Commissaire : Alain Kruger, journaliste et producteur radio, télévision et cinéma Avec le concours de Thibaut Bruttin Conseiller du commissaire : Serge Korber, réalisateur Scénographie à Paris : Designers Unit (David Lebreton / Emmanuel Labard)
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Photographies Stéphane Dabrowski - La Cinémathèque française
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Description
This is the first time that La Cinémathèque française has devoted an exhibition to an actor, a little man born to Spanish parents who has become the most popular of French comedians. Born Louis, Germain, David de Funès de Galarza, Louis de Funès will gradually impose himself during the second half of the XXth century, to become the singer-songwriter of characters in excess.
Passionate about jazz, Louis de Funès painfully earned his living during the war as a bar pianist. As an actor, the jazzman composes variations on the same theme. After a hundred appearances, a lot of work and some successes in black and white, his burlesque genius bursts into color in 1964. He who saw himself above all as a theater actor, plays with the cinema spectator as he did on stage. We can’t blame his characters for being liars, rascals, grumpy, grouchy, cowards, thieves, selfish, angry, paranoid, bilious, chauvinistic, contemptuous, obsequious … They suffer and reassure us ; de Funès, the worst of us.
His art is unique; he doesn’t play the same music as the comedians of the time. He doesn’t take his time, he accelerates it, makes him dizzy. He stretches his features like a rubber band. His game is supernatural. His tuning fork, still on the verge of fainting, packs his machine and his audience. He is both electric and atomic. Throughout a too short life, he perfects his emotions, his faces, his “expressions”, which he prefers to the word “grimace”. A contemporary of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, his elasticity and his energized dynamic make him a cartoon character in the eyes of the little ones.
His jerky gait, inherited from his silent heroes, scrolls at the speed of sound. He mimes, dances and jumps. First the gesture then the word. He is a score accelerator, it is undoubtedly this frenzied tempo that makes his playing timeless. Almost forty years after his death, he has never been so present. Silenced by a certain criticism, his successes continue to make children of all ages laugh. Louis de Funès is a National Treasure – his Japanese admirers would say Kakko Nintei.
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L’exposition revient sur la centaine de rôles incarnés par Louis de Funès, dont les succès sont régulièrement vus et revus en France et dans le monde, et qui est désormais célébré par cinq générations de spectateurs. C’est la première fois que la Cinémathèque française consacre l’une de ses expositions à un acteur.
L’exposition montre et décrypte les sources d’inspiration et les ressorts de la force comique de Louis de Funès, notamment à travers son génie burlesque de l’observation, qui l’a conduit au sommet du box-office à 50 ans. Louis de Funès incarne une histoire alternative de la France, que ses rôles au cinéma décrivent inexorablement : l’ascension d’un sans-grade de l’après-guerre vers le star system, du petit chef au chef d’orchestre ; le passage des années noires de l’Occupation au technicolor des Trente Glorieuses, des privations à la société de consommation et ses objets fétiches (de l’automobile à la « malbouffe »). Pendant les Trente Glorieuses, la courbe des entrées des films avec Louis de Funès recoupe celle de la croissance française.
Pluridisciplinaire, le parcours pose un regard thématique sur le comique de l’acteur, et s’affranchit d’un déroulé chronologique pour mieux creuser les thèmes propres à son univers grâce à un corpus varié de près de 300 œuvres : peintures, dessins et maquettes, documents, sculptures, costumes et, bien sûr, extraits de films.
L’exposition est accompagnée d’un catalogue et dispose également d’un parcours jeune public.
