Henri Colpi

Biography

Henri Colpi (born in Brig, 1921; died in Menton, 2006) was a film editor and director of Swiss origin who worked mainly in French cinema, from the postwar years into the New Wave era. He graduated from the IDHEC in 1947, and his reputation rests more on the editing room than on screen, though he also directed, wrote screenplays and worked in television.

He began as an editor for directors such as Agnès Varda and Georges Franju. That work led to his collaborations with Alain Resnais on Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), where the editing shapes the whole structure of the film. He also edited films for Henri-Georges Clouzot and many other directors. He was noted as a restorer too, most notably with André Antoine's L'Hirondelle et la Mésange, which premiered in 1984 as a 79-minute feature cut from six hours of footage.

His debut as a director, The Long Absence (1961), was written by Marguerite Duras and scored by Georges Delerue. It shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes with Luis Buñuel's Viridiana and had earlier won the Louis Delluc Prize. His second feature, Codine (1963), based on a work by Panaït Istrati, competed at Cannes and won the prize for Best Screenplay. He later directed a few more films, including a documentary on Beethoven's Third Symphony and The Mysterious Island (1973). He also wrote books on film theory and on music in cinema, and in 1996 published Lettres à un jeune monteur on the evolution of editing.

His legacy lies mainly in his editing work with Resnais and the New Wave. He died in Menton in 2006.

Key films

• Hiroshima mon amour (1959): edited for Alain Resnais, one of the most influential European films of its era
• L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961): edited for Resnais, a key title of modern cinema
• The Long Absence (1961): his directorial debut, which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes
• Codine (1963): his second feature, which won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes