5   Sabine Mamou

I talked with Sabine in her Paris apartment, the morning after a preview of ‘Ma Vrai vie à Rouen’, the delightful film which was the third she edited for Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, who both joined us for lunch. Sabine’s career began when she knocked on the door of the cutting room of Abel Gance and that was the first of many wonderful experiences. Sabine’s death at the end of last year made me realise how privileged I felt to have met her. I hope this interview will stand as witness to her commitment and passion.

I was born in Tunisia in 1948 and my mother died at my birth. My father had a garage, which pleased me very much because I could share something with Jacques Demy: we both had a father who owned a garage. Movies and reading were the two things I liked most. I have to remind you that TV did not exist at that time. I remember a movie I saw which was called something like ‘Geneviève de Brabant’.¹ and it was the story of a catholic saint who got burnt. My step-sister was Geneviève, and it was something wonderful to imagine that she could be burned too. I must have been very young – three or four – because it’s one of my first memories: being at the movies and thinking it was true.

Going to the movies was a joy, a reward, a passion; movies would magnify life, with actors being bigger than us. There was Asmahane, Farid al Atrache’s² sister, even more beautiful than ‘Gilda’,³ there were Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and Jerry Lewis, who have remained my favourites. There were Victor Mature, the Indian musicals, and a very strange film called ‘Goha le simple’ by Jacques Baratier,⁴ the first film where they spoke Tunisian, starring Omar Sharrif. Goha, called Ch’rah in the Maghreb and Eddin Hodja in Persia, is a character loved both by Jews and Arabs when they used to laugh together. Jacques Baratier filmed Goha joining his lover at night, crossing a street from a village and entering the street of another village. In the eyes of a little girl so curious about love, it was a secret unveiled.

Life passed by, I wanted to be a movie star, have my name and my image big on the walls. It happened once, as I have been the star of Agnès Varda’s ‘Documenteur’.⁵ First in Los Angeles (LA), then in Paris, and I was ashamed when I warned my father that I was naked on the poster. I was then living in LA, full time in love and didn’t come to Paris.

As a teenager I discovered the Italian neo-realists, and the ‘angry young men’ whom I loved so much. A movie newspaper printed an article I wrote on ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’⁶ when I was fifteen, I became a woman with ‘Family Life’,⁷ ‘I pugni in tasca’,⁸ Godard, Demy, Varda, Satiajit Ray, Woody Allen, Nanni Moretti, Chantal Akerman.⁹ I was a very lonely person, and their works were the only ones speaking to me.

Going to movies is still a feast. Living in Paris is lucky. Although a lot of cinemas have disappeared I guess it has remained the capital of movies. I remember the Styx where we used to see horror movies seated in a coffin; the Luxuor where we’d see Indian films like ‘Mandala Fille des lndes’¹⁰ or ‘Mother India’;¹¹ the Delta which was showing kung-fu films and the Japanese ‘Baby cart’.

Sabine Mamou in Agnès Varda’s ‘Documenteur’ (Courtesy of Sabine Mamou and Agnès Varda)

There are directors, and the list would be long, that fill me with admiration. I’d adore to be Soderberg’s¹² cutter, to participate in the discovery of the sense created by two shots. Being able to see how a film is done, in terms of movement of camera, cuts, voice on or off, multiplies my pleasure and my admiration in looking at films. It’s a pity not to be allowed anymore to stay in the cinema for the next performance. I remember having booked a whole afternoon for Alan Rudolph’s ‘Remember My Name’.¹³

It is also important for me to go to movies when I am editing a film. When the film director with whom I am working is a friend, we go together with other friends. The first Kitano¹⁴ I saw was with Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau and we solved a problem we had in ‘Jeanne et le Garçon Formidable’¹⁵ thanks to that film. Funnily enough, it again happened with another Kitano when we edited ‘Drôle de Félix’.¹⁶

Going to movies helps me stay alert. ‘King of Marvin Gardens’,¹⁷ ‘Safe’,¹⁸ Douglas Sirk,¹⁹ Jean-Claude Guiguet’s ‘Les Passagers’,²⁰ Alain Guiraudie,²¹ ‘Bloody Sunday’,²² any Kaurismaaki,²³ they all wake me up, ask me to pay attention.

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Now back to chronology. I passed my baccalaureate when I was sixteen and a half, entered university, graduated one year and decided not to carry on. Though I had developed other passions than going to movies, as literature theatre and concerts, I wanted to work in the movies and I had to earn my living as I had left home and had no place of my own. The sister of my parents’ best friends was a famous editor for trailers and that’s how I started. I entered a cutting room and really loved it: the smell, the noise of the 35mm perforations on the Moviola, the white gloves, the taste of the film. You remember, Roger, the feeling of the film in your mouth, there was the shiny side and the matt side, and the matt side is the one that sticks to the lips. In winter, if you had dry lips, it would take off a little of your skin. It was enough to forget to check once and be called to the screening room because all the emulsion was scratched on ‘la tete de lecture’ (playback head), and shame on you!

When I look back on those times we would work ten hours a day, six days a week. As an apprentice I was not being paid as I was supposed to be learning. I earned money working in dubbing theatres. I remember a long summer when I subtitled ‘zarzuelas’, Spanish musicals. I also worked in laboratories which did opticals.

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In one of these laboratories Abel Gance was working on a new version of ‘Napoléon’,²⁴ I was a fan of Abel Gance and so I knocked on his door and told him. Admiration bien placée’ he answered (admiration well placed), and he accepted me in his cutting room. I worked there for six months, in great admiration. I loved him and would imitate him in every gesture, trims around my neck sweeping the floor and smoking two packs of Gauloises a day. You may shudder as we were working on inflammable film that could ignite instantly.

When Gance shot ‘Napoléon’ in 1926, sound in movies had not yet been invented, but he insisted that the actors should say their lines. So when sound was invented he could dub the film. This is part of his genius. So he re-cut the film and dubbed it. Now, in 1970, he wanted some of the mute sequences that had not been inserted in the ‘version parlante’ to be part of the new version. For example the little boy on the battlefield beating his drum and when he is killed the sound of hail pouring on the drums replacing him. He also inserted some of Napoleon’s speech and I was able to see Albert Dieudonné in the theatre, dubbing himself over forty years after the shooting.

There was no money for me but it seemed fair as there was no money at all: Abel Gance had to stop till a few years later Claude Lelouch²⁵ came by and helped him out. By that time, I was engaged on, God knows what and couldn’t work on the last version of ‘Napoléon’.

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Then, one day, I was hired as an apprentice on a 35mm fiction film. Spares and trims and trims and spares; after three of those six months apprenticeships, you’d earn a card from the National Centre of Cinema that said that you were an assistant. By that time, I was fed up with the editor working behind a black curtain and the films I was working on (films I would never go and see in the cinema). So I quit editing for good and started travelling in a small truck with my lover, his basset, my Newfoundland dog and a library. Gone my dream of working with Agnès Varda, Mai Zetterling and Jean Schmidt. It was even more than a dream, it was what I had sworn to myself. The first two names were the only female film directors – apart from Paula Delsol²⁶ – of those times and Jean Schmidt²⁷ was a director of documentaries I admired.

I travelled for almost a year, reading Beckett, Joyce, Proust, Bashevis Singer, Flaubert, Manes Sperber, Cervantes, Forster, Koestler, Tanizaki, Nemirovskis.²⁸ Time didn’t count. The future didn’t count.

I came back on the day a friend was looking for me to edit a short film by Mai Zetterling, who was looking for an editor who spoke English. We met, I was an admirer, having seen the films she had performed in, when she was Bergman’s actor,²⁹ and the film she had directed. I guess my enthusiasm made up for my total lack of experience, she trusted me and I edited her film ‘La Dame Aux Oiseaux’.³⁰

Then another friend offered to introduce me to Agnès Varda, to finish ‘One Sings, the Other Doesn’t’.³¹ Imagine, it was on the phone that she told me she’d meet me in the cutting room on Monday, 10:00 a.m. I asked her, ‘Don’t you want to see me before?’ She replied that she was going away for the weekend and that there was no problem. I spent more than ten years working with her. Till now, I have problems with directors who cast editors. I have problems with ‘frileux’ which translates into English as ‘sensitive to the cold’ and ‘unadventurous’. In French it is one word. The problem with ‘frileux’ is that you tend to be ‘frileux’ as well. All I know, I have learned from her and the other film directors I have worked with.

Just like Claude Accursi³² in 1973 – I was twenty-four years then – who chose me to edit his 35mm film. He asked me: ‘Tell me, mademoiselle, why you want so much to edit my film?’ I answered: ‘Sir, because you took the greatest actor in the world, Roger Blin’.

[Roger Blin was above all the director of Beckett and Genet, and an incredible theatre actor. Imagine I didn’t even know his film was about Dadaism! – Sabine] So when Claude Accursi told me that, I rejoiced and when he told me the difficulties he had finding the poem, ‘Dada au coeur’ I said ‘Its simple, it’s in the book published by Seghers’.³³

Comforted by the fact that I had worked with those two, I wrote to Jean Schmidt, it was good timing – he had just finished shooting ‘Comme les Anges Déchus de la Planète Saint-Michel’,³⁴ and he hired me as the editor. So now that I look backwards I see a twenty-nine-year-old woman having coffee with Jean Schmidt who had responded to her love letter. My knowledge of his work and my admiration for it – documentaries were not so fashionable then – made him decide to choose me. It was my first work on documentaries and I realised we had to invent the structure, how you start, how you associate, how you finished the film. Nothing was taken for granted.

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In 1980, Agnès Varda phoned me from LA and asked me to come and assist her on the preparation and the shooting of ‘Murs Murs’³⁵ and then edit it. My love for her is inextinguishable. Does such a word exist? Though I was overwhelmed with joy, I still made one phone call as I had heard that a man had recorded hundreds of hours with survivors of the Shoah. I didn’t know then that it was Claude Lanzmann, author of ‘Why Israel?’³⁶ the first day of the screening of which was the first day of the Iom Kippour War. I phoned the cutting room and learned that Claude Lanzmann already had two editors, so I flew to LA and Agnès.

‘Murs Murs’ took us nine months, from preparation to the end of the mix. We finished at Christmas. For Christmas I offered Agnès a copybook where I had written down all her day-dreams about a film being the shadow of ‘Murs Murs’. She later on said in ‘France Culture’ that it was what made her decide to shoot the film, which was called ‘Documenteur’. She said to me ‘I saw you play with my son Matthieu yesterday and thought you could act in the film’. I was very aware of the risk she was taking as I was not an actress, but I trusted her. She wanted to do a home movie: the characters of the film were her son, and friends of hers or mine. We would shoot and edit and shoot. What I lived through this film was being very close to the process of creating. Seeing Agnès shooting a feature film without any scenario.

The editing machine, a 16mm Atlas, was at her place. I was living very close; my lover was an actor in the film and the assistant of the Director of Photography (DP). The DP was one of my best friends, Nurith Aviv.³⁷ Those times were among the happiest in my life; filled with wit and joy, laughter, energy, tenderness and passion.

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Jacques Demy was something else – Jacques Demy was the impossible dream – he was very English – to me what is English. Like he would say ‘Oh, I am late’ and not move faster and say goodbye and be very polite. I remember him when there was a big discussion in LA, everyone was talking and he was translating very, very peacefully and very slowly to someone who couldn’t get the whole thing and he was translating everything. This for me was incredible. I was always hanging around at Agnès production and she was looking for an assistant speaking English for ‘Lady Oscar’ by Jacques Demy.³⁸ So I asked Jacques if I could be the assistant and he said: ‘Sabine you can’t because now you are a young editor and you can’t now just go down and be an assistant’. I said: ‘Oh but Jacques I’d rather be an assistant with you than an editor with anyone else’. So he started smiling – he was a little perverse really, and I got the job – the editor was Paul Davies,³⁹ because he wanted an English person to edit the film. I liked very much the sound editor, Alan Bell.⁴⁰

I was living in LA and I was starting to edit some small documentaries, some small shorts out of the Union. In 1982 I was thirty-four years old, Agnès Varda was back in Paris and I was still living in LA and full time in love. Jacques Demy called me and asked me if I would edit his film, ‘Une Chambre en Ville’.⁴¹ He had always been one of my favourite film directors. So I said ‘Yes, right away’. He said ‘Is there nothing to restrain you?’ He amused me as he was offering me the castle and at the same time he was giving me the price to pay: a separation from my love.

Jacques Demy wanted me to begin before the shooting. We had to figure out the preparation for playback. I remember being jetlagged and understanding nothing. So I said ‘I have never edited a musical in my life and I am lost’. You could feel all the stress, which filled the mixing room, flying away, as in fact it was what everyone was thinking.

‘Une Chambre en Ville’ was pure happiness – what can I say. For example I remember that ‘Lady Oscar’ was in the era of John Travolta. It was the time of the Palace, a nightclub, which was a kind of paradise on earth. Fortunately it would only start opening on Thursday – so from Thursday – we were three girls in the cutting room – we would arrive at work at 10:00 a.m. already dressed for the Palace. It was disco time, all glitter, and at 7:00 p.m. we would leave Jacques Demy and his editor, and we could see in the eyes of Jacques Demy that he would have just loved to come with us. He would say, ‘Thursday Night Fever!’ But we would also go out with him a lot at night. It was very nice to spend the whole day with people and then call your lovers and all go out together.

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Just after that, a friend of mine named Claude Weisz, with whom I was a political militant, arranged a meeting for me with Yilmaz Guney,⁴² who was looking for an editor. Instead of asking Costa-Gavras,⁴³ whom he knew very well, he asked this old friend from old times when he was not yet a prize winner at Cannes. Yilmaz Guney was hiding – the Turkish police were looking for him. So it was like during the occupation moving from one appointment to another one – I entered the room and I saw a very beautiful man looking at me. It was Yilmaz Guney. I went to the kitchen with him and his translator, and we started talking and the translator started laughing. Yilmaz Guney asked the translator why he was laughing and the translator said because we were supposed to get acquainted and he saw that Yilmaz Guney and I were talking as if we had known each other for a long time.

‘Le Mur’⁴⁴ was extraordinary – to work with someone with whom you have no common language. What a pity that sometimes nowadays, like in a fairy tale, you have to show ‘white hands’ to prove I don’t know what. You had to prove nothing before. People are free or not – you feel you’re accepted and then it’s extraordinary – you feel you could die for them! You trust them, you admire them and then you want to go beyond yourself.

I met a girl – a very strange girl in LA. She asked me if I could see her short film. The film was very good. I said why is this shot upside down? She said because Jim Morrison says ‘Head upside down’.⁴⁵

I told her: ‘The film is perfect, I have nothing to tell you, but you have twisted the leader for the sound and it’s difficult to adjust because the sound is cut diagonally. So I am going home, phone me and I’ll come and fetch you, you’ll sleep at home or I’ll drive you downtown’. I never heard from her again that night.

When for ‘Une Chambre en Ville’ I needed an apprentice, I remembered that girl. I was anxious, never having edited a musical in my life. I was phoning her everyday telling her I needed an apprentice who had already worked on a musical, and then I made up my mind and asked her to be my apprentice. This girl is Patricia Mazuy.⁴⁶ After being my apprentice on ‘Une Chambre en Ville’ she was my assistant on ‘Le Mur’. She was very original. Later she directed ‘Peau de Vaches’,⁴⁷ which was a very good film with Jean-François Stévenin.⁴⁸

We edited ‘Le Mur’ in Pont Sainte Maxence which is about one hour drive from Paris, where Yilmaz Guney turned a convent into a prison. I have loved Yilmaz Guney immediately: he was an oriental prince to me. He had problems with the French crew. I loved the dinners, with the Turkish crew, the workers, the painters, all the kids and the women. We had Greek food. I just loved it. I was with Patricia while the crew would eat outside.

At one point there was a strike of the French crew. They couldn’t cope with waiting for Yilmaz Guney to start shooting. They couldn’t cope either with his attitude to the kids. I remember him slapping a boy because he was late for the shooting. So the boy cried and said he went to the village because it was his birthday. Yilmaz Guney did not reply, but that night there was a super birthday party for the boy. I didn’t go on strike with the French crew. I remember they were not happy with the script in Turkish, on which Yilamz Guney was still working.

We finished the editing in Paris. We immediately fired the translator who was too slow and what he’d say would make no sense. We went on working, Yilmaz Guney not speaking French and I not speaking Turkish, but we understood each other.

Patricia was an incredible first assistant on ‘Le Mur’. I remember at a point there was no reel one. I said to her: ‘How come there is no reel one? So just call the reel two reel one’. So she said: ‘No, reel two is reel two’. ‘Well where’s reel one?’ ‘Reel one is not yet made – it’s made of all the shots that are in reel three, four, five, six –’ She was incredible: I had total confidence, but for weeks we had no reel one¹!

Somehow I just communicated with Yilmaz Guney. He had a court around him – men around him – a lot of men. You would hear them speaking Turkish and then pronounce Marx or Engels or Lenin and then go back to Turkish. I didn’t know which International they were preparing. Every night Yilmaz Guney would give dinner – every night we would go to a restaurant. I was invited with whoever I wanted and could bring as many friends as I wanted. He was very gentle and very generous.

Maybe I’m talking about love instead of talking about editing, I hope it’s okay with you. After that film he got sick, and I remember he had learnt French a little. He told me he would bring me to Istanbul at the crossing of the three seas after the Revolution. We would be there and drink and eat grilled fish. I still have this dream of something I will never do.

There were thousands of people at the burial of Yilmaz Guney⁴⁹ – the burial of Victor Hugo must probably have been the same. They had come by bus – Turks from Germany as well as from Turkey itself. A lot, a lot, a lot, of people. Sometimes I still meet one of the Turkish crew. I still have a few friends. I made very, very nice friends there.

Once a crew from TV came to film him in the editing room. Yilmaz Guney asked me: ‘What do I do?’ I replied: ‘As usual, you press my shoulder when you want the shot to finish.’

For his birthday we decided that we were all going to learn a piece of the script of ‘Le Mur’. We knew it was insult. All the editing crew dressed in white and red, the colours of Turkey, and we played the part. He was crying with laughter. When we got the answer print with subtitles, we realised that what we had said was even worse than we had thought. Things like: ‘I fuck the garage of your mother for generations’!

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I was from time to time asking about Claude Lanzmann’s film ‘Shoah’⁵⁰ until one day Catherine Zins,⁵¹ a friend of mine, told me that she was offered to edit part of the sound of his film and couldn’t do it as she was directing her own first film ‘Matura 31’.⁵² So I went to Claude Lanzmann’s cutting room and was hired right away. This incredible and daring trust that creators give you allows you to surpass yourself. ‘Shoah’ was the film I was expecting. It signified the end of my nightmares.

RC:Tell me why you hated Resnais’ film ‘Night and Fog’.⁵³

SM:‘Night and Fog’ is obscene. I don’t think you should be allowed to show a corpse unless you get the permission of the corpse. No one wants to be shown dead or even in such a state of degradation. All the more because we found out afterwards that Alain Resnais accepted the cutting of photos in two to hide the participation of the French police. The legend of the French only being resistant had to be created. France had to sit around the table of victims!

I felt offended and humiliated by the silence that was made around the Shoah. I did all my classes for fifteen years and the Shoah was never taught. I remember saying once that Second World War had been a war against the Jews and being thrown out of the class for saying such absurdities.

‘Shoah’ for me is a masterpiece of structure and of form. Claude Lanzmann said something which I like very much: ‘Without form you don’t inform’. Form creates sense, it imposes a way of seeing.

While I was editing the sound for ‘Shoah’, TV showed ‘Documenteur’, where I play a love scene and a nude scene. Lanzmann came in the cutting room and said, ‘So you are an editor too’. This man who has made the masterpiece of the movies doesn’t freak out to see that an actress is cutting the sound of his film. Such confidence! Of course he doubts. He’s the man who works with doubts, but doubting has nothing to do with trust.

When Claude Lanzmann asked me to edit ‘Tsahal’,⁵⁴ you can imagine what a gift it was. Even if sometimes afterwards I would quote Thérèse d’Avila: ‘Que de larmes versees pour des voeux escauces’ (‘how many tears you shed for wishes that are granted’), because the editing lasted three years and the film is five hours long! He was shooting in Israel – I was getting the rushes in Paris. I had to tell him things and at one point he said: ‘Why are you telling me that?’ I said: ‘I just thought this would be really great to start with’. He said: ‘Oh it’s strange I thought the same’. With Lanzmann, who is probably the man I admire the most, I am not afraid to sound silly. This is his freedom.

After ‘Tsahal’ we edited ‘The Living from the Dead’.⁵⁵ There was something written in Czech on a wall and he said he wanted the translation. I immediately phoned a Czech friend. When he returned my call I was busy, so I asked my daughter, Rachel, who was seven to write the French translation down. I brought it to Claude – with no time to check it and realised there was at least one fault in each word! Claude read it and said, very gently: ‘But, Sabine, how are you writing French?’ I sometimes feel this is how love can last forever, with a man accepting you write like a seven-year-old kid.

Of course it was hard and of course it lasted a long time, but it’s so interesting to edit a documentary with several characters. How and when does one appear? When are you going to find him again? Will you see him again? And when you are ready to treat a new theme, who will talk about it?

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RC:When you talk about finding freedom from people, how does that relate to your development as an editor?

SM:I’m not afraid to make mistakes: I invent an association – I invent a structure – I invent a form – I am free even with sync – I hate sync! Its something I have worked on a lot with Agnès Varda. How a voice over can come in and be out and be in again. You cheat with the sync. You can invent a silence when there is none. This is absence of fear of making mistakes. They have to allow you that. When a director is petty or mean or when he is waiting for you to make a mistake, it’s impossible to work. I have to work with directors with whom I’m not afraid to sound silly, to have no solution, to say I don’t know.

RC:Is it harder in fiction film, because of the conventions?

SM:No, there are no real conventions in French films. In fiction the more I respect the director, the more I feel free to take a sequence and throw it in another place and see what sense comes out of this change of structure. The director changes your changes and at the end you don’t even know who thought what. Claude Lanzmann said a very beautiful thing. When I decided to take a weeks holiday after three years the producer said ‘Well, as long as the film can continue’, and Claude Lanzmann replied: ‘She can’t edit without me and I can’t edit without her’. I thought it was so beautiful to say that. It relates to what is born in the unique relation between the film-maker and his editor. The miracle can happen from film to film.

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Now I can talk about Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau. Olivier Ducastel was a student at IDHEC (Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques); being a fan of Jacques Demy he asked me to be his teacher. He had directed a short musical, a very beautiful one called ‘Le Gout de Plaire’. He finished School and I chose him to be my assistant on ‘Trois Places Pour le Vingt-Six’, by Jacques Demy in 1988. He was a wonderful assistant – I adored him. When we finished the film he asked me: ‘Who is going to trust me like you did?’ I replied: ‘If there is someone for whom I don’t worry it is you’. I decided that I would not keep him as an assistant. So I gave him all the jobs I wouldn’t do. He became an editor very quickly and then a sound editor.

Then Olivier Ducastel met Jacques Martineau who had written a musical: ‘Jeanne and the Perfect Guy’, he introduced me as the editor of Jacques Demy. I saw in Jacques eyes that I was like a goddess. Olivier asked me to edit the film and I accepted gladly.

They came in the cutting room on a Sunday. I didn’t even know how to make the machine work. So Olivier Ducastel turned to Jacques Martineau and said: ‘I told you she would have stage fright but you didn’t believe me!’ That was set! It was just like he had always known me, sick, physically sick on the first day. Whether Olivier had been my pupil or my assistant had not changed anything.

It’s extraordinary to work with both of them – ‘Ma Vrai vie à Rouen’ is already the third film. I cut with Olivier Ducastel then we turn to Jacques Martineau and Jacques is le ‘garant’, he guaranties.

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RC:Then you worked with Catherine Corsini.

SM:Yes. I first edited ‘La Nouvelle Eve’.⁵⁶ Catherine Corsini is a very beautiful woman – a sort of savage cat in black leather and hair upside down – very beautiful. The first day she told me: ‘I don’t understand why we leave a shot to go to another one’ I replied: ‘You are right’ – it came from my heart. She looked at me and asked: ‘What makes you cut here and not there?’ I said: ‘I don’t know – its something deep inside, which I cannot name’. It was then that I thought I will be able to work with this woman. It was laughter for three months with tears running down. The film was very good, very funny, great actress, Karin Viard,⁵⁷ first commercial success in my life. We had no idea it was going to be a success. A little film produced by Paulo Branco,⁵⁸ a daring man.

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RC:So the fear when you start a film …

SM:It’s just a fright that I have to overcome.

RC:And does it happen every time you start a film?

SM:Oh yes, and sick for a week.

I haven’t read many books on cinema. The book which taught me a lot was Jerry Lewis’s book.⁵⁹ First I adore him, always adored him. He says things like: ‘When I am very bad tempered and I come to the stage I tell people, “Look, it has nothing to do with you, I am very bad tempered because the plumber fucked the toilet”. Then every one on the stage is working peacefully and smiling’. This kind of thing he tells you is true because when you are bad-tempered your assistant and your apprentice start to wonder: ‘What have I done?’ You just have to say: ‘It has nothing to do with you it’s just this sequence – I don’t know how to edit it’, and you see how they keep on working calmly.

RC:When you moved from cutting on film to the Avid – do you have any feelings about that, and the effect it has on you as an editor?

SM:Working on film we would go to the screening room and discover the film on 35mm on the screen, and then we would cut on the machine. Now, in France you discover the film on a video monitor, so you don’t recognise what you have seen on the big screen. The first thing I edited on Avid was the pilot for ‘Jeanne and the Perfect Guy’. I didn’t edit the long shots, the master shots, because I couldn’t see anything. We went to the screening and I said I was sorry. I went back to the cutting room and we edited the master shots. How can you choose which is the best master shot, when you discover it on your Avid screen? This is stupid. We have to have more money to be able to print the rushes and then you recognise it on Avid. We need more money – the rest is no problem.

There are no more apprentices and you have no chance to meet your assistant except if he or she overslept when digitising! It’s a pity. I think that you don’t learn editing, you practice it. An apprentice, an assistant learns by watching you deal with the most difficult thing in editing: the relation with the film director.

The only really excellent thing is the sound. Whereas you had to choose between cheese or desert (as they say in French restaurants), with Avid, or whatever, you can have both; words, music and even effects. Also you can raise or lower a sound or the entry of a sound. How many times did we have to redo a cut, just because the entry of the sound wouldn’t match! And remember when we had to fill a piece of a sound shot. It would start by a phone call to the sound department! And now, copy, insert, it’s done. Numerique (digital) was born last century, so what’s new?

How much I loved to enter the film cutting room and smell fresh coffee, fresh smoke from English tobacco, the ink of the numbering machine and Guerlain. I had forbidden the use of tolluène⁶⁰ long before doctors did and changed it to some Eau de Cologne by Guerlain; it wipes false numbers just as good.

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A donkey can edit. However long it will take, it will be good in the end, if the rushes are good. Maybe it will take him ten years but the donkey will manage. But how do you deal with the director, with his anguish? I’m not even talking about how you deal with yours, but how do you deal with theirs. How can you be in sympathy with him, not suffer too much from his anguish. Make silence so he can say what he thinks of what you did. Who knows if the cut is good – who knows? It’s fashion, and it’s not only the director. It’s the producer. Even if the producer is right, how do you behave? You can listen but you don’t start speaking with the producers saying: ‘How right you are!’ I’ve seen editors doing this. That’s stupid. And now it’s not only the producers, it’s the distributor who come along. So you have to deal with all of that. To keep calm – this is the difficult part of editing – the rest is pure joy.

RC:You can say this now after thirty years but you still had to learn and to find the freedom as you put it. To feel as an editor that you can have the trust and have the freedom to work with the material and find the form.

SM:Maybe because I was a very young editor with film directors who had already done several films and were at ease with themselves. I can’t take this out of my experience. I would rely on them – they taught me everything.

RC:Something Agnès Varda said when she came to the Tate Modern. She talked about the fact that she didn’t know cinema before she became a film-maker. But she knew painting, she knew literature and she said she knew that the form did not have to be conventional storytelling, especially in the linear sense – that there are other ways of representing life than just telling a plot. Therefore the form could be free from what happens next in a story. So her mind was free of that convention of telling stories the way Hollywood does most of the time. Do you know what I mean? That freedom is so important for there to be a cinema which is not just about plot.

SM:I listen to you and I think maybe something that helped me a lot is having been born in different cultures and different languages. In Tunisia we would have Maltese, Italian, Jewish, Arab – you had five or six languages in the playground. There were differences between the plot of an Indian film or an Egyptian film or a French film. I remember seeing ‘Les Quatre-Cents Coups’⁶¹ and turning around at night in my room and understanding suddenly that this was what people call ‘having the blues’, and then going to bed because I could put a name to what happened to me.

RC:But what gives you the freedom to explore beyond conventional cinema?

SM:For me it’s the relation with people. For example, there’s a man I like very much, called François Barat who has always made underground films. I have edited maybe ten of his films. When I edit he comes. He speaks about editing. I swear I have never understood what he said and my apprentices look at me – they feel silly because they haven’t understood. I tell them I haven’t understood either, but his words put me to work again. Since it’s underground we are very free to explore. No distributor is here to give us recipes.

Agnès Varda made some conventional and some unconventional films. ‘Sept Pieces, Cuisine, Salle de Bains à Saisir’⁶² I like very much. I don’t know what it is – I like things that look like nothing.

RC:Yann Dedet said to me that he likes a film ‘for nothing’ which is why he said he likes working with Jean-François Stévenin. ‘Passe-montagne’⁶³ is not like anything.

SM:Yes, ‘Passe-montagne’ or ‘Le Bonheur’!⁶⁴

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RC:The reason for doing this book is because I feel that – not just European cinema – but other kinds of cinema are so important to preserve and develop because otherwise we are totally swamped by the deluge of the conventional cinema. It scares me because working in a film school where it’s sometimes very difficult to get young film-makers to have the courage to do something different. Many of them are just imitating what they think is cinema that works for them and they are often ignorant of other kinds of film-making.

SM:I would like once to see an African film with an African that would tell me if this is the normal way to tell a story. In a film there’s a woman who goes to market, comes home, enters her home and you never see her again in the film. I don’t know in Africa if this is the normal way to tell a story or is it just this person who decided that he would tell the story that way.⁶⁵

Conventions are normal with young people. You have to work to go beyond convention. There are very few innovators. You think of Abel Gance. He invented the travelling, he invented the subjective, he invented the ‘montage-parallele’, he invented almost all techniques – flashbacks; in 1910, he had already done it all. Students have to go beyond admiration and start to be themselves, start to express and explore.

RC:Is it good for you to go from documentary to fiction?

SM:Yes, it’s perfect. One nourishes the other. There is no such thing as documentary – they are both mise-en-scéne. Shooting a documentary, a director decides to shoot this person in this place doing this and that, in that specific light. Remember Claude Lanzmann shooting Bomba as a hairdresser though Bomba had retired? The difference from fiction is that in documentaries the structure has to be invented. Even then in fiction when the script is not strong enough you may have to re-organise the structure by changing the order of sequences.

‘Documentaries’ were the very boring films we had to see before the film in the cinema fifty years ago, but you may see films like ‘Sabotier du Val de Loire’ by Jacques Demy⁶⁶ which is pure poetry.

RC:Do you like poetry itself?

SM:Yes I do. For the concision for the raccord, for the form, and especially for the construction.

RC:When you are not editing, what do you do if it’s not cinema?

SM:In my daily life? I’m a great reader. I am a translator too. I translated into Spanish a book on Talmud, by Marc Alain Ouaknin, with my best friend, Julio Maruri. Now there’s a book they’ve published in Madrid, both in Spanish and in French, called ‘Promenades Avec Julio Maruri’.⁶⁷ It was originally a script abandoned because I never found a producer. The manuscript was lying on the floor of my brother in Madrid. A young man got crazy about it and decided to publish it as a book. So he asked us to translate it into Spanish, which we did. I have spent for ten years about three or four evenings learning Talmud with Marc Alain Ouaknin, the book of whom we decided to translate after as an homage of admiration. I write short stories which have been published in ‘Le Temps Modernes’. I have directed a few documentaries on my best friends.

I take Kung-fu lessons for my love of Kung-fu films. My teacher is a beautiful woman named Xiao Yan, which means ‘Little Nightingale’. I practice three days a week. So does my daughter who is fifteen years old and Champion of France.

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RC:Can you recognise who has cut a film by the style?

SM:There are films you don’t even have to read the credit – you know who has edited the film. This is what I hate most. This idea that they have a style and whatever they cut they cut exactly the same way – I can’t stand it. Can you imagine a hairdresser who would give exactly the same cut to everyone because it’s his style!

French movies have an old tradition of being talkative, (I’m not being pejorative). Think of Louis Jouvet or Jean Eustache.⁶⁸ Words are important and loving words helps. Sami Frey directed ‘Je me Souviens’ by Georges Perec.⁶⁹ It was his first experience as a director. He asked Agnès Varda to give him the name of an editor who loved reading. You’d think: what’s the importance, it’s a play, we won’t take a word out of it? Yet, that was – to my luck, as he’s my favourite French actor – his demand. Not an editor with a sense of rhythm, an editor who loves reading.

As for your question if life changes radically when I’m not working, well, no. When I’m working, I need to be kept awake; I need to go to movies, to concerts, to read. Even more, filled with the energy of work, I have often been able to create short things, a short story published here, a short film shown there. While I can be really lazy when I don’t work and stay at home and read without any make up on and let my daughter come home with the smell of English cigarettes welcoming her, whereas I’d be more careful that she gets a good dinner when I work.

RC:How do you choose to do a film?

SM:At the worst, ‘l’occasion fait le larron’ (literally ‘opportunity makes the thief’). At the best, I was there the moment of the birth of the first sprinkle of the scenario.

RC:How does the script relate to the editing?

SM:I just read the script, sometimes I have been given all the versions of the script. Then I edit. The first duty is to edit the film as the script goes. Then I often go back to it after the first cut, after having worked on new structures …

RC:What is important for you in the cutting room?

SM:Fortunately, my favourite landscapes do not change. I’m thinking of the faces of my favourite film directors, Claude Lanzmann or Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau.

RC:Do you start by doing an assembly?

SM:The first cut is the final cut till I change it or till I’m asked to change it. Even if I know that there is little chance that it lasts till the answer print! And yet some have.

RC:How important is sound?

SM:It’s the sound that makes me cut the picture, with questions like how much silence should I give her before she replies or how many frames before the sound of the spoon against the cup? I edit everything that concerns speech. The sound editor adds the additional effects.

RC:And music?

SM:You know that in France, the film editor cuts the music, we are the music editors as well. You choose with the film director the spots where you desire music. In the dubbing theatre, you’re the one to discuss with the film director to mix it or not. Yet I think that how music is used and the type of music used remains the most boring and conventional aspect of movies.

RC:Do you value your assistant?

SM:Have you ever noticed how important it is to be three in order to understand one another, two talk and one listens and strangely enough, the two that talk understand each other. Being a very unorganised person, having almost never been an assistant, I have always let my assistant organise the things for me. Till now, my favourite assistants are still working with me logging and digitising and putting in order and I rely on them. Technology bores me: four Avid ways to make a cut bore me, what excites me is where to make the cut.

RC:Does your personality affect the way you cut?

SM:I wouldn’t speak of personality, as I don’t think you are the same person whoever you deal with. Unless you’re hysterical! I have no cutting style, let’s take three of the films I’m most proud to have edited: Une Chambre en Ville, Tsahal, Ma Vrai vie a Rouen. I have edited more than one film of those film-makers. An editor needs just one quality: the ability to listen.

Notes

1.  Geneviève de Brabant – or ‘Genoneffa di Brabante’, Italy, 1947.

2.  Asmahane was a talented singer who starred in two films and her brother Farid al Atrache had a long and successful career in movies.

3.  Gilda – Directed by Charles ‘King’ Vidor starred Rita Hayworth in her most celebrated role, 1946.

4.  Goha – Directed by Jacques Baratier, 1958.

5.  Documenteur – Agnès Varda, 1981.

6.  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Tony Richardson, 1962.

7.  Family Life – Ken Loach, 1971.

8.  I pugni in tasca – Marco Bellochio, 1965.

9.  These directors are largely familiar except perhaps Nanni Moretti, ‘Dear Diary’, 1994, and ‘The Sons Room’, 2001 and Chantal Akerman who has made an impressive number of films which challenge our perceptions both of life and cinematic form. I recommend ‘Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna’ as a starting point, which features a stunning performance by Aurore Clement and ‘Jeanne Dielman’ which is riveted together by Delphine Seyrig’s disturbing presence.

10.  Mandala Fille des Indes – I can find nothing to remotely match this title.

11.  Mother India – Mehboob Khan, 1957.

12.  Stephen Soderberg – First made a strong impression with ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape’, 1989, and has since established a solid reputation with films like ‘Erin Brockovich’, 2000.

13.  Remember My Name – Alan Rudolph, starring Geraldine Chaplin, 1978.

14.  Takeshi Kitano – Japanese director whose films usually have a violent edge which is mediated by acute human insights. For instance ‘Sonatine’, 1993 and ‘Hana-Bi’, 1997.

15.  Jeanne et le Garçon Formidable – 1998.

16.  Drôle de Félix – 2000.

17.  King of Marvin Gardens – Bob Rafelson, 1972 with Jack Nicholson.

18.  Safe – Todd Haynes, 1995.

19.  Douglas Sirk – Born in Germany in 1897 he had already established himself before the Nazi takeover in the thirties. It was in Hollywood in the fifties however that Sirk became the king of melodrama – his films drenched in rich colour and high emotion.

20.  Jean-Claude Guiguet’s Les Passagers – 1999.

21.  Alain Guiraudie – French director, born 1964.

22.  Bloody Sunday – Paul Greengrass, 2002.

23.  Aki Kaurismaaki – Born Finland, 1957. With a very deadpan style: For instance ‘Drifting Clouds’, 1996.

24.  Abel Gance – ‘Napoléon’, 1926. Its restoration has revealed the true extent of his genius.

25.  Claude Lelouch – French director perhaps most famous for ‘A Man and a Woman’, 1966.

26.  Female directors – The numbers have grown since then but not as much as they should have done. Agnès Varda has sustained a significant output over more than fifty years but the other two did not produce a significant body of work.

27.  Jean Schmidt – Maker of political documentaries.

28.  Writers – Three are less familiar. Sperber (1905–84) was a disciple of Alfred Adler in Vienna, a communist for many years he wrote a three volume biography entitled ‘All Our Yesterdays’. Tanizaki was a Japanese novelist and essayist whose exquisite ‘In Praise of Shadows’ is of tangential relevance to cinema. I have found two ‘Nemirovskis’, one a mathematician and the other a pianist. Sabine may have been thinking of a third.

29.  Mai Zetterling and Ingmar Bergman – Interestingly this impressive actress was only directed by Bergman once in ‘Musik I Morker’ (Music is my Future) in 1948. She did however star in a film written by him, ‘Hets’ (Torment), directed by Alf Sjoberg in 1944.

30.  La Dame Aux Oiseaux – No trace of such a film.

31.  One Sings, the Other Doesn’t – Agnès Varda, 1977.

32.  Claude Accursi – Best known as a screenwriter.

33.  Dada au Coeur – 1974.

34.  Comme les Anges Déchus de la Planète Saint-Michel – 1979.

35.  Murs Murs – Agnès Varda, 1980.

36.  Claude Lanzmann made ‘Why Israel’ in 1972.

37.  Nurith Aviv was an accomplished Cinematographer who worked many times with Agnès Varda.

38.  Lady Oscar – Jacques Demy, 1980.

39.  Paul Davies – British editor – worked a number of times with Mai Zetterling and also for Sam Peckinpah.

40.  Alan Bell – Highly esteemed sound editor especially amongst his peers, has worked with Joe Losey, Lindsay Anderson and Nic Roeg amongst many others.

41.  Une Chambre en Ville, Jacques Demy, 1982.

42.  Yilmaz Guney and Claude Weisz – The latter made a film about Guney in 1987 after his death called ‘On l’appelait le roi laid’ (We called him the ugly King). Sabine was not alone in finding Guney a very special person.

43.  Costa-Gavras – Maker of films with a political edge, for instance, ‘Z’ in 1969 and ‘State of Siege’ in 1973.

44.  Le Mur – Yilmaz Guney, 1983.

45.  Jim Morrison – Lead singer of the legendary group ‘The Doors’ – he always wanted to make films but died tragically in 1971.

46.  Patricia Mazuy subsequently edited ‘Vagabond’ for Varda.

47.  Peau de Vaches – 1988.

48.  Jean-François Stévenin – See also in Yann Dedet’s interview.

49.  Yilmaz Guney’s burial – There is no doubt that he remained a rallying point for exiles from the oppressive regime in Turkey even after his death.

50.  Shoah – Claude Lanzmann’s epic of nine and a half hours of survivors living testament to the holocaust remains unparalled in cinema history, 1985.

51.  Catherine Zins is a film editor.

52.  Matura 31 no trace of such a title.

53.  Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) – 1955 is, however considered by many to be an eloquent, poetic though devastating film.

54.  Tsahal – Claude Lanzmann, 1994.

55.  The Living from the Dead – Claude Lanzmann, 1997.

56.  Catherine Corsini – Director, ‘La Nouvelle Eve’, 1999.

57.  Karin Viard – Popular actress born in Rouen.

58.  Paulo Branco – Prolific producer born in Portugal.

59.  Jerry Lewis – The book Sabine refers to is hard to find, but I am sure it is invaluable.

60.  Tolluène – Chemical fluid for cleaning film.

61.  Les Quatre-Cents Coups – François Truffaut, 1959.

62.  Sept Pieces, etc. – Agnès Varda, 1984.

63.  Passe-montagne – Jean-François Stèvenin, 1978.

64.  Le Bonheur – Agnès Varda, 1965.

65.  African Storytelling – The differences in narrative form in different cultures is too little recognised and needs protecting from the homogenisation process.

66.  Sabotier du Val de Loire – Film about a clog maker made by Jacques Demy in 1955, produced by Georges Rouquier of ‘Farrebique’ fame.

67.  Julio Maruri – I would like to hope that Sabine’s admiration for this estimable person results in his work being more widely known.

68.  Louis Jouvet – 1887–1951 – ‘a living glory of the French theatre’. Jean Eustache, director, 1938–81, for example: ‘La Maman et la Putain’, 1973.

69.  Sami Frey – a splendid french actor who was in a television documentary about Georges Perce the author of ‘Je me souviens’. I am unable to trace the film Sabine refers to.