Currently in preparation
Montage, Découpage, Mise en Scène: Essays on Film Form
with a foreword by Christian Keathley
Montage, découpage, mise en scène: these three French terms are central to debates around film history and aesthetics in every language, yet the precise meaning of each and especially their relationship to one another remain a source of confusion for many. In this unique volume, film scholars Jacques Aumont, Timothy Barnard and Frank Kessler examine in lively, readable prose the history of these concepts in film theory and criticism and their genesis and development in practice during cinema’s foundational first half-century and beyond—from early cinema to the modern mise en scène criticism of the 1950s and 60s by way of silent-era explorations of the theory and practice of montage and the early sound period’s counter example of découpage. Each 20,000-word essay will serve as an essential guide for students and specialists alike, combining historical overview with fresh ideas about film aesthetics today.
Montage, Découpage, Mise en Scène: Essays on Film Form is the first volume in caboose’s innovative Kino-Agora series of brief, engaging essays on topics in film theory and history. It includes a foreword by series editor Christian Keathley that explores these three concepts in light of the authors’ contributions.
The technique and art of editing came to us from American cinema, a cinema highly subjected to narrative demands. To edit immediately meant “to join two pieces of film”. Until the early 1910s, however, a film’s unity was generally conceived in relation either to a (theatrical) scene or to a tableau (also in the theatrical sense, although the word in addition brings painting to mind). Everything changed when self-sufficient and complete scenes and tableaux, which needed only to be placed end to end, gave way to that new and more complex entity, the shot. The shot too is defined by its dramatic content and an enframed point of view; because its length is arbitrary, however, it is a specifically cinematic invention.
To edit shots is to create continuities and through lines, to relate meanings, but also to create relations of space and time, and even of speed, direction and form. Visual relations, in other words. It is striking that, within the most strongly narrative tradition, in Hollywood, editing has always been conceived in terms of these two sides of the coin: dramatic continuity and clarity on the one hand and fluidity of the visual connections on the other.
European critics and artists of the mid-1910s, discovering the first masterpieces of what would later be called “classical Hollywood cinema”, were dazzled by this art of editing. They soon set themselves to copying it, and even to amplifying it and rendering it supreme. “Montage”, for an entire age of avant-gardes of every description, was the rallying point of those who wanted to create a cinema liberated from theatre and literature. Russian cinema of the 1920s in particular devoted itself to virtuosic montage to such an extent that one spoke of “Soviet montage” (and yet Kuleshov, who did so much to popularise this notion, spoke of “American montage”).
Montage has long served to exalt the purely visual power of cinema: a “montage film”, in this sense, was (and still is) a film that doesn’t necessarily tell a story, but rather links fragments of sensation and meaning to construct a resultant sensation and meaning. (The term has retained this sense in English, in which a “montage sequence” is precisely that: a visually strong sequence of limited narrative content.)
The “collage” aspect of montage is striking, as powerful “found footage” films have been demonstrating for the past twenty or thirty years, and it is still captivating to think about what creates the quite singular rhythm of a film by Bruce Conner, for example. But the more ordinary powers of editing are no less marvellous. My thesis here will be that, because too much attention has been paid to an extreme conception of montage, we have forgotten somewhat to examine its ordinary conception, one directed towards linking, development and the fluidity of meaning and feeling. I will focus in particular on examples taken mostly from the past ten years to discuss the extent to which the shot can demonstrate its arbitrary nature (shifts in point of view, distance, speed and duration) in editing whose ultimate goal is to give an impression of narrative unity.
Vocabulary:
- Montage (French, adopted in German, Italian, Spanish, English and Russian); in Korean: montajou
- Editing (and now compositing); in Chinese: jianji (cut/part)
- Shot / in French: plan; in Spanish: plano / in German: Einstellung (Aufnahme) / in Italian: Inquadratura (Piano) / in Korean: Jang myeon (scene, situation)
Jacques Aumont has worked as a radio and television engineer, a critic with Cahiers du Cinéma and a member of the board of directors of the publisher Éditions de l’Étoile. He began teaching cinema studies in 1970, and later aesthetics, at the Paris-1, Paris-3 and Lyon-2 universities and at the E.H.E.S.S. in France, and in addition in Berkeley, Madison, Iowa City, Nijmegen and Lisbon. He is emeritus professor at the Université de Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris. He has worked in three related fields: (1) theoretical problems around representation; (2) the aesthetics of visual art, in particular the relationship between cinema and painting; and (3) film analysis, its methodology and related concepts.
His publications include: Montage Eisenstein, 1979, 2005; L’Oeil interminable, 1989, 1995, 2007; L’image, 1990, 2011; Du visage au cinéma, 1992; Introduction à la couleur, 1994; De l’esthétique au présent, 1998; Les Théories des cinéastes, 2002, 2011; Matière d’images, 2005, 2009; Cinéma et mise en scène, 2006, 2010; Moderne?, 2007; L’Attrait de la lumière, 2010; Le Montreur d’ombre, 2012; and Que reste-t-il du cinéma?, 2012. He has edited or translated an additional twenty volumes and written some two hundred and fifty articles for journals, periodicals, catalogues and conference proceedings.
In 1952, André Bazin conceived a fine prank. Its intended victims, however, innocently sidestepped it, and it cruelly backfired on him into the bargain. Asked by the Venice film festival to write an essay whose assigned topic, we can only assume, was editing (the other essays in the volume were on screenwriting, acting, costumes, music and the ‘film-setting’, or mise en scène), Bazin delivered instead a theoretical manifesto which challenged the entrenched notion that editing is the basis of film art and presented a vision of film as a fluid form of writing with the camera. He called this article, and his theoretical concept, ‘Découpage’. This word’s dictionary meaning, ‘cutting up’, paradoxically at odds with the seamless film aesthetic he propounded, has contributed greatly to the confusion that surrounds it in film studies today, to the point that a widespread folk meaning in English understands the term as describing a kind of rapid continuity editing (cutting the scene up into tiny bits)—the exact opposite of Bazin’s meaning.
Bazin’s concept and text alike, however, quickly sank from view. Published in an Italian festival catalogue, ‘Découpage’ was noticed in France only by a young Jean-Luc Godard, who was inspired to pen a rebuttal. What’s worse, the article’s English and Italian versions were christened ‘Montage’ (and ‘Montaggio’), supplanting Bazin’s concept by the very thing it opposed. And soon his young protégés, the new critics at Cahiers du Cinéma, would inaugurate the mise en scène school of criticism that obscured and overshadowed Bazin’s contribution. ‘Découpage’—and découpage—in France and elsewhere, disappeared from sight.
Or almost. For when Bazin revised the text slightly a few years later, for inclusion on the eve of his death in the collection of essays Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, he renamed it ‘L’Évolution du langage cinématographique’—‘The Evolution of Film Language’, the most widely-read text in film studies. In French the critique of editing remains clear, even as the polemical defence of découpage is obscured by the change of title. In English the translation of this essay first published in 1967 and unchallenged until 2009 completely muddied the waters and betrayed Bazin’s intent, systematically translating découpage as ‘editing’, the object of its critique. Bazin must have been turning in his grave all these years.
The legacy of this perversion of Bazin’s key aesthetic theory is everywhere around us: in English, découpage appears in virtually no discussion of film theory or aesthetics, no dictionary of film terms or concepts. This essay examines the concept’s scant yet full-of-pedigree history—Luis Buñuel and Roger Leenhardt wrote about it in the 1920s and 30s respectively, and Eisenstein’s 1930s lectures, handed down to us as the volume Lessons with Eisenstein, are nothing if not the first manual for treating découpage as the cornerstone of film art. Its place in Bazin’s system and its relationship to montage and mise en scène in film practice and the film theory tradition are considered, arguing in favour of reincorporating the concept into film studies today. Sixty years after the fact, Bazin’s revolutionary theory is finally seeing the light of day in its full and proper sense. In a word: that cinema, and in particular ‘classical’ sound cinema, is not, contrary to what we are constantly told, a cinema founded on editing. It is, instead, a cinema of découpage—‘continuity découpage’. And all the historical and material evidence supports this view.
Timothy Barnard is the proprietor of caboose, for whom he has translated a selection of essays from André Bazin’s What is Cinema? in 2009 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television in 2012.
The Belgian film critic Dirk Lauwaert once proclaimed that mise en scène was the “most beautiful word” when talking about cinema. This, at first sight, might seem paradoxical, given its origins in theatre where, as an 1885 dictionary of stage terms states, it refers to “the art of organising the stage action considered under every angle and in all its aspects”. Lauwaert, however, quite obviously alluded to a very specific understanding of the term, which emerged in the wake of the politique des auteurs as practised by Cahiers du Cinéma. Here, mise en scène emphatically became the focus of film criticism in order to identify the distinctive qualities of an auteur.
Thus the term mise en scène is applied in a variety of ways within Cinema Studies. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, for instance, use it rather descriptively when discussing the shot as a unit of film form, in order to be able make a distinction between all the elements that belong to the realm of the profilmic, and those that result from the work of the camera. From the point of view of mise en scène criticism, on the other hand, such a distinction might seem inappropriate, as cinematography surely is one aspect of mise en scène.
Mise en scène, when understood as one of the most fundamental techniques of film making, has always been part of film history, from Georges Méliès’s “artificially arranged scenes” to contemporary block busters or art house movies. But it is also obvious, that the practices the term refers to have changed over time, that film makers have made a variety of choices, and that complex interplay between space, actors, and camera is dependent also upon technological constraints.
This section of the book will try to disentangle the various ways in which mise en scène appears in writings about film, with regard to its descriptive scope as well as its strategic functions, and in relation to other terms such as ‘staging’. It will also look at the different practices of mise en scène and the way in which these are conceptualised.
frank kessler is professor of media history at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and one of the founders and editors of KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films. He is a past president of Domitor, an international association for research on early cinema. His research mainly concerns the period of the emergence of cinema, exploring various aspects of early cinema, especially the genre of féeries, early non-fiction film and acting styles.
