| | | | | | mother and her son are not getting along very well. The next scene is in another section of the living room where father and son bicker about a missing book. Finally, later at night, we find the boy trying to sleep on a cot in the hallway. As the father goes to the bathroom, a car is heard stopping in front of the house and, soon enough, the mother comes in, climbing over the cot to enter the small apartment. She goes to the bedroom where the father accuses her of having an affair with her boss. The argument quickly spreads beyond the affair: the missing book, the mother accusing the boy of being a liar, the father reminding her that he is her son, not his, the possibility of sending him to a boarding school, etc. | | | | | | | | | Each setup consists of a single angle, generally in a medium shot. There is no coverage whatever, no close-ups or cut aways. One angle, no more. As a bonus, because each scene takes place in a different room, there are no continuity bits to worry about (apart from the clothing the characters are wearing). No matching of motions, gestures, or positions. Finally, if the first four scenes show what is happening quite conventionally, the last scene is exemplary of the power of d coupage. Instead of following the mother to the bedroom and shooting the couple's fight in a full shot or in a series of shots/reverse shots, Truffaut's camera stays on the boy's face as he listens to it all: the realization that he is a bastard, that his mother does not love him, that his future may involve a disciplinary school, etc. To play it this way was not an editing decision. Rather, Truffaut understood from the beginning that the heart of the scene was there, on the boy's face, and that there was no point in putting the camera anywhere else. In d coupage then, you know what you are doing before you stage a scene. | | | | | | | | | There are indeed a thousand ways to shoot any action, but it is possible, with some effort, to find one solution you can feel comfortable with. It is really a question of imagining a flow of images, one that will bring to the spectators the filmic narrator's feel, take, his or her viewpoint on the action. For that, finally, is the job of the director: to grope with a developing action and sense its potential, complexity, and truth in relation to a series of specific camera angles. | | | | | | | | | D coupage is relatively easy to execute in a studio, but what happens when the reality of a location clashes with one's pre-visualization of a | | | | |
