In this week’s reading, Luis Bunuel, discusses what découpage is, to the best of his ability. Although I am still a little confused about what exactly it is, as we don’t have a direct translation of the word in English, I feel I have gained a little more understanding of it after reading this piece.

I feel as though it as a term which covers many bases, the construction of a shot, how it’s executed and the “ordering of the visual fragments” (p. 131) which have been collected. It seems as though, quite often refers to the editing process. As the magic seems to lie in what is created from the tidbits of information to create a story in film. The premise is there, but it takes the découpage to develop narrative and action in a scene.

The piece finishes off posing that the “very act of setting one’s camera before an object to be filmed presupposes the existence of découpage” (p. 134). I have interpreted this to mean that the possibility of creating découpage is automatic when having even the motivation to capture frames of subjects or object.

Cited work:
Bunuel, L., (2000), ‘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.