In his rethinking of cinema’s history in the 1940s, André Bazin argued that the previous ways of valuing cinematic art were wrong. Emphasis on expressionism of the image and the plastics of montage, along with a healthy suspicion of narrative, which had been the dominant values in the 1920s, needed to be replaced with a different understanding the art form: one that drew a comparison with the realist novel, and that claimed the art of cinema was found in what he called découpage. This term – which has been noticeably absent from Anglo-American film studies until recently – refers to the cinematic specifics of a motion picture: framing, camera movement, editing. But even within dominant narrative cinema, Bazin sensed differences. In the 1930s, Bazin wrote: “Découpage was practically always carried out according to the same principles. The story was told by a series of shots whose number, around 600, varied only slightly. The typical technique of this découpage was the shot–counter shot, wherein the camera’s viewpoint, in a dialogue for example, alternated from one speaker to the other.” This standard découpage, Bazin writes, “was called into question by the depth-of-field découpage found in the work of Orson Welles and William Wyler,” directors whose films feature “entire scenes . . . shot in a single take.” While Otto Preminger did not work at the stylistic extreme of an Orson Welles, he nevertheless developed his own alternative to conventional découpage. At a time when the average shot length (ASL) for a film was 9-10 seconds, Preminger’s films boasted ASL’s of twice and even three times that norm. In addition to the use of longer takes and greater visual fluidity implied by these lengths, Preminger’s découpage constructed in his films a minor formal system, one that crucially shapes issues of the narrative.
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