French Literature Reviews - 2026
Y. Dedet, Le Spectateur zéro. Conversations sur le montage
Art and Visual Culture
Le Spectateur zéro
Conversations sur le montage. Entretiens avec Julien Suaudeau
Yann Dedet
P.O.L.
May 2020
352 pages, €22
ISBN:
978-2-8180-4992-1
This book of interviews traces an exceptional fifty-year career dedicated to cinema and film editing. In 1967, Yann Dedet landed his first editing job as an assistant to Claudine Bouché, Truffaut's editor, on the film The Bride Wore Black. Meeting Truffaut proved decisive. Dedet would go on to edit Day for Night (1973), among other films. He subsequently worked with Jean-François Stévenin, Dušan Makavejev, Maurice Pialat, Philippe Garrel, Amos Gitai, and Cédric Kahn. He has also worked as an actor, screenwriter, and director of several documentaries.
There are no comparable books in French on the craft of editing. These interviews read as a unique document on the technique of editing and its day-to-day practice. The precision of memory and the power of reminiscence here attain a literary quality. By looking back at his own path, the author reflects on cinema itself. The book also offers an original countershot on the "sacred monsters" whom we thought we knew entirely: a fresh perspective on Truffaut's "puritanism," Maurice Pialat's "cruelty," Poirier's "simplicity," and Philippe Garrel's "modernity."
The book includes several photographs from the film sets.
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In my adolescence, a Paillard-Bolex 8mm camera, reading Strindberg, listening to Edgard Varèse, and watching every single Bergman film paved my way into cinema—a plural art. Wanting to become a camera operator, but too impatient a cinephile to finish my studies, after an internship at the Laboratoires de Tirages Cinématographiques I gradually became a film editor for directors I had already loved in high school (Truffaut, about whom I would later make a short film after his death concerning the Cinémathèque affair) and others: Makavejev, Pialat, Stévenin, Garrel, Kahn, Poirier... Spellbound by Japan, I shot a fiction film in which a couple, bewitched by Passe Montagne, travels to the Jura region where that film was shot—a landscape that had likewise bewitched me. I learned Japanese and shot a few films there: two travel journals in Tokyo and Uchiko, two documentaries on Japanese folk theatre, a film about the Japanese painter Sakata Eizo in Nagoya and Cunlhat (Pialat's birthplace), and another about Mieko Miyazaki, a koto player in Japan... and in Corsica.
Some forty years after the adventure of making Passe Montagne, after attempting to write a screenplay about that experience lived from A to Z, I wrote the novel: Le Point de vue du lapin.
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View the book on the publisher's website...
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An article about this book can be read on en-attendant-nadeau.fr:
"Cutting Time," by Norbert Czarny (published online June 30, 2020).
The Story of Adele H., Passe Montagne, À nos amours, L'Ennui. Just a few film titles among those Yann Dedet has edited for Truffaut, Stévenin, Pialat, Cédric Kahn, and other directors. "The camera operator carves out space, whereas the editor carves out time," he summarized in the catalog for the exhibition dedicated to François Truffaut at the Cinémathèque Française. He recounts his craft in Le Spectateur zéro, a "conversation on editing" with Julien Suaudeau.
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In Positif, article by Michel Ciment, Positif, May 2020:
"Interviews with artistic collaborators (cinematographers, production designers, musicians, editors)—all too rare—are among the most rewarding imaginable, perhaps because they focus above all on formal explorations, placing us at the very heart of artistic creation. This masterful book is one of the most convincing proofs of this. Yann Dedet, one of French cinema's greatest editors, insightfully explains why his position relative to a work in progress is uniquely privileged: 'It is unlikely that the director possesses the necessary distance from their film to judge it with the required severity and serenity.' Aesthetically involved yet emotionally detached, the editor can exhibit extreme lucidity. Yann Dedet, a collaborator to the greatest directors (Truffaut, Pialat, Poirier, Makavejev, Kahn, Garrel), does not hesitate to voice reservations regarding certain works by the artists he admires: 'It is ironic that Under the Sun of Satan—a film whose every flaw Pialat was well aware of—brought him his only Palme d'Or.'
The book originated from a collaboration with Julien Suaudeau, whom Dedet met twenty years ago during a retrospective of Dušan Makavejev's films at the Jeu de Paume. At the time, Suaudeau was a young critic for Positif preparing a lengthy feature on the Yugoslav filmmaker, who had entrusted the editing of Sweet Movie to Dedet. The intelligence and precision of the questions constantly prompt the editor to elaborate on his insights, helping us understand—with concrete examples—an art that is exceptionally difficult to define: ellipses, condensations, choice of takes, and rhythm problems. We already knew Yann Dedet's literary flair from his fine book on Stévenin's Passe Montagne, Le Point de vue du lapin (P.O.L, 2017), or his recent text on Dušan Makavejev published in Positif (see no. 710, p. 56), but what strikes one in this oral performance is the stylistic consistency that makes for such fluid reading. The book also serves as a gallery of memorable portraits: from Truffaut—almost always absent from the editing room, nicknamed 'Little Grey' for his 'unvarying demeanor in a multicolored tie and small grey suit'—to Pialat declaring, with the cruelty of a gruff bear after the first rough cut of Loulou: 'Dedet edited every single bad take and picked the shots right where we should have left them.' These directors, with whom he collaborated on five or six films, nonetheless provide him with ample opportunity for exercises in admiration.
Le Spectateur zéro, a brilliant definition of the editor, is also a self-portrait in which the author makes no secret of his difficult personality. He confesses, for instance, to his strained relationships with female directors: 'With Yolande Zauberman on I Иван, You Abraham, it was the beginning of a long and complex relationship with female filmmakers that would always remain, for them and for me, even more conflict-ridden than with male directors.' The acidic portrait he paints of Catherine Breillat during the editing of 36 Fillette bears witness to this. It is these sharply-edged portraits of himself and others, combined with the finesse and depth of his reflections on his art, that make this indispensable work so valuable."
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Film editing is often described as the process of carving out time from the raw material captured by the camera. Within the broader tradition of French cinema, the editor occupies a position of aesthetic involvement and emotional detachment. This book of interviews traces the career of Yann Dedet, who has worked as an editor, actor, screenwriter, and director. Readers interested in the collaborative dynamics between directors and their technical teams may find these reflections on the craft particularly relevant.
The book provides a series of portraits of figures such as François Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, and Philippe Garrel, offering perspectives on their working methods. These accounts explore the day-to-day practice of editing as a technical pursuit. By recounting his experiences with diverse filmmakers and his own trajectory, Yann Dedet illustrates the nature of the medium. The book includes photographs from film sets and documents a professional life spent navigating the complexities of film production and the distinct personalities that shape French cinema.
"Le Spectateur zéro," an article by Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret available on Le littéraire.com.