Guido Kirsten (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf)
In a review of L’Heure sincère (René Plaissetty, 1917), Louis Delluc wrote that the film’s “script is devised and broken down [découpé] with a remarkable simplicity.” This is one of the first instances that the term appears (in the specific sense of a ‘cutting-up’ a screenplay into a succession of shots) in a publication. In later writings by Delluc, in which the less specific aesthetic terms “simplicity” and “rhythm” become central terms, concepts in film practice such as mise en scène, montage, and découpage actually remain quite rare. With regard to the latter this seems astonishing since Henri Diamant-Berger, the publisher of Le Film, who had hired Delluc as its editor-in-chief, was the most important promoter of the idea that découpage was essential to the cinema: “The découpage is as indispensable to the cinema as dialogue is to the theater or punctuation is to writing,” Diamant-Berger wrote in 1919, a year after he had already described découpage as “the fundamental principle of cinema.” There is reason to believe that Delluc agreed with these ideas, although he never uttered them explicitly. My paper will trace the short history of Delluc’s engagement with scriptwriting and découpage, focusing especially on a screenwriting contest Delluc organized and announced in the first issue of Cinéa (May 1921), on Delluc’s article “Scenarii” (first published in Comœdia, April 1923) and on the scripts he published in Les Drames de cinéma (March 1923), most of which he had “broken down” himself in order to shoot them.
CV:
Guido Kirsten has led the research project “Filmic Discourses of Lack: On the Representation of Precarity and Exclusion in European Feature and Documentary Films” at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (Potsdam) in the DFG Emmy Noether Program since October 2018. Previously, he researched and taught at universities in Zurich (2009–2014) and Stockholm (2015–2018) and held a visiting professorship in Mainz (2017). He is the author of the monograph Filmischer Realismus (Marburg: Schüren, 2013) and editor of, among other works, the anthology Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018; with Margrit Tröhler), the film theoretical writings of Étienne Souriau, Das filmische Universum (Paderborn: Fink, 2020), Einführung in die Klassische Filmtheorie (Mainz: Ventil, 2021, with Chris Tedjasukmana) and is co-editor of the film and television studies journal Montage AV.