Renée Lichtig

Biography

Renée Lichtig is one of the major figures of film editing and restoration in France. Born in Shanghai to a Russian mother, she spent her childhood in China before moving to France in the 1930s. The tragic death of her father, an electrical engineer, in a nitrate‑film fire deeply shaped her relationship to cinema and fueled her later commitment to film preservation. She began as an intern at the Épinay studios and then became a film editor. Her half‑sister, Lucie Lichtig, was a script supervisor; together, they collaborated on numerous shoots, notably with Nicholas Ray. Thanks to Henri Langlois, she assisted Erich von Stroheim in the restoration of La Symphonie nuptiale (1954), a formative experience. In the following years, she worked with several major filmmakers, including Jean Renoir, with whom she collaborated on his last three films. Her reputation as a rigorous and inventive editor quickly spread, both in France and internationally. In 1978, she joined the Cinémathèque française, where she headed a unit responsible for checking film prints and devoted herself to heritage restoration. She reconstructed more than a hundred films, including Casanova (1927) by Alexandre Volkoff, screened in 1986 with a score by Georges Delerue. Her preservation work was recognized far beyond France: in 2023, she received the Jean Mitry Award from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, honoring her lifelong contribution to the memory of cinema.