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Annecy Classics: Peter Földes, a Boy with a Bright Future

Overview
Description
Films

For a quarter century, Peter Földes (1924-1977) – originally Hungarian, then British and later French by adoption – marked French and world animation history with his protean style.

Very much as with pop art, Foldes was able to convey the astonishing porosity among all forms of art in his works, refusing to be hemmed in by a specific style and thereby distinguishing himself from it. He developed a grammar which spoke in universal tropes and frequently pertinent messages. Similar to Émile Cohl, his incredible ease in drawing removed him to a higher plane from his contemporaries thanks to the draughtsmanship and soulfulness emerging from his works. Fun and emotional, they supplemented the era of so-called "serious" animated films aimed at adult audiences. Today we tend to overlook – in spite of an accomplished career admired by his peers wherein he was successively and simultaneously a painter, filmmaker, graphic artist and video producer – the immense abundance and diversity of his work right at the cusp of the avant-garde. At the end of the 60s, availability of new technologies enlarged the scope of his research in producing computer-generated images. These very techniques were those he espoused without sacrificing his line-stroke or imagination to them.

Today, his prolific work for television sends us back to our collective memories (sequences for Dim, Dam, Dom; programme credits; design of the first National Audiovisual Institute emblem) without forgetting his creation of our dear Annecy Festival’s striking and polymorphic logo.

"Short Cuts" Arte Court-circuit

As an opener to this Annecy Classics special programme, discover an animated short based on a classic film and made as part of "Short Cuts" from Arte’s Court-circuit: Short Cuts "Jean Renoir’s French Cancan", animated by Theodore Ushev.

Short cuts