Découpage.

I keep running across the term découpage in learnèd discussions of movies and not knowing what it means, so I decided to find out — doubtless not for the first time, but I’m hoping that posting about it will make it stick. The OED is unhelpful; its two senses of the word are: 1. The decoration of a surface with an applied paper cut-out; an object produced by this technique. […] 2. Cinematography. = cutting n. 2h. Even I know it’s not the same thing as “cutting,” and once again I deplore the OED’s cavalier attitude to areas of knowledge it doesn’t consider worth detailed differentiation. Wikipedia is even worse; its Decoupage page only deals with the “paper cutouts” sense. Fortunately, there’s a new book On the History of a Film Aesthetic Concept: Découpage, by Guido Kirsten (Routledge, 2026), whose publisher’s summary does a much better job of explaining it: Unlike editing, découpage does not take place after the film has been shot, but before. The French term refers to the breakdown…