NEW YORK — Pierre Etaix, a French director of seamlessly choreographed slapstick films, including “Happy Anniversary,’’ which won an Oscar for best live-action short subject in 1963, died Friday in Paris. He was 87.
The cause was complications of an intestinal infection, his wife, Odile, told Agence France-Presse.
Mr. Etaix (pronounced ay-TEX), an actor as well as a director, specialized in a deadpan visual comedy, animated by sight gags, funny sound effects, and fantasy sequences that harked back to the silent films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Max Linder as well as his own background as a circus performer.
He was an assistant to Jacques Tati on the 1958 film “Mon Oncle,’’ providing gags, designing sets, and illustrating the poster, before striking out on his own in 1961 with “La Rupture’’ (“The Break-up’’).
With a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere, who would later write “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’’ and other films for Luis Bunuel, it told the story of a boyfriend who tries to answer a rejection letter with one of his own but finds himself in an unequal battle with his pen, ink well, and desk.
Buoyed by the film’s success, Mr. Etaix teamed up again with Carriere on “Happy Anniversary’’ and several longer films, “The Suitor’’ (1963), “Yoyo’’ (1965), “As Long as You’ve Got Your Health’’ (1966), and “Le Grand Amour’’ (1969).
In the sweetly melancholy “Yoyo,’’ often considered his masterpiece, Mr. Etaix played the dual roles of a wealthy idler and his son, who grows up to become the celebrated clown Yoyo. “Le Grand Amour,’’ his first color film, included a dream sequence with a traveling bed that remains a touchstone of French comedy.
Although he fell out of favor in the 1970s, and sank into obscurity when legal obstacles made it impossible to show his films until 2009, he won the admiration of American directors Woody Allen, David Lynch, and Terry Gilliam. Jerry Lewis, whom the French saw as a kindred spirit, cast him in his film “The Day the Clown Cried,’’ which was never released.
On a petition to bring the films of Mr. Etaix back to the public, Lewis wrote: “Twice in my life, I understood what genius meant: the first time when I looked up the definition in a dictionary, and the second time when I met Pierre Etaix.’’
As a child, Pierre Etaix had become infatuated with the circus and with the films of the great Hollywood silent clowns.
“I loved the fact that all of these artists were coming from musical halls and vaudeville and the circus,’’ he said in 2011. “Their comedy was derived from these sources.’’
His ascendancy was brilliant but brief. “Land of Milk and Honey’’ (1971), an experimental documentary that satirized French consumerism through man-in-the-street interviews, alienated critics so profoundly that the film was pulled from theaters two weeks after its release.
Mr. Etaix, unable to find backing for his films, returned to his first love, the circus. He and his wife, Annie Fratellini, a circus clown who played his wife in “Le Grand Amour,’’ founded the National Circus School to replenish the diminishing ranks of French circus performers. She died in 1997.
“He is the last star of slapstick in Europe, if not the world,’’ director Alain Jomier told The Guardian in 2009. “In France there was Tati and then there was Etaix and now there are no more.’’
