Hollywood, Cinecittà, Bollywood… And Aveyron. Live, exactly. In this village of one thousand two hundred inhabitants, one of the most prolific directors in the world worked for a long time: Guy Brunet, now 78 years old. More than a filmmaker, a producer, an actor, a poster designer, a set designer, a casting director, a cinematographer… All without money, without network, without anything.
Let’s start from the beginning. Guy Brunet was born in [1945sonofanelectricianwhobecameaprojectionistandcinemamanagerHisbrothersellsicecreaminthefamilyroomshismotherrunstheticketofficeHedevelopedapassionfortheseventhartbegantodrawandwriteinsertedhimselfintoimaginaryfilmpostersplacinghimselfalongsideJohnWayneorGeneKellyAsanadulthewrotescreenplaysoneontheFrenchRevolutionanotheronNapoleonontheIslandofElba
In the middle of the years 1990, he moved into a workshop where he created a studio: Paravision, a contraction of “paradise” and “vision”. There, he created cardboard silhouettes of actors and actresses, the movie stars he had loved since childhood, all 1.38 meters high. He produced more than a thousand in total. Credits, small puppet theaters, cardboard actors, paper costumes that they wear according to their wishes, Taj Mahal sets…
“A unique corpus in the world”
All of his work forms “a unique body of work in the world, which crosses art and cinema, which reveals an unparalleled visual artist in his way of creating his own universe”, explains Christophe Boulanger, curator of the monographic exhibition dedicated to Guy Brunet, at the LaM – Lille Métropole Museum of modern art, contemporary art and outsider art, in Villeneuve-d’Ascq (North). And to clarify the links between the artist’s work and the prehistory of cinema, such as the magic lanterns of the 18th century.e century.
In the museum therefore parades the “filmography” of what connoisseurs compare to art brut, defined by Jean Dubuffet as the creation emanating from people without training or artistic culture. But Guy Brunet had the culture of cinema, “that of what he describes as the “golden age””, explains Christophe Boulanger. Or the films that precede the New Wave. It’s Cecil B’s. DeMille, Hollywood filmmaker of excess, to whom he often pays homage.
In the years 1980, Guy Brunet developed a passion for VHS, making his own editing of the films he recorded on television. He only likes happy endings and offers a new montage, as for The Wages of Fear, by Henri-Georges Clouzot (1953), from which he deleted the last scene, where the truck, driven by Yves Montand, falls into the ravine. He comments, in voice-over, on the extracts.
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