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Pierre Etaix



A French comedy master whose films went unseen for decades as a result of legal tangles, director-actor Pierre Etaix is a treasure the cinematic world has rediscovered and taken up with relish. His work can be placed in the spectrum of classic physical comedy with that of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, but it also stands alone. These films, influenced by Etaix’s experiences as a circus acrobat and clown and by the silent film comedies he adored, are elegantly deadpan, but as an on-screen presence, Etaix radiates warmth. This collection includes all of his films, including five features, The Suitor (1962), Yoyo (1965), As Long as You’ve Got Your Health (1966), Le grand amour (1969), and Land of Milk and Honey (1971)—most of them collaborations with the great screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière—and three shorts, Rupture (1961), the Oscar-winning Happy Anniversary (1962), and Feeling Good (1966). Not one of these is anything less than a bracing and witty delight.

The Suitor

Pierre Etaix’s first feature introduces the droll humor and oddball charm of its unique writer-director-star. As a tribute to Buster Keaton, Etaix fashioned this lovable story of a privileged yet sheltered young man (played by Etaix himself, in a nearly silent performance) who, under pressure from his parents, sets out to find a young woman to marry—though he has a hard time tearing his mind away from the famous singer whose face decorates the walls of his bedroom.

Yoyo

This elaborately conceived and brilliantly mounted comedy is Pierre Etaix’s most beloved movie, as well as his personal favorite. Beginning as a clever homage to silent film, complete with intertitles, Yoyo blossoms into a poignant family saga (in which Etaix plays both a father and his grown son) and a celebration of the circus Etaix adored. Chock-full of nimble sight gags and ingenious sound effects, Yoyo is very sweet, a little bit melancholy, and wholly imaginative.

As Long as You've Got Your Health

In this endlessly diverting compendium of four short films, Pierre Etaix regards the 1960s from his askew but astute perspective. Each part is as technically impressive as it is riotous: a man attempts to read a novel about vampires beside his sleeping wife but cannot seem to separate reality from fiction; a simple afternoon at the movies becomes a consumer-culture assault; a jarringly noisy urban landscape keeps a city’s population on edge; and a day in the country means something different to a picnicking city couple, a hunter, and a farmer.

La grand amour

Despite having a loving and patient wife at home, a good-natured suit-and-tie man, played by writer-director Pierre Etaix, finds himself hopelessly attracted to his gorgeous new secretary in this gently satirical tale of temptation. From this simple, standard premise, Etaix weaves a constantly surprising web of complexly conceived jokes. Le grand amour is a cutting, nearly Buñuelian takedown of the bourgeoisie that somehow doesn’t have a mean bone in its body.

Land of Milk and Honey

Pierre Etaix’s most radical film, and perhaps unsurprisingly the one that effectively ended his career in cinema, Land of Milk and Honey is a fascinating investigative documentary about post–May ’68 French society. In it, Etaix trains his discerning eye on idle summer vacationers, but the film has bigger fish to fry, asking pertinent questions about the sexualization of culture, class and gender inequality, media and advertising, and even architecture.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:

- New digital restorations of all five features and three short films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray edition
- New interview with director Pierre Etaix
- Pierre Etaix, un destin animé (2010), a portrait of the life and work of the director by his wife, Odile Etaix
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic David Cairns

This set looks fantastic--the entire filmography of a director of note but as yet unfamiliar to me, and all of it on Blu-ray. More of this please.

It's encouraging and laudable that they apparently changed their original plans and brought this from Eclipse into the main line. Even better that they've set the retail price $10 below other 2-disc blu-rays like Yojimbo/Sanjuro and Complete Monterey Pop, as this will depend a bit more on blind-buys, and a slightly lower price can really help with that.

I'm guessing the delay- iirc, this was originally slated to come out last year- was due to hesitation between full spine number and Eclipse, and I'm glad it came down on this side, as wasting those features would be pointless. Having this on blu is a nice bonus, too.

Does anyone have any information on Feeling Good, one of the shorts? There doesn't seem to be an IMDB listing.

It's here

This short movie was one of the sequences of the feature film As Long As You're Healthy. In 1971, Pierre Étaix re-edited his film and extracted this sequence, which became this short movie. In 2010, he decides to release it together with his other restored films.

I am beyond thrilled with this release. Several months ago, I read an article about Etaix, was instantly intrigued, and was determined to learn more about his films. So Bravo Criterion!

How is all of this fitting on two discs without bitrate issues, by the way? Five features, three shorts, an interview, and a documentary?

mfunk9786 wrote:How is all of this fitting on two discs without bitrate issues, by the way? Five features, three shorts, an interview, and a documentary?

I was wondering the same thing, but the maths seems to work - just.

The first three features add up to 250 minutes, and with the intros that will give you about 265, say - which would be in the vicinity of what they fitted onto the Lonesome Blu, as I recall.

The remaining two features (163 minutes) plus the three shorts (45 mins?), the interview (20?) and the doc (which seems to have originally been a TV episode, so 30 mins?) comes to a similar total.

Ashirg wrote:It's here

This short movie was one of the sequences of the feature film As Long As You're Healthy. In 1971, Pierre Étaix re-edited his film and extracted this sequence, which became this short movie. In 2010, he decides to release it together with his other restored films.

Thank you. The Criterion site had the release date of 1966, which makes perfect sense given the source.

I recently saw La Grand Amour and Yoyo. I thought the first was one of the funniest films I've ever seen, a laugh out loud revelation. Yoyo isn't as funny, but has lots of layers. It's also a small classic.
Etaix is one of the hidden greats of comic cinema and this Criterion set is a real gift.

Mark

I love this announcement, can't wait for this set.

swo17 wrote:This set looks fantastic--the entire filmography of a director of note but as yet unfamiliar to me, and all of it on Blu-ray. More of this please.

Be aware, that claim is a bald fib on Criterion's part; I don't see L'Âge de Monsieur est avancé or Le Cauchemar de Méliès listed anywhere in the details, to cite just two other Étaix films.

(Now, having looked into the matter further, I suppose that Criterion might be able to carry their point on the technicality that the other Étaixs were produced for television, but even so I believe it's misleading to assert that this collection is 'complete'.)

I have only seen Happy Anniversary, a real masterpiece, so I am very forward to get this set. Etaix also had a small guest appearance in Fellini's The Clowns.

Cinéslob wrote:(Now, having looked into the matter further, I suppose that Criterion might be able to carry their point on the technicality that the other Étaixs were produced for television, but even so I believe it's misleading to assert that this collection is 'complete'.)

Does Criterion actually make that assertion?

Going from the above, they only seem to be saying that the collection contains all of his films, which I would certainly assume was referring to non-TV work unless explicitly stated otherwise - just as I'd assume that a cinema's "complete Hitchcock retrospective" wouldn't include the episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that he directed without clear confirmation.

Mea culpa for overstating Criterion's claim. As I said earlier, this director is completely new to me.

MichaelB wrote:

Cinéslob wrote:(Now, having looked into the matter further, I suppose that Criterion might be able to carry their point on the technicality that the other Étaixs were produced for television, but even so I believe it's misleading to assert that this collection is 'complete'.)

Does Criterion actually make that assertion?

Going from the above, they only seem to be saying that the collection contains all of his films, which I would certainly assume was referring to non-TV work unless explicitly stated otherwise - just as I'd assume that a cinema's "complete Hitchcock retrospective" wouldn't include the episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that he directed without clear confirmation.

Your counterexample of a Hitchcock retrospective is interesting. I, too, wouldn't automatically assume that his television work would be included in a 'complete' one, but I think that owes more to expectations I have about the current state of cinema exhibition (e.g. difficulty finding materials suitable for projection, subtitling logistics and so on*) than to any fundamental distinction I may choose to draw between cinematic and televisual films. Home video publishing operates in a very different context however, and so I thought — at first blush — that a DVD set of "all of [Étaix's] films" would include the television stuff.

*And even there I'd have varying expectations. For instance, if Hitchcock had directed a British television series rather than an American one, I would have expected most of his surviving works for the idiot box to have been given big screen outings during the BFI's recent (and wonderfully thorough) retrospective, given that body's pre-eminent access to UK TV heritage; but Hitchcock didn't, and so having only three of his seventeen episodes of Presents projected was more than satisfactory.

swo17 wrote:Mea culpa for overstating Criterion's claim. As I said earlier, this director is completely new to me.

Oh no, no; really, I'm the berk solely responsible for dragging this thread into the aridest pedantry, and all over the blurb of what appears to be the most crackerjack set Criterion has produced since Lonesome.

TCM (US) will show most of the films in the set on the night of Tuesday, April 16 (preceded by a full day of Chaplin features).

Matt wrote:TCM (US) will show most of the films in the set on the night of Tuesday, April 16 (preceded by a full day of Chaplin features).

8:00 PM "YO YO" (1965)

9:45 PM "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY" (1962)

10:00 PM "LE GRAND AMOUR" (1969)

11:45 PM "RUPTURE" (1961)

12:00 AM "AS LONG AS YOU'VE GOT YOUR HEALTH" (1966)

1:30 AM "THE SUITOR" (1963)

(All times Eastern)

DVD Beaver review.

There is mention of (necessary) digital work put into restoring the films. I guess what's not clear is whether Criterion is responsible for this, or if the digital tools used to restore these works were done separately, during the restoration which led to the theatrical run of these films. I'd assume it was the latter. Looking forward to checking this set out.

This is probably the Criterion release I am most looking forward to so far this year. What little I have seen of Étaix as a director over the years has been extremeley enjoyable, a very personal brand of gallic wit. Including in his documentary "Pays de Cocagne", which I remember as pointedly mordant. He has been accused by a few of peddling a safe and petit-bourgeois type of humour, so this set will come as a useful reassessment.

He is still active even in his 80s; when I was in Paris last October, there were posters advertising his participation (in his Yoyo character) in a circus show, scheduled to start the following month.

MichaelB wrote: they only seem to be saying that the collection contains all of his films, which I would certainly assume was referring to non-TV work unless explicitly stated otherwise -

The practice may vary from director to director. I think no one would spontaneously include Charbol's work for TV in the 70s when discussing his film work, but Renoir's two forays into television, "Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier" and "Le Petit Théâtre", get considered almost automatically as an integral part of his work as a filmmaker, especially the first one.

Florinaldo wrote:

MichaelB wrote: they only seem to be saying that the collection contains all of his films, which I would certainly assume was referring to non-TV work unless explicitly stated otherwise -

The practice may vary from director to director. I think no one would spontaneously include Charbol's work for TV in the 70s when discussing his film work, but Renoir's two forays into television, "Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier" and "Le Petit Théâtre", get considered almost automatically as an integral part of his work as a filmmaker, especially the first one.

But my point is that I wouldn't assume that a collection stretches to TV work without checking.

Just to be pedantic, the set also leaves out J'écris dans l'espace, an hour-long Omnimax feature, photographed by Henri Alekan no less. (Which I saw in 1989 at La Géode in Paris.)

Yo Yo is currently airing on TCM, but I assume it's not the new restoration, or not the Criterion disc at least. It doesn't seem to be anamorphic (black border around the whole image), nor HD. Comparing it with the DVD Beaver grabs, there definitely seems to be a more grey look on TCM than the slightly better contrast on the DVD. With that said, the picture quality is still fairly good, and I'm very eager for the set.

Drucker wrote:Yo Yo is currently airing on TCM, but I assume it's not the new restoration, or not the Criterion disc at least. It doesn't seem to be anamorphic (black border around the whole image), nor HD. Comparing it with the DVD Beaver grabs, there definitely seems to be a more grey look on TCM than the slightly better contrast on the DVD. With that said, the picture quality is still fairly good, and I'm very eager for the set.

TCM doesn't show anything in HD, it's all upscaled SD. The windowboxing is a byproduct of that (unlike anamorphic images, the black area created by the SD channel is actually part of the image, so that all has to be cut out when TCM artificially does the HD upscale - you see the same windowboxing on any faux-anamorphic DVD.) Any other discrepancies are due to the same upscaling process - heavy filtering.

These are certainly the same HD masters used for the Blu-ray (the subtitles are the HD font,) TCM just puts it through the jungle jim before it all pops out kind of tired and roughed up on your end.