On Cinematic Découpage

Opening paragraph from Timothy Barnard's new book Découpage (Montreal: caboose, 2014)

découpage
French term, untranslatable into English, for an EDITING “plan” of a (sometimes finished) film which is like a visual version of a “screenplay,” but not necessarily a “storyboard” or “shooting script” because these can’t include a precise conception of movement within and between shots. Most notably used by film theorist Noël Burch and director Robert Bresson. 

Peter Rist, 'Découpage' in Tim Barnard and Peter Rist 'Glossary of Film Terms', South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography 1915-1994, edited by Timothy Barnard and Peter Rist

Film Studies For Free is thrilled to present an entry on the concept of cinematic découpage to celebrate the online publication of the first half of the forthcoming volume on that topic in the Kino-Agora series (edited by Christian Keathley, author of some of the other works on découpage linked to below) published by the Canadian publisher caboose and written by Timothy Barnard. The full book will be published in Fall 2014. While you're visiting the caboose website, it's really worth having a good look around: this is one of the most generous of film publishers in offering free excerpts from its wonderful books.

FSFF will be back on Monday with a round up entry of open access goodies from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference on Seattle, at which [in]Transition, the new journal of videographic film and moving image studies was launched! So, if you have any items you'd like to share, please email them. Thanks!

REFRAME Seminar: "DÉCOUPAGE and Otto Preminger's CARMEN JONES" by Christian Keathley

The recording of a Film Studies research seminar given by Christian Keathley at the Centre for Visual Fields, University of Sussex, on December 4, 2013. For information about this video (and for an audio file version) please see here.

Keathley, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, USA, is the author of CINEPHILIA AND HISTORY, OR THE WIND IN THE TREES (Indiana University Press, 2006), and is currently working on a second book, THE MYSTERY OF OTTO PREMINGER (under contract to Indiana University Press). Professor Keathley’s research interest also focuses on the presentation of academic scholarship in a multimedia format, including video essays (see his Vimeo account here). Keathley is editor of caboose's kino-agora book series.

For links to numerous examples of Keathley's scholarly work online, including items he mentions in this talk, please see this earlier Film Studies For Free entry.

• Timothy Barnard, Découpage [online excerpt], Montreal: Caboose, 2014 

• 'The Art of Film Editing', Special Issue of P.O.V: A Danish Journal of Film Studies, edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998
• Lutz Bacher, 'Max Ophuls's Adaptation to and Subversion of Classical Hollywood Cinema and Their Effect on his European Filmmaking', Undercurrent | Fipresci, Issue 3, 2006
• Tim Barnard, '[Note on] Découpage', caboose [date unknown]
• Jean-Pierre Coursodon, 'Desire Roped In: Notes on the Fetishism of the Long Take in Rope', Rouge, 4, 2004
• Christian Keathley,  'Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of Découpage', MOVIE, 3, 2011
• Adrian Martin, 'The body has no head: corporeal figuration in Aldrich', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000  
• Girish Shambu, 'André Bazin & caboose', Girish, March 12, 2009
• Girish Shambu, 'A Cinema Haunted By Writing', Girish, May 3, 2009
• Donato Totaro, '“What is a Good Translation?” Bazin Revisited', Offscreen, February 29, 2009
  
• Jesús Urda, 'Baroque Glances at Society: the Appropriation of Decoupage, the Long Take and Depth of Field Photography in the Early Films by J.A. Bardem', Film Studies Postgraduate Forum, Trinity College Dublin, September, 2008

New WORLD PICTURE on Distance: André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Barbara Hammer, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Phil Solomon, Yorgos Lanthimos, and much more

Frame grab from Κυνόδοντας/Kynodontas/Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009). Read Eugene Brinkema's new essay on this film

Distance suggests a standing apart—a separation, an opening or difference, a gap in space. And mirroring broader swaps of categories of time for categories of space, “distance” can also stand for remoteness on the level of time: James Phillips, for example, neatly summarizes this shift as “Odysseus longs for home; Proust is in search of lost time.”6 But neither this sense of a spatial gap or a temporal remove is precisely the sense in which distance is taken seriously in Dogtooth. For that, we require an older sense of the word. [Eugenie Brinkema, 'e.g., Dogtooth', World Picture 7, 2012]

It's been busy, busy, busy round these parts, but today Film Studies For Free stirs itself from its travails to bring you the, as usual, wonderful news that World Picture, that most original of online humanities journals, has just published a new issue.

The keyword for WP 7 is Distance, and it has activated a wide range of brilliant cultural and philosophical readings on that topic. FSFF particularly loved filmmaker Barbara Hammer's contributions to this issue here and here (see this earlier FSFF entry on her marvellous work), as well as Eugenie Brinkema on Dogtooth, Sam Ishii-Gonzales on Bergson, and  Domietta Torlasco on The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

There is much more in WP of huge worth and interest, so please dip into the below contents.

Oh, and also, please come, if you can, to the upcoming annual World Picture conference, held this year at the University of Sussex, November 2-3, 2012. A terribly excited FSFF will be in attendance!


World Picture 7: Table of Contents

• Zach Barocas Givens
• Eugenie Brinkema e.g., Dogtooth
• Robert Cavanagh Contact Sport
• David L. Clark “Not ours, this death, to take into our bones”: The Postanimal after the Posthuman
• Lorenz Engell Apollo TV: The Copernican Turn of the Gaze
• Victor Fan Approaching Reality: Epistemic Distance, Political Crises and Temporal Imaginations
• in the Sino-French Dialogue on Cinema Ontology
• Alexander García Düttmann The Worst, or The Lesser of Two Evils
• Sam Ishii-Gonzales Suspended Meaning: On Bergson and Cinema Perception
• Barbara Hammer, in Correspondence with John David Rhodes
• Film is Thinking: A Conversation Across Distance
• Barbara Hammer Bent Time
• Sorin Radu Media on Target in the Global System: Military Strategy and Narrative Practice
• Alessandra Raengo Reification, Reanimation and the Money of the Real
• Phil Solomon While You Were Asleep
• Phil Solomon, in Conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland
• Mediating the American Idea
• Keston Sutherland The World and John Wieners
• Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece In the House, In the Picture: Distance and Proximity in the American Mid-Century Neutralized Theatre
• Matthew Tierney The Eclipse of the Eclipse of Distance: Talking Politics in a Global Village
• Domietta Torlasco The Actress as Filmmaker: On Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini's New Erotics of Vision

"Between Past and Future": ROME, OPEN CITY Studies

Updated November 19, 2011

Frame grab from Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

Projected on the war torn landscape for a weary people, Rome Open City poetically serves the goals of unification and restoration. In many respects, this film both conforms to and promotes an ideal image of a courageous, Resistant and unified population – from communist intellectuals, to catholic priests, to working class women and their children. Open City maintains the comfortable melodramatic schema of Rossellini’s earlier Fascist-era films in which the forces of good (the Italian people) struggle triumphantly against the forces of evil embodied in the Nazi general Bergmann and his deviant cronies. The director’s fondness for his people culminates in an apologetic portrayal of Italian fascists as either wretched or unwilling collaborators. However, in the end, Open City’s epic scope effectively precludes the possibility of another film like it: all the “fathers” (Manfredi, Pina, Don Pietro) are dead and the child soldiers are abandoned to the city, suspended “between past and future”. The conclusion, the partisan priest’s execution, witnessed by the children of his parish, forewarns of the fragmentation, destitution, and moral poverty to come. With his last words, “non è difficile morire bene, è difficile vivere bene” (it’s not difficult to die well, it’s difficult to live well”), Don Pietro intimates the struggles ahead. [Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948', PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009  97-98] 

Another teaching week beckons, and Film Studies For Free's author looks forward to pondering, for the umpteenth, pedagogical time, that intensely strange film Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945).

There are some excellent resources on this film, and on related issues of (neo)realism, that are openly accessible online. So, andiamo felicemente with one of FSFF's regular studies of a single film.

• John Bleasdale, 'The Unrealistic Rossellini', Film Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 34, 2002 
• Gian Piero Brunetta, 'Introduction', The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
• Peter Brunette, 'Rossellini and Cinematic Realism', Cinema Journa1, 25, No. 1, Fall 1985
• Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, 'Open City, Rossellini and neorealism: Sixty years on', Screening the Past, 20, 2006 
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reply to Bleasdale',  Film-Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 35, October 2002
• Ora Gelley, 'Europa '51: The Face of the Star in Neorealism's Urban Landscape', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• Sidney Gottlieb, 'Introduction: Open City: Reappropriating the Old, Making Way for the New', in Gottlieb (ed.), Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 
• A. S. Hamrah, '[Interview with Tag Gallagher] From Italy to Iran', Hermenaut, October 20, 2000
• Marcia Landy, 'Introduction', Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 
• Adrian Martin, 'Always a window: Tag Gallagher's Rossellini', Screening the Past, March 2000
• Adrian Martin, 'What is Modern Cinema?', 16:9, September 2010
• Daniel Morgan, 'Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry, 32 (2006) 
• Brent J. Piepergerdes, 'Re-envisioning the Nation: Film Neorealism and the Postwar Italian Condition', ACME, 2007
• Inga M. Pierson, Towards a Poetics of Neorealism: Tragedy in the Italian Cinema 1942-1948', PhD Thesis, New York University, January 2009 
• Luca Prono, '[Review of] Rome Open City (Roma Città Aperta) By David Forgacs, London: BFI Publishing, 2000; Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, Edited by David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London: BFI Publishing, 2001', Scope, November 2002
• Luca Prono, '[Review of] Celluloide, Dir: Carlo Lizzani, 1996', Scope, 2000
• Hugo Salas, 'Roberto Rossellini', Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, 2002
• Erica Sheen, 'Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete', Film Studies, Vol. 7, Winter 2005
• New Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon, 'The Film of Tomorrow will be an Act of War [on ROME OPEN CITY and its legacy]', Idiom Magazine, October 17, 2011 
• Martin Walsh, 'Rome, Open City, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV: Re-evaluating Rossellini', from Jump Cut, no. 15, 1977
• Jonathan David York, 'Open Spaces, Liminal Places: the Deployment of the Sacred in Open City', JCRT, 10.3, Summer 2010

Michael P. Rogin, 'Mourning, Melancholia, and the Popular Front: Roberto Rossellini's Beautiful Revolution', in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Jaimey Fisher, 'On the Ruins of Masculinity: The Figure of the Child in Italian Nerealism and the German Rubble Film', in Italian neorealism and global cinema, eds. Laura E. Ruberto, Kristi M. Wilson (Wayne State University Press, 2007)

'Total realism'? On depth of focus and field in cinematography, mise-en-scène, and sound design

Short documentary on the work of cinematographer Gregg Toland, one of the greatest Directors of Photography of all time. Also, read his article for the September 1941 issue of Theater Arts magazine The Motion Picture Cameraman.

Film Studies For Free was so inspired by Jim Emerson's excellent essay 'Avatar, the French New Wave and the morality of deep-focus (in 3-D)' at his blog Scanners, that it decided to speed up production and publication of its long-in-preparation list of links to openly-accessible scholarly material of note on cinematographic depth of field, focus, and related matters of sound design and staging. Thanks Jim!

Readers might also like to (re)visit FSFF's posts on 3D Studies, phenomenological film studies, film music and sound, Orson Welles  and Avatar.

• Richard Abel, 'Collapsing Columns: Mise-en-scene in Boudu', from Jump Cut, no. 5, 1975, pp. 20-22

• Michael J. Anderson, 'The Mortal Storm: 1940 and After', Senses of Cinema, Issue 52, 2009

• Fran Apprich, 'Born into Sound', quest, Issue 2, Autumn 2006

• Terri Meyer Boake, 'Architecture And Film: Experiential Realities And Dystopic Futures', Architecture and Film, University of Waterloo

• David Bordwell, 'Do filmmakers deserve the last word?', Observations on Film Art, October 10, 2007

• David Bordwell, 'Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise-en-Scène Criticism', The Velvet Light Trap no. 21 (Summer 1985):118–25

• David Bordwell, 'La Nouvelle Mission de Feuillade; or, What Was Mise-en-Scène?', The Velvet Light Trap no. 37 (Spring 1996): 10–29

• Stephen Boyd Davis, 'Interacting with pictures: film, narrative and interaction', Digital Creativity 2002, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 71–82

• Carlos Calderon, Karl Nyman and Nicholas Worley, 'The Architectural Cinematographer: creating architectural experiences in 3D real-time environments', International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2006

• Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell, 'Film Purity, the Neo-Bazinian Ideal, and Humanism in Dogma 95', P:O.V. No.10, 2005

• Sarah Cooper, 'Montage, Militancy, Metaphysics: Chris Marker and André Bazin', Image [&] Narrative, 2010

• Clementine Douglas Cummer, 'Seeing Things, Making Sense of Life', BFA Thesis, Fibers, Massachusetts College of Arts, 1999

• Jessica Durgan, 'Framing Heritage: The Role of Cinematography in Pride & Prejudice', Persuasions On-Line, V.27, No.2 (Summer 2007)

• Jim Emerson, 'Avatar, the French New Wave and the morality of deep-focus (in 3-D)', Scanners, February 10, 2010

• Kevin L. Ferguson, 'Covering the Cinema: On Wallpaper in Some Films', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 58, November 2007

• Rosalind Galt, “It’s so cold in Alaska”: Evoking Exploration Between Bazin and The Forbidden Quest', Discourse, 28.1, (Winter, 2006), pp. 53–71

• Peder Grøngaard , 'Hitchcock's cinematic style: a study of Marion Crane's metaphorical journey into darkness', P:O.V. No.4, 1997

• Lennard Højbjerg, 'Some Aspects of Style and Space', P:O.V. No.4, 1997

• Bruce Isaacs, 'The Cinematic Real: Aesthetics and Spectacle', Sydney Studies in English, 2007

• Bruce Isaacs, 'Film Cool: Towards a New Film Aesthetic', PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006

• Søren Kolstrup, 'Camera Movement and Narration: The camera as narrator in the documentaries of Lars Engels', P:O.V. No.4, 1997

• Mark Le Fanu, 'Metaphysics of the "long take": some post-Bazinian reflections', P:O.V. No.4 - On camera movement and filmic space, 1997

• Julia Lesage, 'Blue collar filmography' from Jump Cut, no. 2, 1974, pp. 15-17

• Daniel T. Levin, 'Perceiving Stability in a Changing World: Combining Shots and Integrating Views in Motion Pictures and the Real World', Media Psychology, 2, 2000

• Jonathan McAlmont, 'Cinematic Vocabulary – Opening Scene of Touch of Evil (1958)',Ruthless Culture, March 9, 2009

• Lars Morell, 'Installations in Space and Architectonic Scenery', P:O.V. No.4, 1997

• Tim Palmer, 'Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body', Journal of Film and Video 58.3 / Fall 2006

• Stephen Prince, 'The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts: Cinema and Cinematography in the Digital Era', Film Quarterly, Vol. no. 57, Issue no. 3, pages 24-33

• Richard Raskin, 'Camera Movement in Wings of Desire', P:O.V. No.4, 1997

• Michael C. Riedlinger, 'Orson Welles – Painter', Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, 2009

• Jacques Rivette, 'On abjection', Order of the Exile/Jacques-Rivette.com, Originally appeared in Cahiers du cinema 120 (June 1961): p. 54-55. Translated by David Phelps with the assistance of Jeremi Szaniawski

• Henry M. Taylor, 'Frames, Cons, and Double-Crosses The Theatrical Cinema of David Mamet', Cinetext, July 2009

• Peter Thomas, 'Anywhere But the Home: The Promiscuous Afterlife of Super 8', M/C Journal, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2009)

• Ben Turner, 'Acoustic Ambience in Cinematography: An Exploration of the Descriptive and Emotive Impact of the Aural Environment', Dissertaton for Masters of Music in Composition, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, September 2005

• Billy Budd Vermillion, 'The "Wondrous Truth" of Microcosmos', 16:9, Vol. 5, No. 21, 2007

• Daniel Yacavone, 'Jean-Luc Godard and Roy Lichtenstein: Originality, Reflexivity, and the Re-Presented Image', Forum, Issue 1, Autumn 2005

Follow-Friday Links Round Up

Image from Frederick Wiseman’s La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris (2009)

For those of you not (yet) following Film Studies For Free on Twitter here's a meaty round up of FSFF's (aka @filmstudiesff) recent top tweeted recommendations of online and openly accessible film and media studies resources of note. They are listed mainly in reverse chronological order, so there are as many must-read recommendations at the foot of the list as there are at the top.

For Twitter aficionados, FSFF's 'Follow-Friday' recommendations are given in (@) brackets throughout:

• Two excellent and must-read items from David Bordwell:
  
  
  • 'Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong'
  • The hilarious and informative blogpost on bedposts and cinematic phalluses...
    

• Scorsese, Schoonmaker, and Toback talk to Aaron Hillis at GreenCineDaily about THE RED SHOES restoration (@GreenCineDaily) 
  

• At Film International, read Robert Leeming on Joseph Losey:  (thanks to @theauteursdaily)
  

• Must-read: Hito Steyerl on the 'Poor Image' (and 'swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities') (thanks to @theauteursdaily)
  

• Compelling essay by Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) at The Valve: 'Tarantino is an Inglourious Basterd'

• Excellent Guardian article by Peter Bradshaw (@guardianfilm and @peterbradshaw1) on 'What Michael Haneke owes to Kafka' 

• Fabulous piece on the essay film's jostling of cinematic pieties by Andrew Tracy for Moving Image Source (thanks to @theauteursdaily)
  

• Dan North (@drnorth) on the decline and fall of Tarzan  

• At Indian Auteur, a really good interview with Atsushi Funahashi (Deep in the Valley)  (Thanks to @niteshrohit) 
  

• Luke McKernan at The Bioscope on recovering obscure histories, e.g., that of British silent era screenwriter Mary Murillo (thanks to @theauteursdaily)

• Check out Ron Reed's fascinating post on the Coens' A Serious Man: 'Questions For Further Study' @ Filmwell  (@filmwell)

• The Open Culture blog had a good round of websites where you can watch Free Movies Online

• See Ryland Walker Knight's wonderful work transforming Michael Bay's images: "Bay Area: A Flare for "Transformers"
  

• See Matthew Flanagan's great review of "La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris" (Frederick Wiseman)  (thanks to @theauteurs) 

• A must-read: Henry Jenkins on' Strange Overtures: Vodaphone, Tchaikovsky, Ernie Kovacs and the "Wowness" of New Media  (thanks to @henryjenkins)  
  

• A last post (sob) Mystery Man on Film's old blog: [HIS] 101 BEST ARTICLES! - Lots of great educational stuff, especially on screenwriting. (thanks to @MMonFilm)
  

• Great post at The Bourne Cinema Conspiracy on 'The Best Korean and Japanese Films of the 2000s' 
  

• Excellent essay by Ernest Mathijs, 'Threat or Treat: Film, Television, and the Ritual of Halloween' at Flow TV (thanks to @flowTV)

• Truly great stuff, as always, from Michael J Anderson: "Being Above/Being Within: A Taxonomy of the 360° Panorama" (thanks to @theauteursdaily 

• The ever excellent Michael Guillén at The Evening Class on LOS SANTOS SUCIOS/THE DIRTY SAINTS (2009) - great Q&A with Luis Ortega (@MichaelGuillen)

• David Cairns (@dcairns)  is brilliant on THE HAUNTING 'Halloween Film Club: Sick Building Syndrome' at his Shadowplay blog 

• Chris Cagle's done it again - a great overview, this time, of film history textbooks (thanks to @theauteursdaily). It's a companion piece to his extremely useful review-overview of introductory textbooks.
  

•  'Kuxa Kanema: Mozambican film … and Godard' from Damon Smith's brilliant The Hands of Bresson blog
  

• Jonathan Rosenbaum compellingly asks the big Bazinian question 'What is cinema?' in his essay 'Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia'

• A Must-read: Srikanth Srinivasan (@justanotheruser) brilliantly posted about Roman Polanski's second feature REPULSION (1965) 
  

• And last but certainly not least, read Film Editor Jo Ann Kaplan on 8 "magic" cuts (with clips) at the great website APEngine (@APEngine)