On the Inevitable Triumph of Clowning and Circus

[post 425]

Dario Fo

It seems that the world we know is being torn asunder. I speak not of Donald Trump and the wreckage and foul taste of his campaign, though it's in some ways related. I'm thinking of all the wonderful clown sages we've just lost —first Dimitri, and then in the past two days, both Dario Fo and Pierre Etaix. (Which reminds me of U.S. presidents #2 and #3, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, staying friends and pen pals in their later years, and then dying on the same day.)

These losses were inevitable, but more stinging in a time when the media is suddenly obsessed with sightings of so-called "clowns" frightening people, as if these idiots were the real deal. Dressing up as an astronaut wouldn't get me on the space shuttle, but a costume, make-up, and fright wig somehow make me a clown.

The craze started here in the United States, spread to England, and is apparently headed for the rest of Europe. It is not only damaging the image of clown performers, but costing them gigs as well.

Pierre Etaix

Just as the media has allowed Trump to drastically lower the level of discourse, they have allowed these masqueraders to be taken seriously. Once again, real clowns have to defend their art and answer the same stupid questions, which are  on a par with "when did you stop beating your wife?" And that's if they can find anyone to interview them. Part of me wants to write an Op Ed piece for the newspapers, patiently explaining that these are "Halloween clowns," people dressing up as clowns with an exaggerated, macabre look designed to scare people, and have nothing to do with the noble and quite loving tradition of clowning.

Dimitri

But I haven't bothered to write this, and won't. The media is the media, and they will take this and run with it until it runs its course. Which it will. It's a fad, and even its shallow-minded perpetrators will soon grow tired of it. The good news is that true clowns, who value and delight in the tradition of Dimitri, Fo, and Etaix, will honor these grand fools by continuing to do their good work tomorrow, next year, and centuries from now.

Here's an à propos discovery I'd like to share with you. As some of you may know, I am working on a revised and expanded version of my book, Clowns. I'm not updating it, which is why I think of it as Clowns: Volume 1, but but but I know a lot more than I did forty years ago, when it was first published (Nov. 1, 1976!), so some sections are being significantly improved. One of them is the very beginning of the book, which starts with the clowning traditions of the native American cultures of the U.S. southwest, especially the Hopi peoples. What I am emphasizing more this time around is that the clown is a central part of the Hopi creation stories; the clown is there from the very beginning, is part of the fabric of life.

For the Hopi, in the beginning was The Emergence, and it was the clowns who led humans from the underworld to a higher level of existence. It was the clowns because they were the ones who could cross borders and teach lessons. And this is not just some myth gathering dust in the archives; rather, versions of it are re-enacted time and again in countless Pueblo ceremonies. Which is why this wonderful sculpture, The Emergence (1989), by Hopi artist Roxanne Swentzell, will be the first illustration in the new edition of my book.

But that's not the discovery, this is:

This Mimbres bowl, whose subject shows a clear kinship with Hopi koshare, is from the same southwest region and dates all the way back to between 1000 and 1250 A.D. I know what you're saying! "It's been a thousand years and they couldn't even afford a new costume?" Point well taken, but that is how we know this stuff has been going on forever! My point is that what we should be talking about when we are talking about clowns is an elemental life force, and a very positive one. When pundits trash politics as a "circus" and politicians as "clowns," my only response is, "ah, if only they could rise to that high level..."

And here are some more reasons to remain positive. Those performance traditions that we group under such labels as clown, circus, vaudeville, physical comedy, etc. —and which are repeatedly pronounced dead— are actually becoming a more widespread part of our culture. Clown training and performance is everywhere, with hundreds of times more practitioners than half a century ago. Clowns are in circuses and hospitals; in the theatre, in the street, and in refugee camps. Circus training is no longer just a family tradition. There are professional schools everywhere, especially in France and Australia. Circus education that's not just for those with career goals is now contributing to positive youth development throughout the world. Social circuses —yes, I'm thinking of you, Circus Harmony— are doing amazing things to bring people and cultures together. There may be no formal vaudeville circuit, but countless individuals have embraced the variety arts as a means of self-expression, of sharing what they do best and what they love... and the staggering variety is a wonder to behold.

Likewise impressive are all the self-taught enthusiasts who do it for fun and only occasionally for profit. Think of all the slackliners executing incredible tricks between two trees. Or all the excellent jugglers who juggle because they love juggling. All the subway acrobats doing amazing hat moves with baseball caps. All the bartenders learning flair juggling to impress their customers. All the trick cyclists and parkour practitioners.... Clown and circus have indeed arrived, they just take different shapes and forms.

And this just today, which gave me a chuckle: a NY Times article on a new craze for bottle flipping, which is flipping a bottle so it lands upright on its own. (Depressingly, the last line in the article quotes the mother of an avid bottle flipper saying, well, at least he's not dressing up as a scary clown —as if these were somehow either-or choices.)

Here's the short video they share, but you can find more on YouTube.

And why do I chuckle? Because in 1973, as an NYU grad student and TDR Assistant Editor, I co-edited a special popular entertainments edition of The Drama Review, and had to fight to use this Diane L. Goodman photo on the cover. We had seen this guy at a carnival in Ypsilanti, Michigan earlier that year. I knew what he was doing with that bottle, but my TDR colleagues didn't think it was clear enough. Maybe they were right... or maybe I was just 43 years ahead of my time!

So my conclusion is: Don't panic! Try to take the long-range view. This crap shall pass (so to speak) and the good shall endure. Meanwhile, here's my recent tribute to Dimitri, and a tribute to Pierre Etaix that I wrote back in 2010. I subsequently got to meet Etaix in Paris and he was a very sweet man. Such an honor. And in 1990, I was likewise honored to attend rehearsals at the Comédie Française for Dario Fo's production of two Molière plays. I wrote an article about it for Yale Theater, which I will share with you in a future post.

To be continued... so keep on doing what you're doing!

Pierre Etaix is at the Film Forum... and Jim Moore is There!

[post 296]

And I wasn't. After a few years of following the re-emergence of Pierre Etaix, my plans of seeing him live were derailed by a Friday night bike repair class. Priorities, priorities. (Yes, we were actually working on derailleurs.) Luckily, intrepid blogger / photographer / videographer Jim Moore was playing Superman to my Clark Kent and covering the event for his required-reading blog, vaudevisuals.com. Here's the video he shot.


Pierre Etaix - Excerpt from Q & A at FIlm Forum, NYC from Jim Moore on Vimeo.

The collaborator M. Etaix praises so effusively is screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who also worked with Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, and Peter Brook.

Thanks again to Jim! You can read the whole post here.

See all of my Pierre Etaix posts here.

Pierre Etaix Update

[post 102]

We last left Pierre Etaix (post 99) with the happy news of the legal triumph that restored his rights to his own films, paving the way for their reappearance in film festivals and, ultimately, their DVD debut.  Now that I'm back on the case, I thought I should try to find out how much of that has actually come to pass since my May 19th post. Here's the scoop:
• A restored version of Etaix's Le Grand Amour was shown at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
• Restoration of the entire Etaix ouevre was completed this July by the Technicolor Foundation and the Groupama Gan Foundation.  Click here for details.
• At least four of his films are being screened this week at the Cinémathèque Québécois in Montreal. Click here for an article from the Montreal Gazette.
• A September DVD release of the collected works, Intégral Pierre Etaix, was said to be forthcoming from Carlotta, but their web site was only promoting live screenings and video on demand, and the VOD was only available in France
• So I wrote Carlotta and this morning heard back from them that it is Arte, not Carlotta, that is releasing the entire collection — and it's due out next week!  Click here to link to Arte's Etaix page. As of today, they are not yet taking orders, but the release date is set for November 2nd.  So, yes, I will get my order in and try to post a review to your favorite physical comedy blog as soon as I can work my way through the nine hours (!) of material.

Meanwhile, here are a few tidbits for you:
• A new article by Frank Wren on the re-emergence of Etaix, with some interesting connections to Chinese cinema.
• There's now an Etaix Facebook page. Search for Intégrale PIERRE ÉTAIX.
• And here's a podcast of an interview (in French) with Etaix.  Just click here to go the podcast.



All's well that ends well!

Pierre Etaix's short film "Happy Anniversary"

[post 100]

Don't quote me, but it's a small world after all.

One day after posting my In Search of Pierre Etaix piece, I was at Jeff Seal's "Dead Herring" Williamsburgh loft, attending a fundraiser (image, right) for Jeff's own quite exciting silent film comedy project, A Day's Messing. The star attraction was Ben Model, the deservedly celebrated silent film accompanist, playing live piano to a nifty 1912 short, new to me, Robinet Cycliste, and to Chaplin's The Rink (1916) and Keaton's Neighbors (1920). (In my next life, I want to play piano like Ben does.)

While we waited for the sun to go down over the Williamsburgh Bridge, I had a chance to chat with Ben, and I was of course telling him the latest news on Etaix. It turns out that Ben had seen a 16mm copy of Etaix's short Happy Anniversary for sale and snatched it up. He has since digitized it and generously uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is, in two parts:






You can visit Ben's web site here and his blog here.

Postscript (pun intended):
So....... congratulations to me (he said modestly) on reaching post 100 on this blog. If nothing else, it justifies labeling my posts 023, 024, etc.; in fact, that served as inspiration to reach 100. Along the way, I sometimes wondered what post 100 would be, hoping it would somehow prove brilliant and marvelously repersentative of the blog. Forget the brilliant part, but I very much like that this one spans work from 1912, 1916, 1920, 1965, and 2010 — all linked by Ben's piano chops. Good enough!

Live from Paris: In Search of Pierre Etaix

[post 099]

The year was 1973 and I was a student at Ringling's Clown College where, as part of the training, dean Bill Ballantine screened comedy films. Yes, this was the Dark Ages, still several years before the first VHS tapes and a full two decades before DVDs. I fondly remember sitting with the likes of Penn Jillette, Michael Davis, and Mike Bongar, devouring the works of W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and other classics. One delightful oddity that caught my attention was a modern-day silent film comedy, Yoyo (1965), directed by and starring the French renaissance man, Pierre Etaix. Although Jacques Tati — another French master of the modern silent film — was to complete his last feature film the next year (Parade, 1974), neither he nor Etaix were exactly household names in the United States.

Fast-forward to 2010, a mere 37 years later, and through correspondence with writer Frank Bren — more on whom later — I learned that Etaix was alive and well and on the comeback trail. Now a young 81, he had recently mounted and starred in a stage production in Bordeaux — Miousik Papillon — that he hoped to bring to Paris, and was involved in an intense legal and public relations battle to regain rights to his films, which he had sold to a company that then decided not to release them. That's right, nearly four decades later and still no theatrical releases, no VHS tapes, no DVDs. [You can read a London Guardian article about this long battle by clicking here.]

Clearly something had to be done. A web publicity campaign was launched, petitions circulated, donations solicited. Major film artists lent their support. Here's a clever promo video (in French) in which Etaix does some sleight-of-hand with five coins that disappear just like his movies did. Ultimately all he and co-creator Jean-Claude Carrière can do is pray to St. Anthony of Padua.



Hmm... since I was going to be in Paris for two weeks, perhaps I could connect with the Etaix campaign, maybe even with the old master himself, at least for an interview. In Search of Pierre Etaix. I had a mission! It was almost like being a real journalist.

So I signed the petition. I even made a donation. And I wrote to the friend of Etaix who was running the campaign. And no one answered. Being a crack investigative reporter, I took the next step. I wrote again, and I waited. I drank some Bordeaux, munched on my pain au levain and roquefort, and when that didn't work, I showed great determination, consuming yet more wine, bread and cheese. And meanwhile waited some more. And then I had to leave Paris. Bummère, as they say along the banks of the Seine.

I thought this was the end of the story, but back in New York just a few days later I was greeted by a barrage of late-breaking Etaix news. There had been a victory in the film rights battle! Not only would the movies be released this summer, but Le Grand Amour was to be screened May 19th at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Here's the Cannes press release:

The Cannes Classics programming of Le Grand Amour by Pierre Etaix is a major event. It was only recently, after a long legal battle, that the director succeeded in recovering the rights to his own films. Eight films by Pierre Etaix have now been restored and prepared for re-release. In Competition at Cannes in 1969, Le Grand Amour, which was the first colour film by Jacques Tati’s collaborator and assistant director, has been selected to open this special retrospective. A comic and poetic film, where Pierre (played by Pierre Etaix), though happily married, falls in love with his pretty young secretary and starts dreaming, Le Grand Amour will be screened this evening in the presence of the director.

So even if my personal Etaix quest was a failure, here he is about to be rediscovered by the wider world, and at least I can help spread the word. To prime the pump, here's some stuff you might want to know about this creative clown genius:
• He won an Academy Award in 1963 for his short, Heureux anniversaire.
• His writing partner was and is the prolific and talented Jean-Claude Carrière, who won much acclaim for his work with film director Luis Bunuel and stage director Peter Brook.
• He worked as an illustrator and created designs and gags for Jacques Tati, serving as an assistant director on Mon Oncle.
• He made five features between 1962 and 1971: The Suitor (1962), Yoyo (1964), So Long as You're Healthy (1966), The Great Love (1969), and Land of Milk and Honey (1971).
• He was cast by Jerry Lewis in his unreleased film The Day the Clown Cried. Lewis said of Etaix: "Twice in my life I understood what genius was. The first time was looking at the definition in the dictionary. The second was encountering Pierre Etaix."
• He returned to cabaret and circus performing in the the 70s and was married to the celebrated French circus clown Annie Fratellini, grand-daughter of the legendary Paul Fratellini; Annie played Etaix's wife in Le Grand Amour and in the circus was the auguste to his whiteface clown.
• Together they founded the first French national circus school, l’Ecole Nationale du Cirque Annie Fratellini, which pioneered the growth of circus as an art form in France and the emergence of "nouveau cirque."

But all of this is just an introduction to the following excellent 2008 retrospective on Etaix's career by the aforementioned Australian writer, Frank Bren. This is a "work in progress" from Mr. Bren's forthcoming book, which currently has the working title, ETAIX — adventures in cinema. It is reprinted here from Film Ink magazine with the generous permission of Film Ink and Mr. Bren.
Frank Bren: Pierre Etaix—France's Forgotten Comic Genius

I'll try to keep you posted on the latest developments and get a hold of any Etaix book or DVD set if and when. Meanwhile, a few links:
Etaix's new music-hall show
Films of Pierre Etaix web site
Etaix video clips
Etaix on Wikipedia
Etaix on IMDB
Film Ink magazine