ABSTRACT
In this introduction to On the History of a Film Aesthetic Concept: Découpage, I argue that there are two perspectives on the phenomenon of découpage: the perspective of practical filmmaking and the perspective of criticism. For film professionals, découpage consists of translating a plot from a script into a sequence of shots that is then realized during filming. Critics and scholars, on the other hand, focus on the form of the finished work and describe its structures in terms of aesthetic effects. Furthermore, I discuss what it means to study the development of a concept, referring in particular to the considerations of Reinhart Koselleck, one of the founders of conceptual history. At the end, I provide an overview of the structure of the book.
