Essential essays, in robust, lively prose, on film aesthetics The three French concepts montage, or editing, découpage, or scene conception, and mise en scène, or staging, underlie our understanding of and debates around film form. In this unique volume, Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form, which effortlessly blends film history, theory and aesthetics in an approach at once synthetic and contrapuntal, Laurent Le Forestier, Timothy Barnard and Frank Kessler examine in lively, readable prose the history of these concepts in film theory and criticism and their genesis and development in practice during cinema’s foundational first half-century and beyond. |
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Dudley Andrew of Yale University, describing this volume as “an uncommon, and uncommonly useful book”, says of it that it is a “brilliant idea for an affordable text on film form [which has] already demonstrated its worth in my classroom. . . . Three scrupulous scholars—genuine philologists of film theory—have brought precision and nuance to the way we talk about the most powerful yet befuddling art of the twentieth century. ‘Montage’, ‘Découpage’, ‘Mise en scène’ . . . to grasp the complexities of such nearly mystical terms may be the swiftest, securest way for students—for anyone—to understand and articulate what counts in how early, classical and modernist films look and sound”. |
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Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène is available now in an electronic library edition from the Proquest platform, as a sewn paperback with a stiff card cover and in a Kindle version. Free sewn paperback for libraries purchasing For a very limited time, you can read the first half of the essay |
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Libraries: purchase a three-user electronic licence from Proquest before September 1 and we will give you, free of charge with shipping at your expense, a free paperback edition, with premium 60 lb. cream paper, sewn binding and stiff card cover (retail: $40 USD). Just contact us to make the arrangements. Students and professors: ask your librarian about consulting the Proquest PDF edition via your library catalogue. And please recommend the book for permanent electronic acquisition, and mention this free offer! Individuals: get a free Kindle edition! Purchase the Kindle version for the ridiculously low price of $9.99 USD (Amazon will adjust the price to your currency), and when you decide that you need the beautiful bound edition (surely a collector’s item) for your bookshelves, we will deduct the cost of the Kindle from your purchase. Note that Kindle is now a free app, available from Amazon; no special device is needed to purchase or read the book. |
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Coming this summer in the caboose Theory and Practice series: Have an idea for a volume in the Theory and Practice series? Looking for an independent scholarly publisher with high editorial standards and fantastic design and production values, where you can publish in the Theory and Practice series alongside Garrett Stewart, the Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène authors, Bazin and Godard? To join the series, send us a proposal. In addition to superbly designed library PDFs (and printed books post-pandemic, we hope), we’ll make a Kindle edition of your book available to individuals and students for just $10. |
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The three authors of Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène take up topics such as early cinema, the modern mise en scène criticism of the 1950s and 60s, silent-era discussions of the theory and practice of montage, the sound period’s counter model of découpage, and film aesthetics in the digital age. Each 30,000-word essay serves as an essential guide for students and specialists alike, combining historical overview with fresh ideas about film aesthetics today, drawing on the writings of a broad range of modern-day and historical figures, both well-known (Bazin, Eisenstein) and unfamiliar perhaps to today’s reader. FRANK KESSLER explores the origins of mise en scène in 19th-century theatre and its place in the contemporary digital cinematic landscape by way of the auteur theories of French film criticism of the 1950s and 60s and mise en scène and sound in the cinema. Kessler’s three-pronged historical, theoretical and practical approach fills a major gap in the literature on cinematic mise en scène. TIMOTHY BARNARD, in the only discussion of découpage in English, surveys a broad range of writings—including those of André Bazin, for whom découpage was central—which see a film’s ‘relations between shots’ not as the work of editing, with which it is regularly confused, but rather of the camera’s formal treatment and sequencing of the mise en scène. LAURENT LE FORESTIER’s premise is that montage must always be considered in light of the time and place in which it operates and studied in relation to other arts and social phenomena. As a form of thought, montage speaks to constantly fluctuating realities. His study of the concept’s odyssey and transformations lays the foundation for what could become a utopian total history of montage. Frank Kessler’s essay on mise en scène was originally published in 2014 in the caboose Kino-Agora series. It appears here in a revised and expanded edition. Timothy Barnard’s essay on découpage was originally published in 2014 in the caboose Kino-Agora series and appeared in a revised version the following year. It appears here in an expanded and further revised version. Laurent Le Forestier’s essay on montage appears here for the first time, in any language. Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form |
Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: electronic, ppbk. and kindle editions
Out now, only from caboose
Reading with
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Preface and coda
by Fredric Jameson
by Fredric Jameson
In this one-of-a-kind volume, 50 specialists working in a dozen countries engage with 109 books by 90 authors found over nearly 70 years of Godard’s films and writings. Each of these readable three-page mini-essays explores a corner of the extraordinary breadth and depth of Godard’s reading.
The most comprehensive collection in English
The André Bazin Reader
A 670-page collection of writings by André Bazin throughout his entire career. A widely acclaimed translation that casts his ideas in an entirely new light. Soon to be accompanied by over 2,000 epigrams from his entire body of work, André Bazin, Rhetorician: Epigrams 1942-1958.
New takes on film aesthetics
Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form
Le Forestier, Barnard, Kessler
The lively discussions in the essays in this volume explore questions of film aesthetics from unique theoretical and historical perspectives around these three fundamental concepts.
The only complete edition
Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television
Jean-Luc Godard
The first-ever English translation of this monumental discussion of film art by cinema’s preeminent director, incorporating countless corrections and additions to the French edition.