Remember those black and white flics from the 20s and 30s? Shivering grained images, fast and grotesque action, dramatic piano chords, a hero with little esprit and luck, who often happens to get beaten up? Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd where the pioneers of the silent genre, that was at the beginning of Hollywood. The times when a good but short idea was everything, no stupid dialogues had to be invented and nobody would complain, if the idea was not good for more than 2 minutes. What counted, where the laughters.
Main ingredients then: Insane stunts, all done by the actor, a violence without consequences except to the story line, a children – like – phantasy and no respect for authorities. Most certainly not the sensitive cinema of romance, no, these guys were all pranksters as is Rémi Gaillard. And propably he is the king of prank!
Well, there are many diffierence from Buster Keatons junior days to Rémi Gaillards public pranks. Besides being tied to the studio system, the Pioneers attempted to start free production enviroment that concentrated on the creative process rather than the marketing aspect of the movie industry. Chaplin created United Artists and was more or less successful. Now this french man called Rémi Gaillard is the living evidence you can amuse the folks with pranks and be completely free in the creative process too. With no distribution system at all except the Internet. What does it require to become the King of Pranks? What you need is a video cam, YouTube as a platform, a website for your advertising income and lots of ideas: Running through narrow supermarkt alleys dressed up as PACMAN, followed by monsters, beaten up by vivid golfers who find it not funny that their balls get eaten up by Pac Man. Or as an Astronaut, planting the flag on the course whereever he likes. As an arctic eplorer, who is surprised by the violence of icehockey players – Rémi Gaillard does it all, he invented a fierceful “Farce de Frappe”. He translates video games to reality, plays with his childish phantasy and evokes many memories of the old black and white shorts, that started to make people laugh when the pictures learned to move.
Gaillard gave himself a motto: “C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui” which you could translate “It really does not matter what you do, at least you do something to be somebody.” Whatever that could mean in this context, he is one of the webs best entertainers and has incredibly good ideas. That he can live from it and we don’t have to pay a cent to watch him maybe the biggest difference to the Hollywood early days of Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin. Almost certainly that would find him simply very funny. More on his his website: Nimportequi.com