The Role of Decoupage in Orientation and Moral Judgment of the Audience: Studying Two Iranian Movies, The Glass Agency and A Separation

Decoupage is one of the most important elements for making movies. Most of the time, cinematic researchers have looked to decoupage solely from a technical and aesthetic point of view. In many cases, this has led to neglecting the capacity of decoupage in creating meaning and directing the moral judgment of the audience. In many cinematic analyzes, decoupage is examined from a technical point of view, and cinematic researchers often focus on technical decoupage models. The traces of such an approach are obviously evident in the books written for filmmakers. In such books, they focus on introducing decoupage technique and its different patterns to the young directors. Despite the undeniable benefits of this approach to enrich the cinematic knowledge of filmmakers, it’s necessary to note that the importance of decoupage is not only limited to technical topics but also this concept contains other orientations in addition to technical notions. The impact of decoupage on the feelings and moral judgment of the audience is one of these neglected aspects which means that decoupage, as one of the most important tools available to the filmmaker would bring dramatic meanings to the audience and guide their direction and judgment in the process of film events. The purpose of this article is to address the neglected aspects of decoupage functions. This research tries to give an accurate and detailed analysis to decoupage in two sequences of the “Glass Agency” (Ebrahim Hatamikia 1997) and “A Separation” (Asghar Farhadi, 2010), analyzes how to use the drama of these works from this cinematic arrangement and its moral consequences using the approach of Robert Sinnerbrink and the concept of "Cinempathy" (cinematic empathy) represented by him. Two movies are selected as the case study in this article, two important films which are made by two famous Iranian directors from different generations and ideologies. From each movie, just one key sequence is selected for analysis to reach more accurate and detailed results. By analyzing these sequences it’s been tried to examine the attitudes of two filmmakers in using decoupage as a meaningful and effective way to shape the audience's “cinematic empathy”. In the first step, decoupages of the selected sequences in both movies are analyzed in detail. In this section, it’s been tried to analyze the decoupage characteristics of each film in the selected sequence by choosing a structural approach to reveal the effective features of each film in the field of decoupage. Then, the next stage attempts to examine the approach of the two filmmakers to the orientation and judgment of the audience through the decoupage they have done to reveal the ethical position of each filmmaker concerning the characters and current drama in each sequence. In this section, the decoupage of the selected scenes is analyzed based on Sinnerbrink’s votes to realize both directors’ views in guiding the feelings of the audience wholly. This article shows that decoupage plays an important role in the audience's orientation (or not) regarding characters, and plays a crucial and undeniable role in the moral judgment of the audience about the movie events and dramatic characters. Hence, each filmmaker should notice the effects of decoupage on the moral judgment of the audience.