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French director Jean-Pierre Mocky died at the age of 86. Martin BUREAU / AFP

Director Jean-Pierre Mocky died at the age of 86. For the civil status, he had 90, his Polish Jewish father falsified the identity papers of his son, the aging of a few years so that he can take the boat alone, go to Algeria and not to be arrested by the police during the Second World War. Legendary outspoken artist, author of a prolific and uneven work, he has directed more than 60 feature films, grinding comedies or thrillers, dozens of TV movies. He also started a whole generation of actors.

An anarchist is the word that comes up most often to describe the man and the artist. Jean-Pierre Mocky liked to say that he was not from any club or chapel. Actor, screenwriter, and producer, he wanted to control the entire production process of his films with a predilection for popular comic cinema.

On film and television sets, his legendary jokes earned him a reputation as a troublemaker. Inventive, unclassifiable, he has embodied a form of popular comic cinema, and has enjoyed success and marginality.

Mocky intends to act as a young actor at a very young age, but only succeeds in linking a multitude of supporting roles such as an appearance in 1942 at the age of nine in Marcel Carné's "Les visiteurs du soir", shot in part at the Victorine studio in Paris. Nice, his hometown.

After the Second World War, he could have become a young first, but only a multitude of supporting roles, in the shadow of the stars of the time Jean Gabin or Fernandel. To give himself one last chance, he produced his first film The Head against the Walls in 1958 and took the lead role. The film will not be a success, Jean-Pierre Mocky then insists on the realization. The following year his film "The Dragueurs" with Charles Aznavour and Jacques Charrier works well.

His works bear the label of black humor. He sketches the manners of the time, where the absurdities of the political system. He denounces the television that makes stupid in The big laundry , the corruption in Is there a Frenchman in the room? or sports fanaticism in A mort l'arbitrator! .

From the 1990s, the public is no longer at the rendezvous, but this hard worker sometimes tinkers up to three films a year with the means on board. Films not widely distributed Jean-Pierre Mocky, an indefatigable seducer, had given up counting his offspring. " I have 17 known children ," he admitted in a memoir book published in 2016.

Jean-Pierre Mocky (1933-2019)
Epic shooting of La Candide Madame Duff
The cowboys of Dick Rivers in the fleet.
The Zenitude of Alexandra Stewart.
The burnout of Edmond Richard, his faithful assistant.
The last "Engine!" of #Mocky is CULT

📺 The umbrella of Cherbourg (2000) pic.twitter.com/PxhUrHBPwg

📼 VHS Collector 📼 (@CollectorVhs) August 8, 2019

The commercial failures that punctuated his work of director have never curbed his appetite, confirmed his son Stanislas Nordey, director of the National Theater of Strasbourg. " He worked to the end. Two or three days ago he
was still aware and he was talking about his next project he was to shoot with (Gerard) Depardieu, (Isabelle) Huppert and Laurent Lafitte, "he said on BFM TV. "My father was out of the limelight, out of the system, he loved to produce his films to have total freedom ," he added.

The Minister of Culture, Franck Riester, in a tweet paid tribute to the director by highlighting " a style, banter, friendships, rants and especially cinema, his cinema: unique, unclassifiable, provocative
and poetic ".

Jean-Pierre Mocky it was a style, a banter, friendships, jokes and especially cinema, his cinema: unique, unclassifiable, provocative and poetic. His freedom of tone and his vision of the world will be missed. I think of his family and his friends. pic.twitter.com/850wvzRrM3

Franck Riester (@franckriester) August 8, 2019

" His films spared nothing and nobody, and tirelessly denounced the tricks and excesses of society, " wrote the former Minister of Culture Jack Lang in a statement on his Twitter account. " His filmography was in his image: caustic, nonconformist, far from clichés, " added Jack Lang in his tribute.

Find my statement following the disappearance of Jean-Pierre Mocky # mocky #Cinema pic.twitter.com/BYJNqJhzjN

Jack Lang (@jack_lang) August 8, 2019