychological tension generated in a viewer who senses, without confirmation, that something significant is unfolding beyond the frame; see also: dread, anticipation, that feeling when someone says “we need to talk” and then asks if you want tea first.

Cf. mise en scène n.; off-screen space n.; ellipsis n. (cinematographic sense); dramatic irony n. (the universe’s preferred mode).