ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the differentiation of the concept of découpage in sound film—the distinction between découpage artistique and découpage technique—and the great importance it assumed in French film theory in the second half of the 1940s. In the writings of Alexandre Astruc, André Bazin, and others, it had a double function: first, it introduced a basic difference between an aesthetic of découpage and an aesthetic of montage; and second, the concept was used to characterize the style of individual auteurs. As an alternative to Bazin’s appropriation of the concept, Jean Epstein’s poetics is discussed at the end of the chapter, in which the concept of découpage also played an important role in the 1940s.
