The electronic edition maintains the original text with very, very few alterations. What is new, in addition to easy access, is a rich and changing panoply of visual elements: still and moving images that prove how appropriate the Web is for the serious work of film criticism. The electronic Altering Eye will now continue to be a fully present visual work in progress.

Robert Kolker
Jan, 2007

I’m curious if it is noticeable in the film’s scene rather than just a still from the film? Sometimes a shot like this may last a second or two – but as a frozen frame it seems so much more significant.

David Bordwell once laid out a whole color theory about an Angelopolous film. When I went back to see the scene it passed by so quickly that it barely registered. But, clearly, he had seen it on an editing device [or DVD] and was able to watch the film frame by frame. Which essentially made it a different scene.

There’s the viewer of the film and the maker of the film. Whether film or digital, editing involves looking at individual frames or freeze framing. Nowadays the viewer of a DVD can stop the film in much the same way as the editor does. The difference is the film-maker started off with a lot more footage to edit down to his final film, the viewer only has the final cut, whether to view as a film or frame by frame.

Essential Points

A Slideshare presentation. 33 slides with graphics. Good for revision. At the bottom a transcription of the text. Other film related interesting slideshows at the side.

Scenario by Jean-Luc Godard for His l961 Film A Woman is a Woman


transl. Michael Benedikt


Godard’s Scenario Subheading: ‘Based on an idea by Genevieve Cluny’

An An extract from “Le Filmage,” Le Cinema (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1919), 145-68 by Henri Diamant-Berger (1895-1972), a French director, producer and screenwriter, has an example of decoupage written by him as an illustration:








He explains that “This scene, as cut up into twenty-six pieces in the scenario, calls for fifteen camera set ups and measures 50 metres in length. You will notice, of course, that a scene thus exhibited out of context carried a completely arbitrary significance and that, according to to its placement in a film, it should be treated in a manner that is either more or less synthesised or balenced.”

Also: the median length of a shot is 2-5 metres (1 meter might be about 2 seconds). There is mention of ‘extremely special decoupages’. Footnote 2 of this extract – or is it a whole article – giving as examples where they can be found in Gance’s J’Accuse (1919) and Griffith’s Intolerance (1916)


He finishes with:

The decoupage is as indispensable to the cinema as dialogue is to the theater or punctuation is two writing…..

This presumably is decoupage technique.


Another way of looking at decoupage would be to look for specific mention of decoupagers in credits. The only one I’ve found so far is is for Falbalas or “Paris Frills” (1945).

Maurice Aubergé (scenario and adaptation)

Jacques Becker (scenario and adaptation)

Maurice Griffe (scenario and adaptation)

Jacques Becker (decoupage)

Maurice Aubergé (dialogue)

page 301:

There were [..] five stages listed in script development “manuals”: the synopsis, the traitment, the continuité, the dialogues or continuité dialoguée, and the découpage techniqué. Frequently, mention is made of a prior “stage”, the idée de film, which might be an anecdote noted in a few lines or at most a few pages.

This quoting is a bit complicated – p.301 came from a previous search on the GoogleBook. The recent search had p.301 missing. You’ll have to buy the book, sorry. I just did.


p.302

…the complete five-stage process was not necessarily followed for every film. Sometimes there would be more like three stages — synopsis, traitement through continuité dialoguée, and découpage technique; and if all five stages, they did not necessarily or even normally succeed one another temporarily: each flowed and overlapped with the next. The addition of dialogue in particular might well not be a separate stage, but an ongoing procedure beginning at the traitement stage and not be being finally completed till shooting began (or even after). Consequently, the term for this fourth stage fluctuated more than did the others, from adaptation to découpage artistique to continuité dialoguée; many writers simply use a descriptive phrase such as “addition de dialogues.” The term scenario itself was used for the whole process, but sometimes for the synopsis or traitement stages. The earliest of these post-war commentators, writing in the period 1944-1946, showed particular uncertainty as to how to label the stages, as if the range of terms was still there being developed and had not firmed up. “Scenario, synopsis, adaptation,” says Style en France in 1946, “continuity, dialogues, découpage artistique, découpage technique — this flurry of prestigious and recondite terms cluster around the work.”