K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page i Fine Cuts This page intentionally left blank K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page iii Fine Cuts: The Art of European Film Editing Roger Crittenden AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON • NEW YORK • OXFORD PARIS • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page iv Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP 30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803 First published 2006 Copyright © 2006, Roger Crittenden. All rights reserved The right of Roger Crittenden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, England W1T 4LP. Applications for the copyright holder’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science and Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone: (ϩ44) (0) 1865 843830; fax: (ϩ44) (0) 1865 853333; e-mail: [email protected]. You may also complete your request on-line via the Elsevier homepage (http://www.elsevier.com), by selecting ‘Customer Support’ and then ‘Obtaining Permissions’ British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN-13: 978 0 240 51684 4 ISBN-10: 0 240 51684 2 For information on all Focal Press publications visit our website at: www.focalpress.com Typeset by Charon Tec Pvt. Ltd, Chennai, India www.charontec.com Printed and bound in Great Britain K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page v Contents Acknowledgements vii Foreword: The Transformation of Chance into Destiny ix Introduction xiii 1 Montage, Mon Beau Souci 1 2 Agnès Guillemot 4 3 Yann Dedet 20 4 François Truffaut on Editing 35 5 Sabine Mamou 38 6 Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais 60 7 François Gédigier 65 8 A Conversation with Nino Baragli 73 9 Meeting the Tavianis 89 10 Roberto Perpignani 92 11 Simona Paggi 121 12 Julia Juaniz 135 13 Takis Yannopoulos 141 14 Peter Przygodda 157 15 Juliane Lorenz 163 16 Sylvia Ingemarsson 179 17 Michal Leszczylowski 190 18 Andrei Tarkovsky 203 v K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page vi Contents 19 Lidia Zonn 207 20 Milenia Fiedler 218 21 Anna Kornis 223 22 Béla Tarr 229 23 Éva Palotai 232 24 Josef Valusiak 236 25 Alois Fisárek 245 26 Tony Lawson 251 27 Jonathan Morris 268 28 Mike Ellis 294 29 Mick Audsley 315 30 Pia Di Ciaula 341 31 Lucia Zucchetti 351 32 Gillies Mackinnon, Pia Di Ciaula and Roger Crittenden: A Conversation 367 Index 385 vi K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page vii Acknowledgements In the first place I have to express my sincere thanks to all those who have contributed to this book, especially the editors from all over Europe who are represented here. For one reason or another some of those I wished to include are missing. There is a modesty about editors which inhibits them from developing any self-importance, and I did not possess the powers of persuasion or sufficient charm to convince some of them to be part of the enterprise. This was especially true of Martine Barraqué – who worked for François Truffaut in the last phase of his career and is still an active editor. Martine was on my original list because she was my first con- tact when I wrote a book on Truffaut’s ‘La Nuit américaine’, and I have considered her a friend ever since. It was Martine who intro- duced me to Yann Dedet and the conversations between the three of us in Martine’s Paris apartment made me aware more than any other encounter of the passionate dedication of editors to their craft, and of my own lifelong fascination with that passion. Although Martine would not be persuaded to be in the book, Yann has been a wonderful supporter of the idea from the beginning, and his own conversations with me set the tone for all subsequent encounters. It is a similar case with Roberto Perpignani. Of all the interviews I conducted the one in Rome with Roberto was the most intensive. It lasted three days and could have gone on forever. In recent years Roberto has combined editing with teaching at the Italian National Film School and his desire to communicate the magic of the editing process gives us a mutual agenda that I am so happy to share. But all my contributors share that passion and I hope the reader feels that it is communicated in these pages. Where I was unable to travel to the country of a contributor in some cases the interview vii K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page viii Acknowledgements was conducted by a mutual friend, in others the response was by letter and e-mail. Often it involved translation, either by colleagues in England or before the text was sent to me. With Agnès Guillemot I was lucky enough to have Sarah Hickson with me and Arlette Kendall kindly translated from the tapes. Although Yann Dedet and I talked in English I have used part of another inter- view and that was translated for me by Elizabeth Hardy. Virginie Langlais was good enough to translate some of François Gedigier’s interview. I have to thank Alan Griffin for his research on my behalf and mak- ing contact for me with Julia Juaniz in Spain and Eleni Alexandrakis for performing similar services for me in Greece and making the time to interview Takis Yannopoulos in Athens. Sylvia Ingemarsson’s original text was translated for me by Päivi Overend. Sylvia’s interview was conducted during a particularly pleasant day at her home. Andrej Mellin set up my contacts with the two Polish editors, and Gaby Prekop acted as intermediary for the Hungarians. ‘Bara’ Kastakova performed a similar service vis-`a-vis the Czechs. I have also to thank all other translators including Eva Cieszewska and Emiliano Battista. At Elsevier, Jenny Ridout was the one who believed in the concept for the book, and I thank her for putting her faith in me, even though it has been a struggle to deliver the MS. Christina Donaldson and Georgia Kennedy couldn’t have been more helpful. Lastly I wish to record my deep sense of loss at the death of Sabine Mamou. Sabine welcomed me into her home and immediately moved me by her open and honest attitudes. Her moral stance and her political and social commitment stood as an example to us all. She served to remind me that although editing can be a very rewarding role it can also involve questions of morality and of good and evil. I am sorry Sabine will not see this book but I think and hope her words represent her well. viii K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page ix Foreword: The Transformation of Chance into Destiny Film is the only art whose birthday is known to us. Béla Balázs The motion picture was born in Edison’s New Jersey laboratory in 1889 and spent an innocent childhood at fairground sideshows around the world, amusing and astonishing audiences with its one trick – single-shot representations of events like The Sneeze, The Kiss, Train Arriving at the Station, Workers Leaving the Factory. Then around 1903, at age fourteen, it unexpectedly discovered the intoxi- cating and almost sexual power of montage. What emerged out of this adolescence, as a butterfly out of its chrysalis, was cinema. The construction of a coherent and emotional story from discontinuous and sometimes conflicting images is the fruitful paradox that lies at the heart of the equation: MOTION PICTURES ϩ MONTAGE ϭ CINEMA. We have the testimony of Edison and the Lumière brothers, American and European inventors of the mechanisms that made motion pictures possible, but the voices of those who invented the art of montage, which made cinema possible, are long lost. And they were largely European, anticipating developments in America by a couple of years. How did G.A. Smith, in 1900, arrive upon the idea of the closeup in Grandma’s Reading Glass? Or James Williamson, in 1901, the idea of action continuity across various locations in Fire! We simply don’t know. How were these basic ideas elaborated and refined by Meliès, Mottershaw, Haggard, Porter and others? There are some interviews with the American director D.W. Griffith, and the books on theory written years later by Russian directors Eisenstein and Pudovkin. But as for what actually took place in the ix K51684-Prelims.qxd 10/18/05 5:12 PM Page x Foreword editorial trenches in the first two decades of the 20th century we have only the most fragmentary circumstantial evidence, and in 1924 Balázs was already mourning the lost opportunity. ‘It was the first chance to observe, with the naked eye so to speak, one of the rarest phenomena in the history of culture: the emergence of a new form of artistic expression.