The return of a class clown

IT’S A COMEBACK worthy of its own film. The revered, Oscar-winning film-maker whose surreal, slapstick comedies have won him adoring fans on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly falls into obscurity, only to be rediscovered after a 20-year exile and applauded back into the spotlight.

The film-maker in question is Pierre Étaix, the pioneering clown and director of much-loved films such as Yoyoand Le Soupirant( The Suitor).

A long-running legal dispute over distribution rights has meant that, for the past two decades, Étaix’s films have been out of circulation, the old spools rotting slowly away. Cinemas couldn’t show them, shops couldn’t stock them. The man once lauded as the French Buster Keaton lived in limbo, earning a living by making television advertisements, while in his spare time working on film projects he thought would never come to fruition.

And now he is back. After a resolution of the legal dispute and a campaign that culminated in a petition of 50,000 signatures – among them those of Woody Allen, David Lynch, Charlotte Rampling and Jean-Luc Godard – being presented to the French culture minister, Étaix’s films have been painstakingly restored and re-released.

The man himself, brimming with energy and excitement at the age of 83, suddenly finds he is in heavy demand. His lovingly designed box-sets are on display in the shops, his voice can be heard on the radio, and a new generation is watching his films for the first time.

“It was very difficult,” Étaix says of the past 20 years. “I didn’t want to complain. I did the job I always wanted to do. But there were times of total despondence because when you spend 20 years unable to do your job, or working while knowing nothing will come of it, it’s difficult.”

Sitting in his home in northern Paris on a midweek morning, dressed in a bright red blazer with his hair combed back and his quick, inquisitive eyes darting here and there, Étaix is instantly recognisable as the lead character in many of his own films. He betrays no bitterness or rancour, and says the thrill of film-making is fully intact. “I’m still full of hope, full of a desire to do things,” he says.

After training as a graphic artist, Pierre Étaix established himself in the postwar Paris world of cabaret and music hall. A chance meeting with Jacques Tati in 1954 led to his recruitment by the director as a designer and gagman on the film Mon Oncle. "I worked with him for four years, and at the end of those four years, I knew cinema," he says.

It was not long before Étaix became a leading light of French comic cinema, a master of slapstick in the tradition of Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. He won an Oscar for best short in 1962 with Heureux Anniversaire, though he never made it to the ceremony because his producer brought a girl along instead. "Medals, awards – they don't really matter, do they?"

But Étaix’s first love, his training ground and the subject he returned to again and again, was the circus. “It’s impossible to explain,” he says of that great passion. “For me, the circus is the purest entertainment. It crosses all borders.” He remembers clearly the first time he saw a clown, when a circus came to his home town of Roanne in the early 1930s. “I was four-and-a-half. I’m incapable of articulating exactly what happened, but I still have the memory of something wonderful.

“The white face, the costume – it was something I’d never seen. At that time the circus would parade through the town with an orchestra on a wagon. The elephants, the horses moving through the streets. It was wonderful. And in the evening it was even more extraordinary, going in under the big top, and you couldn’t recognise the public square. You were in a magical place.”

Étaix is known for his use of sound as a comic tool, but his films are above all visual – a feature, he believes, that makes them more demanding of the audience than modern mainstream comedy. “I’ve always called on the viewer’s intelligence . . . I’m against imposing a definitive idea. It’s very easy to give the audience fixed ideas – he is good, he is bad. I give people keys. They can open whatever doors they like,” he says with a playful smile.

Age means nothing to Étaix. At 83, he is working on his next film and travels so much – his next stop is Cork – that he keeps his suitcase in the hall. He is fighting the same battles he remembers having with producers decades ago, resisting their attempts to impose star actors or lead him away from his instincts.

And thanks to his clown’s make-up, he can remain forever ageless on stage and screen. “Being a clown is part of you, part of your interior make-up. It’s not like being an electricity man, a function you take on.

“My goal in life was – and still is – to make people laugh. It’s frivolous, but then it’s very ambitious. Wanting to make people laugh is a crazy thing.”

Pierre Étaix will be the guest of honour at the Cork French Film Festival, which runs from March 4th to 11th and includes a complete retrospective of his films. corkfrenchfilmfestival.com

Étaix unique

* A trailer containing a succinct montage of his career: iti.ms/yK1iva

* A scene from his classic film Yoyo, featuring an extraordinary moment between elephant, boy and drunk. iti.ms/ygZVBu

* A surreal bed scene from Le Grand Amour iti.ms/yoKsgy