Louisette Hautecoeur
1914 – 2004
Louisette Hautecoeur (sometimes credited as Louisette Taverna) began her editing career in 1934 with René Clair’s The Last Billionaire. (*) Her seventy-five editing credits span forty-two years of French cinema; she occasionally collaborated with her husband, editor Henri Taverna. Hautecoeur edited a total of eight films for Clair including Man About Town, Beauties of the Night, The Grand Maneuver and The Gates of Paris. She also edited three films for Luis Buñuel (Diary of a Chambermaid, Belle de Jour and The Milky Way), and worked with other directors such as Georg Wilhelm Pabst (Young Girls in Trouble and Street of Shadows), Jean Boyer (Romance de Paris, À vos ordres and Madame), Jean Grémillon (Remorques, Pattes blanches and The Love of a Woman), Jean Delannoy (L’assassin a peur la nuit, This Special Friendship and Only the Cool), Andre Berthomieu (Mademoiselle Josette, ma femme and Wonderful Mentality), and Roberto Rossellini (for the “Envy” chapter of the omnibus film Seven Deadly Sins).
(Hélène Plemiannikov, who has her own page on this website, edited three other films for Buñuel: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire.)
(*) Even the Cinémathèque Française couldn’t supply me with a photo of Hautecoeur. Instead, the above image is of Jeanne Moreau in Diary of a Chambermaid.
