Respond to the Week 2 reading, an essay by Luis Bunuel entitled “Decoupage, or Cinematic Segmentation”:
Bunuel, Luis c2000, ‘Decoupage, or cinematic segmentation’ in Bunuel, Luis & White, Garrett, An unspeakable betrayal : selected writings of Luis Bunuel, University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 131-135.
On Wednesday’s class, Robin mentioned wondering if anyone actually understood what he was going on about when he speaks about stuff like film form. Not going to lie, before reading this essay the term ‘decoupage’ was just a fancy word to throw around to impress my none film student friends. And although I still don’t have a totally clear knowledge of all that the word signifies, I’d like to think that I have at least an increased understanding.
In his essay, Bunuel defines decoupage as “the intuition of film, its cinematic embryo” through segmentation and creation. There is the idea that a film is composed of a series of shots, and a shot is composed of a series of images. Therefore, the decoupage is the segmentation, or the coming together of each small piece to create a rhythm and subsequent meaning.
For me, Bunuel’s discussion of decoupage links to something Robin said that caught my attention: the classification between film as photographed theatre verses real cinema. Through segmentation, a script and visual ideas on a page ceases to be literature and instead becomes cinema. Without this process, one can argue that a film is just the photography of a series of animated images. An idea that I’m still wrapping my head around is that even though a film can be considered good in terms of its content or technical choices, it can still be considered uncinematic if it lacks good decoupage. On the contrary, if a film contains good decoupage even though it only relies on natural unplanned material, one can still produce an admirable piece of cinema. In simpler terms, I think this means that decoupage is not dependent on the quality of the script, an actor’s ability, or the level of technology available. It’s more than just making sure you can see whatever action is happening, which would just be photographed theatre. Rather, it’s when you carefully consider the connection between one shot and another, the relationship between time and space, and the rhythm that makes a scene flow that a film becomes a piece of cinema.
I’m sure that as this semester continues my ideas about coverage and decoupage will also continue to develop and change. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the content and aesthetics of a film are two completely different things. Sure, we can’t have one without the other, but as I explore terms like decoupage I can see the unique artistic elements of film that separate cinema from theatre and literature. I hope that as my understanding develops I will be able to reflect upon my learnings and apply them to analysis of cinematic products as well as implement them into my own future works.
