ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of the marginalization of the concept of découpage in film criticism and the emerging field of film studies. This marginalization was due, firstly, to the dominance of the idea of mise en scène in the “politique des auteurs,” secondly, to the disinterest of semiology in questions of film production, and, thirdly, to a revaluation of montage (and devaluation of découpage) in the context of Marxist film theory. When film studies was institutionalized and the first text books appeared, découpage had fallen out of favor. This marginal position within French film theory contributed to mistranslations into English, German, and other languages, which made it even harder to recognize the existence of découpage as an independent concept.
