Pierre Etaix Retrospective

Pierre Étaix returns to the big screen

Pierre Étaix is back! The French writer-director-star, a disciple of Jacques Tati with whom he worked closely, has been released from a kind of purgatory in which his entire back-catalogue of films was unavailable to the public for decades, due to a bizarre legal wrangle over screening rights: as he sees it, his life’s work had been simply stolen.

The good news is that the films, five features and three shorts, have now been liberated, and a rejuvenated Etaix is traveling the globe reintroducing them to a new generation. And what we see is not merely an adjunct to the work of Tati, but a distinctive contribution to the world of film comedy. With his dapper, man-about-town persona Étaix is in the lineage of Max Linder, and his play with cinematic form and narrative clearly inspired the young Woody Allen with his “early, funny ones”.

A sense of liberation flows through the films of Étaix with fresh surreal approaches to narrative for comedy purposes. The contribution of co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière is significant here. A connection can even be made between Étaix and Carrière’s most famous collaborator, Buñuel, not so much in the surrealism, but in the way a narrative can be assembled from a series of blackout sketches. Étaix’s background in the music hall is evident, but while his films work as a string of inventive skits and sight gags they also possess a single narrative with rather profound, humane points to make about modern life.

The restoration project by the Technicolor and Groupama Gan foundations has been an extensive undertaking, overcoming the problems of a long legal battle, the technical work of restoring films damaged by the ravages of time and programming the international re-release of a complete retrospective of an auteur whose work has remained unseen by a whole generation of viewers. This year, the comic master who won an Oscar in 1963 may finally get his due.