The choice of shots and of camera angles and movements is called découpage. The order and the length of shots correspond to the task we call editing.

– Henri Agel, Le Cinéma (1954)

In this week’s reading, this quote really stood out for me. It helped me to further get my head around what découpage is. Basically, there are several definitions of the term, particularly because it seems to translate differently in every language – this muddies a solid definition and unfortunately leaves us with several variations of what it really means. After delving into Timothy Barnard’s exploration of the term among several different people, it is apparent to me that having knowledge of these altering viewpoints makes découpage seem like a very broad term. It hoods the entirety of what makes up a film. The pre-planned direction of every element involved with the production process. The artistic choices in imagining the film as a sequence of shots which are individual motion-stricken canvases.

Barnard, T. (2014), Découpage. Caboose, Montréal. pp. 3-8