3   Yann Dedet

Yann’s first films as editor were with François Truffaut. He subsequently became the editor for amongst others, Maurice Pialat and later Cédric Kahn. He has recently directed his first feature length film, ‘The Land of the Singing Dog’.

We talked in his Paris apartment and at a nearby café.

I was born in Paris in 1946. My father was a publisher, including for instance the last three books by Antonin Artaud.¹ My mother was an ‘antiquaire’ (antique dealer). I was very ‘moyen’ (average) at school, but I developed an early interest in the theatre (Shakespeare, Strindberg).

My father took me to see my first film when I was eight. It was ‘L’homme des vallées perdues’ (Shane) by George Stevens.² I ran out of the theatre, crying, when the dog howled to death at his master’s funeral. Later ‘Peter Pan’, ‘Snow White’ many peplums and westerns and then the first Chaplin films that I saw (‘Les temps modernes’ (Modern Times)³ and ‘The Great Dictator’)⁴ made a bridge to reality by such a mixture of joy and sadness. From where, I think, I got the idea of making films myself; a hope materialised by my grandfather when I was eleven, by the gift of a Paillard-Bolex eight millimetres⁵ and the making of ‘movies’. Other early films that made an impression on me were ‘La Prison’ (The Devil’s Wanton)⁶ by Ingmar Bergman, Fellini’s ‘Eight-and-a-half’⁷ and Visconti’s ’II Gattopardo’ (The Leopard).⁸

Culturally, my first loves in music were Vivaldi, Moussorgsky, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Varese and Léo Ferré; in literature Julien Green, Henri Bosco, André D’hotel and lonesco.⁹

My first passion was really theatre, maybe more serious because nearer to literature. The shock was the sight, in an editing room of the two ‘celluloids’, the brown sound and the grey (black and white) image, falling together in a box under the Moritone,¹⁰ mixed together like two snakes, and the nazillard, direct sound making its way above the strong noise of the motor and the celluloid splices passing en claquant through the wheels of this magical and physical machine.

But at the time the pleasure of holding my little camera and the fact of choosing what was to be filmed was stronger than the idea of editing, less instinctive for the moment than framing. So I want to go to the Vaugirard¹¹ School of Photography to learn framing. But studies went worse and worse because of the awakening of adolescent ‘pulsions’ (urges) which pushed me to make with my Paillard-Bolex a very destructive and auto-destructive little movie in the mood of ‘Erostrate’ by Sartre.¹²

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So no Vaugirard and instead one month in London to improve my English (and for my parents to put me far away from a very pousse-au-crime friend I admired very much) and six months in a film laboratory where I spent half my time synchronising dailies; another shock coming from my 8mm to this huge 35mm and even more when one day I touched 70mm from ‘Playtime’ of Tati.¹³

But I only really knew what editing was when I edited myself the sequences that were reshot for the – very bad – movie I made my first stage (trainee-ship) on. Happily there were a lot of bad sequences reshot and, coming in at around six in the morning, I tried all sorts of stupid cuts, and even splicing the film upside down, drawing on the film, etc. At the time it was only a game and now it is real work but happily the pleasure of playing is still there. As Pialat¹⁴ says, ‘Its only when you have fun that you work well’.

The editor I saw working on this first stage was so bad that I could begin by learning, what not to do, a very important step. Afterwards, Claudine Bouché,¹⁵ whom I assisted on ‘La Mariée était en noir’ (The Bride Wore Black)¹⁶ confirmed in me that playing in work is essential, and Truffaut was so incredibly easily changing the meaning of the material, of the shots, twisting, reversing them and placing them so freely out of their first place that once again I felt the ludique (play) side of editing.

Then Agnès Guillemot,¹⁷ edited the next four Truffaut movies, and he asked her to keep me as assistant. Agnès has two enormous qualities; firstly, she tries nearly every solution, even the ones which look logically bad, and secondly, she lets the movie breathe, almost by itself, waiting very often for the solutions to become obvious.

She puts shots, not cuts, next to each other to try to see what is the effect between the two shots, but not the splice, the interior of each shot, what it says, the meaning, the colour, the pace of the shot. Then she cuts entire shots out and suddenly there is something obvious between the shots that remain and then she makes the raccord (match) between the shots but not before. It’s like you don’t take the skin off the chicken until you know it is a good piece. So Agnès has a good way of attacking the work, which is waiting–looking–thinking–hearing the music then tout à coup this piece can be out because its not the mood of the whole thing. It’s very delicate work.

For me it is different. I replaced this method by being very presse, always a guy in a hurry. So very quickly I focus on a centre – the shot from the rushes which speaks to me – and little by little I extend, maybe too fast but sometimes it has good results because it provokes interest in the rest of the rushes.

François (Truffaut) hated the cut on action, like the Americans always do. A gesture should be complete and not interrupted by a cut and/or change of angle. Rather the rhythm should dictate the moment. Also I don’t like champ-contre-champ (matching two-shots), with a piece of somebody on the edge of frame. It’s like a stupid proof, just for what? It wastes the energy of the image; putting technique before art.¹⁸

I don’t remember this kind of thing in silent cinema. I think it is the demand of sound, suppressing the character of ancient cinema.

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I had an entirely different experience with Dusan Makevejev on ‘Sweet Movie’.¹⁹ The structure there is not essentially narrative but essentially emotive; that a scene follows another by opposition or by similitude is the important thing. At the wall of the editing room on the list of the sequences, each sequence is characterised by a little coded sign which means: ‘something violent’, ‘something sweet’, ‘something sexual’, ‘something animal’, ‘something horrifying’, ‘something tender’, ‘something historical’, ‘something childish’, etc. The way he chooses the pieces to edit is very special too; totally un-narrative at first, just putting cut – cut the pieces he likes without any apparent idea of construction.

Yann Dedet (on left) cutting with Jean-François Stévenin (Courtesy of Yann Dedet)

But the greatest editor for me is the director Jean-François Stévenin,²⁰ always chasing the ‘défauts’ (flaws) in each shot. I like imperfection; things should be seen and heard that are défaut. Films need arrhythmic things, too long or too short. Stévenin’s movies are full of ellipses. He has a certain pleasure, and talent too, for breaking the logic of a scene, and mixing the ups and downs of an actor in so complete a disorder that he amplifies the trouble – that the actor was trying to express – ten times more than expected.

Then I worked with Patrick Grandperret²¹ who is in some sort the opposite of Stévenin, framing himself, shooting his movies in a total disorder, rewriting the script every night, and changing direction the next day. In all this mess editing is the moment when he really writes, cutting one shot to another so that the movie looks like one long sweet movement (Stévenin on the contrary shoots very controlled plan-sequences and editing is the moment of putting everything in ‘living-disorder’).

With these four directors, Truffaut, Makavejev, Stévenin and Grandperret, I must say that this period was my school time, I was learning and learning.

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Maurice Pialat was the second director to choose me ‘against’ Truffaut (the first was Makavejev) having respect but no approbation for Truffaut’s style. In fact, as often as not, opposition was the game, the idea being to compare and oppose one idea of cinema to another, for the purpose of refining his style. Or by using methods from other styles, or not using them, by discovering something which improves and goes further in his own style. Very drastic, very radical solutions are found this way, often by leaving the problem without solution.

After that I worked with Philippe Garell:²² with him each time you cut five frames, you check the entire twenty-minute reel to feel whether the inside music of the film has been broken or not. Then with Cédric Kahn,²³ who is an incredible mix of instinct and reflection; with Manuel Poirier²⁴ whose dream would be (as for Pialat in fact) not to cut; the less shots there are, the better it is to let time flow.

With Claire Denis²⁵ we spoke a lot, but it is as if words couldn’t be of any use. Only listening to the film counts. The important thing about Claire is that she never wants to say what she wants; she is suspicious of words. So our dialogue is always going around the subject. Like Stévenin, they both don’t want the words to come before the act of building the film.

It is the opposite with Pialat; the talk is nourishing the film; a way of liking life. He believes you will never have a good movie if you don’t have fun with it. He is suffering because you have to cut, so is trying to cut by playing with cutting. It is a magical moment when the ‘réalisateur danser devant son film’ (the director dances in front of his film).

My key experiences as an editor have been Truffaut for learning (he was my cinema father – I never read Bazin²⁶ who was the grandfather), Stévenin for the feeling that everything can be tried, even what seems impossible, and Pialat who seems totally untechnical, who is as free as life.

For example, in ‘Van Gogh’,²⁷ in the cabaret sequence, I remember a savage cut in the music, surely unbearable to a musician, a savage cut which, en rapport avec the other cuts and jumps of image and sound in this sequence, was something which gave équilibre (balance) to the whole thing, as if life lay in the erratic cuts more than in the logical cuts. For me this kind of thing is impossible to replace by another figure de style (stylistic device).

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What seems to be apparent in most of American Cinema is a very important rational thinking at work: everything has to make sense, and to be precise, like subtitled, the sound saying the same thing as the image, and shots explaining and saying again and again the same idea, which is already over-expressed by the intentional face-playing of the actors, the endless repetitions of the dialogues. The American ideal of cinema is an infinite continuity of pléonasmes (emphasising the obvious).

In European cinema you can sometimes see un plan pour rien (literally a shot for nothing) different, elsewhere, out of the movie, but which is in fact the movie. Sometimes when I’m very glad for a movie I say, ‘un film pour rien’ it was just like a part of life, or a good dream. There is no story, no thesis to defend, there is no purpose, just doing music, letting time flow. Show it how it flows, marvellously. This is un film pour rien.

In the storytelling process European editors have to work like musicians, like rowers in rapids, trying to listen to the sound of the falls, not to be pulled towards them by the flow.

Maybe the biggest utility of an editor is to be like a mirror, but one who gives back another image to the director. Often, just listening to what someone says makes the ‘sayer’ aware of the fact that he just said something wrong or incomplete or stupid or…: and this is part of the role of an editor and this quality – just being there to receive, even saying nothing – helps the one who creates to ‘see’ as he never saw his work.

For the editor, arriving first at work is very important, to take possession of the film as much as working alone on it sometimes. The editor is coming late to the film: he didn’t dream, didn’t write, didn’t direct the film and he has to take the film, to touch it, break it and splice it to understand how the film is thought and how it reacts.

The ideal editor is a humble director.

The difficulty in everything is not to be perfect. An editor must be half-intelligent–half-instinctive, half-romantic–half-logical, half-imaginative–half-terre à terre (down to earth), half-here–half-dreaming …. This makes a lot of halves and I would say that such a mess is more a gift of nature than something that can be worked and built.

The first reason for choosing to work on a movie is the director, and most of all how he speaks about cinema – or about life. All those who are very aware about techniques or about the business world of cinema are very repulsive to me. The best is, as Pialat does, to speak music, sex, painting, mountains, sculpture, love … (Although the most revealing thing for me was when he asked me ten years before we worked together: ‘Do you like films in which the guy says “lets go to the sea”, and the next scene is on the seashore?’)

Very seldom scripts are good enough to really imagine how the movie will be, what I mean by good is poetic without being literary, giving the envie (desire) to see images and hear sounds of a special universe, like ‘not really belonging to this planet’ as John Boorman said about ‘Passe-montagne’.²⁸

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On the question of whether I prefer to read the script before committing to a film, the best thing is not to read a script and to judge a film only by seeing the images and listening to the sounds, in order to edit, not with the ideas but with the filmed material. Sometimes when I am asked for I read the script very fast never reading over to try to have the screening-feeling; incomprehensible things staying incomprehensible.

My best editing machine was the Moritone, something like a Moviola but a little bigger, on which I edited standing up, thus improving the physical pleasure of editing. Flat-bed machines give less pleasure.

What is very difficult in actual editing rooms – not conceived by editors – is the totally stupid place of windows (even on the ceiling! I often have to bring curtains from home) and the horrible noise of air-conditioning (as in movie theatres nowadays it is quite impossible to listen to tenu (weak) sound or to really see a night scene because of the exit or toilet lights).

I always need a big board on which I can change the place of the sequences, written in several different coded colours, depending on the kind of narration: a colour by character, place or period or any essential point of view regarding the nature of the particular movie. And like a real cowboy, I can’t have a door at my back in the editing room.

I try to be very near to what I think the film must be when I am editing, as if the mix would be the day after, except for very enormous errors: much too long or too short shots, bad takes, holes in the narration (storytelling), objectionable repetitions, which I think are necessary to the deep thinking about the film. Sometimes the question asked by the film is so huge that you have (I have) to make the proof by the contrary, and it can happen that one or several of these mistakes leads to an idea which fits the film. Or that this attempt to be like the opposite of the film, it leads to express by opposition that the direction of the rest of the film is confirmed by the obvious contradiction of this solution.

I can spend, like everybody I guess, between one second and one hour on one cut, but I’m very confident on instinct; a first instinctive raccord (link) tells something precious.

The interaction between image and sound is essential in cinema. The sound must lead half of the film; it must be the guide alternatively with image. It is very interesting to check how the image can be forced to get (synchronised or de-synchronised on purpose) into a sound cut, even if the image cut is hard, brutal and the sound cut imperceptible. It can be an instinctive desire which leads you to cut the sound first, or it can be a very cold thinking like: ‘lets try this kind of thing now’. In fact, I am sure the film itself forces you to think for and with it. You are not the one who decides, and if you let yourself go in this esclavage (slavery) it is pure délice (delight) to be half-master, half-slave of the film.

The new technology can be very efficient to try immediately sound ideas, but I keep a certain nostalgia for sound on one track, because it forced you to try and find the good cut. The good idea of cutting in regard to what this cut should mean and bring as emotion.

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To begin with, I must say I don’t much like music in movies. It is too often used as a means of underlining, or is pleonastic or heavy or complaisant (indulgent).

But we sometimes have to dare to make this fault. For instance, when music is obviously something completely different than the scene, in complete décalage (separation), but I must say I nearly always have this feeling of décalage when there is music, even when it seems to be in the same mood as the scene. Music always says:

‘I’m here!’

The right adéquation (‘accord’) is hard to find. I have a few good souvenirs of adequate music. One is on Pialat’s ‘Under Satan’s Sun’.²⁹ The reason I think is because he had lived with the idea of putting Dutilleux’s³⁰ music on the images of his film before having shot them, and that the shooting was carried by this strong thinking.

Another good souvenir is the opposite démarche (process). It was after many tries (Wagner, Strauss, two composers who wrote or improvised something after having seen the cut of ‘Passe-montagne’) and by an enormous work of cutting in the music itself and repeating the notes he wanted to hear more and more among other things we made a boucle (loop) several times repeated, that Stévenin was able to use the music written for another movie (‘Barrocco’³¹), and forced the accord between this music and his image by two very difficult hours of mixing sound in the auditorium.

This is the total opposite of the experience with Pialat. The first time I placed ‘a la volée’, Dutilleux’s music on the sequence where Depardieu gets lost in the countryside, Maurice told me to make a synch-mark very fast on the sound with a white pencil and never touch it again; it was good and he didn’t want to risk losing it.

Very often I will choose the music against the sense of the director. I think the music brings more sense than the sense itself, and I was fighting, I remember, a lot of times with directors. Although never with Stévenin for instance whose films are pure music, for him the base, everything comes after, if it can, because it doesn’t always fit with the pace. This is the difficult work with Stévenin, learning what not to do: not to listen only to the sense; not to listen only to the horrible logic; not to listen only to the story as it was written, because the physical shooting has changed all that – in time and space – in that I mean time and space have to be reconsidered within a (the) frame.

It is difficult to analyse the relationship between rhythm and meaning. Take for instance the idea of suppressing dialogue. Very often when you cut out dialogue and put a look which is after or before you have the ‘music’ which is not entirely explanative but which is comme un piste, as a track, as a direction in which you can ask the spectator to go. Something like an aspiration or inspiration of something; the feeling rather than the explanation. I think here the ‘music’ stands, and here, maybe, the more profound sense stands. The sense unexplained.

With the great directors this comes very simply. With Truffaut for instance, he did it himself. Just cut out the last phrase and put a plan muet (mute shot), just a face. With Pialat too, a long held look is easy between the sentences, but with others I have to struggle, I have to be a traitor, not to say its cut but just let them see it in a screening.

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With the new technology I try to keep things the way they were with film. I try to limit the number of versions of scenes and resist the fact that the Lightworks³² can keep as many as I want. I try to keep these things on a human scale. The machine is not the editor, as producers tend to believe and I have to decide how I want to be organised and not let the machine usurp my control.

First of all – headache – the computer is obliging you to think with its methods, which is a coded method, not a physical method, which obliges us to transfer our thinking into another form. It’s very painful for me to be obliged to use a code that I didn’t invent, which I find very stupid, very badly named. There is a very beautiful sentence by a famous French author which is ‘Naming things badly adds to the unhappiness (misfortune) of the world’, because it doesn’t fit with the emotions.

I am very impulsive and I think I wouldn’t dare do foolish, insane or even stupid things if I was more wise, more careful. This can serve the picture by pushing the search for solutions very far. Also I can’t bear being beaten by a failure and up to the last day of editing I will try and try again to look for solutions, going back to the dailies, and trying to invent another point of view to overturn the problem which made us fail.

Definitely, variety is the gas for my engine. Documentaries to enrich the capacity of fictioning reality; fiction to enrich the capacity to documentarise fiction; short films to breathe and meet new blood. TV things to know what not to do.

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The following extracts are from an interview with Yann Dedet in ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’ No. 576, February 2003, part of a tribute to Maurice Pialat. Yann’s comments add weight to his analysis of the special qualities that he admired in the work of Pialat.

The common link between all the great directors that I have known is the total freedom which they allow the people that work with them, actors as well as technicians. With Pialat, this is particularly true. I already had a tendency to build a sequence around a central point, on a basic fact and this was developed even more with him. What first appears is not necessarily how the sequence will start nor how it will finish. It is this that frees you from the emphasis and the specifics of the film, which differentiates between pure narrative and emotional narrative.

The thing about Pialat is that he didn’t hesitate to throw away scenes essential to the narrative, if they were not good enough. Whatever he was not satisfied with would be thrown out. In all the films that I edited, I think there is only one single scene which he kept in – forced and constrained by the narrative – because what followed would have been incomprehensible without it. It was the scene in the parlour between Marceau and his lover in ‘Police’.³³ He did it voluntarily but he didn’t like doing it. When the film was finished, he said ‘Next time, I’m going to take on a real director, or I’m going to learn how to direct properly. I’m fed up with films full of holes!’

Maurice Pialat (on right) when shooting ‘Van Gogh’ (Courtesy of Artificial Eye)

He would take a shot again and again, and very long shots. For the five minutes of the lunch in ‘Van Gogh’, there are six hours of rushes. That makes for a very long editing process. For two months we had a special room reserved for editing this sequence of the lunch.

There were some sequences which we edited entirely together, like the cabaret in ‘Van Gogh’ some when he was never there at all, some sequences where we spent hours together talking about other things. Once, we had stopped on an image in ‘Van Gogh’. There was a sort of bizarre shadow, very strange, which turned out to be that of the clapper-boy, who was standing in the field. He (Pialat) stopped at that image and said to me: ‘If all film images were like that, you could keep account of what you would have done.’ I believe that he talked for an hour and a half. It was very enlightening, it summed up everything that he does: the intervention of chance, the lack of pure logic of light, a mysterious beauty …. And then he left, because he was tired of talking for an hour and a half, because he realised that that was enough. He knew very well what he had done: he had filled you full of the mindset of Pialat. He was no longer actually there but I continued to work with him. He’s the kind that can give you an injection of himself by telephone.

We played lots of games over the question of the order of scenes. We were even going a little far with ‘Loulou’³⁴ as we had finished by making him die. A knife cut at the end and then finished. The scene order in ‘Van Gogh’ was also very varied. I had even found a way of making the film in flashback. The end was at the beginning, the woman saying: ‘This was my friend …’ and then, with the opening of the mists we put on the beginning of one of the ‘Nuits d’été’ by Berlioz: ‘Open your closed eyelids ….’ We had all of the song and then the train. Maurice said: ‘It’s out of the question that we keep it this way but today we can begin the edit’. He used this as a jumping-off point. It was very beautiful in itself, but it wasn’t his way to make films in flashback; on the other hand, it laid open the belief that you could have this in a film. You told yourself: ‘The film is do-able.’

(There was an) enormous amount of work on sound editing, particularly on ‘Van Gogh’, changes in phrases, small sounds taken from other takes. He was not one of those who makes the image and then the sound. He refused dubbing as much as possible. There are some scenes that are incredibly empty of sound, almost unrealistic. He made a complete mockery of the rational approach of the technicians, and of their way of doing things. If one of them said to him: At that time of day, you can’t have so few cars’, he would look at the image, listen to the actors talking and say: ‘What, isn’t there enough ambience there?’

Recorded on 17 January 2003 in Paris by Patrice Blouin. Translation: Elizabeth Hardy.

Notes

1.  Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) – Playwright, actor, director and theorist. One of the surrealists in the 1920s his most famous text is ‘Le théatre et son double’ 1938 (The Theatre and its Double). Created what has been termed ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’. Immensely influential on post-war theatre.

2.  George Stevens – First worked with Hal Roach on Laurel and Hardy films. Apart from ‘Shane’ (1953) he also directed ‘A Place in the Sun’ (1951) and ‘Giant’ (1956). His earlier work is more interesting, including two Katherine Hepburn films, ‘Alice Adams’ (1935) and ‘Woman of the Year’ (1942).

3.  Modern Times – Charles Chaplin, 1936.

4.  The Great Dictator – Charles Chaplin, 1942.

5.  Paillard-Bolex eight millimetres – Before portable video, eight millimetres was the gauge for home or amateur movies and the Bolex was the Rolls-Royce of this medium.

6.  La Prison (The Devil’s Wanton) – Ingmar Bergman (1949). Original title ‘Fangelse’ and a very early work.

7.  Eight-and-a-half – Federico Fellini (1963) was the examination of his own fears and anxieties as a director, played by Marcello Mastroainni, struggles with a film he seems unable to bring to fruition.

8.  II Gattopardo (The Leopard) – Luchino Visconti (1963), epic film from the novel of the same name starring Burt Lancaster as an Italian aristocrat who is powerless to stop his world disappearing as Garibaldi strives to unite 19th century Italy. Visconti at his operatic best.

9.  Yann’s taste in music and literature is interestingly varied. The composers are mostly well known though the writers less so.

10.  Moritone – This editing machine was a European version of the Hollywood Moviola, which was originally put together from projector parts, with an intermittent and very noisy movement. I learned to cut on the Moviola.

11.  Vaugirard – School of photography which gets its name from the part of Paris where it was situated.

12.  Erostrate – It is a story by the existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, based on the myth of Herostratus.

13.  Playtime – Jacques Tati (1967). His third great film after ‘Jour de fête’ (1949) and ‘Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday’ (1953).

14.  Maurice Pialat – Director, with whom Yann Dedet worked five times and whose work he particularly admires. His elliptical style tends to occlude his staunchly humanist philosophy.

15.  Claudine Bouché – Editor for early films of the ‘New Wave’ and still cutting.

16.  La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) – François Truffaut (1967), which reunited the director with Jeanne Moreau.

17.  Agnès Guillemot – See previous interview.

18.  Cut on action/matching two-shots – Part of the essential style of ‘continuity editing’ where the cut is made essentially to achieve smooth transitions, rather than for other aesthetic purposes or to serve the narrative or emotional line of the film.

19.  Sweet Movie – Dusan Makavejev (1974). A Yugoslav director who figures in the careers of three of the editors in this book: see also Tony Lawson and Sylvia Ingemarsson.

20.  Jean-François Stévenin – Has made a varied career in French cinema from assistant directing to acting – notably the school teacher in Truffaut’s ‘L’argent du poche’ and more recently as a director of his own very particular films which at their best treat of everything but narrative thus evoking a world which hardly acknowledges the camera since it is so self-contained and sufficient to itself. I totally concur with Yann’s admiration for this other kind of movie.

21.  Patrick Grandperret – Yann cut his ‘Mona et Moi’ in 1989 in which he acted alongside Jean-François Stévenin.

22.  Philippe Garell – Yann cut ‘J’entends plus la guitare’ in 1991 and ‘La Naissance de l’amour’ in 1993 for him.

23.  Cédric Kahn – Yann has cut four times for him notably ‘L’Ennui’ in 1998, ‘Roberto Succo’ in 2001 and most recently ‘Feux rouges’ in 2004.

24.  Manuel Poirier – Yann has been involved in three of his films, notably ‘Western’ in 1997.

25.  Claire Denis – Yann cut ‘Nenette et Boni’ for her in 1996. A very interesting director from her first film, ‘Chocolat’, 1988 to more recent work like ‘Beau travail’ 1999.

26.  André Bazin (1918–58) – The father of the French New Wave through his writing (notably in Cahiers du cinéma) and thought which fed the passion of a whole generation of aspiring filmmakers and thus (with Henri Langlois and the Paris Cinémathèque) the begetter of modern cinema.

27.  Van Gogh – Maurice Pialat’s wonderful film which almost alone amongst biographies of artists, manages to evoke the true spirit of its subject, 1991.

28.  Passe-montagne – Jean-François Stévenin. Yann also edited ‘Double Messieurs’ 1986, for Stévenin (1978).

29.  Under Satan’s Sun (Sous le soleil du Satan) – Maurice Pialat, 1987, for which he won the Palme d’or at Cannes, which he promptly handed to his star Gerard Depardieu. The latter returned it to Pialat’s ten-year-old son at a screening in Cannes to commemorate the directors death.

30.  Henri Dutilleux – Composer born in 1916, originally inspired by Debussy and Ravel, but developed his own style. Became professor at Paris Conservatoire in 1970.

31.  Barrocco – Directed by André Téchiné, 1976.

32.  Lightworks – Name of a digital editing machine which until a few years ago was the machine of choice of many famous editors.

33.  Police – Maurice Pialat, 1985.

34.  Loulou – Maurice Pialat, 1980.