Françoise Collin
Born 1937
Françoise Collin began working in 1961 as a co-editor (with Jean Ravel and Néna Baratier) of Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer, the landmark film by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. Between then and 2006, she amassed thirty-two credits for both narratives and documentaries. Her collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard began in 1964 as a co-editor (with Dahlia Ezove and Agnès Guillemot) of Bande à part/Band of Outsiders. Following this, she was co-editor of Une femme mariée/A Married Woman (with Andrée Choty, Agnès Guillemot and Gérard Pollicand). Collin was sole editor of Godard’s next film, Pierrot le Fou and then co-editor of Made in U.S.A. (with Agnès Guillemot) and co-editor of 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle/Two or Three Things I Know About Her (with Chantal Delattre).
Collin continued editing with numerous other directors, including Jean Aurel, Pierre Koralnik, José Varela, Anna Karina and François Dupeyron. Between 1999-2005, she edited three films for Philippe Garrel (Le vent de la nuit/Night Wind, Sauvage innocence/Wild Innocence and Les amants réguliers/The Regular Lovers). When Collin cut Histoire naturelle for the director and actress Ysé Tran in 2006, it was the culmination of an editing career that lasted forty-four years.
There is also one listing on the (often unreliable) internet of a documentary from 2011, Rua Diamantina Rosa, that lists her as the director but I haven’t found any other evidence to support it, and a different website spells the director’s name as Coullin.
Note: You can read more about the seventeen women editors who collaborated with Jean Rouch here.
There isn’t a single photograph of Collin to be found in any archive or anywhere online. One can find images online, but they’re all of a same-named French philosopher. So here instead is the screen credit from her first film—above, in which her name is misspelled —and one from a later film.
