Dive headfirst into the fantastical worlds of the Louis de Funès Museum in Saint-Raphaël
For the thrill... and for the laughter! Louis de Funès has long fascinated people with his acting, his burlesque skills, his acting talent, his genius, and his humor... But few know that he also harbored a great fascination for fantasy and science fiction. It is this aspect of his personality that is being highlighted starting today in an exhibition at the museum called Fantastic Universes.
The museum, for the occasion, has borrowed some valuable pieces on this subject. "The Museum of Cinema and Miniatures in Lyon is offering us some creatures that the general public will quickly recognize (read below). As for the Museum of Gendarmerie and Cinema in Saint-Tropez, it has honored us with an exceptional loan of an alien arm from the film The Gendarme and the Extra-Terrestrials," said Nora Ferreira, director of the Raphaëlois museum. "Behind this arm, we are showing excerpts of everything fantastic in the world of Louis de Funès. Through this exhibition, we realize that in French cinema, from the 70s/80s onwards, we had aliens or extra-terrestrials who were finally nice!"
"This is in comparison to the 50s and 60s, especially in the United States, where the alien represented a metaphor for the communist threat and the nuclear peril," comments Laurent Silvestrini, film critic for the magazine L'écran fantastique*, whose expertise, particularly in writing the texts, was necessary for this exhibition. And so, as Nora Ferreira said, thanks to Louis de Funès, we began to see an evolution at the end of the 70s with more "gentle" extraterrestrials like in Cabbage Soup. Louis de Funès was fascinated by the new generation of the 70s like Steven Spielberg: he appreciated Jaws in 1975, then Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. Louis de Funès was fascinated by this young, up-and-coming director. And wanted to make his own version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: this initially resulted in The Gendarme and the Extra-Terrestrials in 1979. So, of course, the saucer is what it is, but it's its own reading of - and homage to - Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Furthermore, few people know this, but "Louis de Funès was also an admirer of German expressionist cinema. He often replayed one of his favorite films, Nosferatu the Vampire, which is one of the first fantasy films in history, in 1922."
In many of his films, Louis de Funès offers a personal vision of fantasy, thus marking generations of directors thereafter. The new exhibition invites the visitor on a journey that allows them to discover an often unsuspected facet of De Funès, through his rich filmography seen from a different perspective. Three universes, inside the museum, mark the route: first the Fantomas trilogy, with its futuristic gadgets, its very realistic masks and its secret submarine, echoing the secret agent films of the time, and halfway between anticipation and comedy.
The second universe invokes extraterrestrial life with poetry, nostalgia and burlesque - Cabbage Soup, The Gendarme and the Extraterrestrials as a nod to American science fiction of the 1950s.
And finally a third universe, with Hibernatus, where fantasy and comedy become one, where technology and comedy form a winning duo... A true Louis de Funès signature!
"He was interested in everything that was happening around him, he analyzed the developments of his time. We wanted to pay tribute to him in a different way with this new exhibition," Nora Ferreira and Laurent Silvestrini say in unison.
*Find out more about this topic on De Funès and the fantastic with a major report on the Fantomas series in the May-June 2025 edition of the magazine l'écran fantastique. Louis de Funès Museum, rue Jules-Barbier, opposite the SNCF train station, in Saint-Raphaël. One-year exhibition, from May 23, 2025 to May 31, 2026.
Telephone: 04.98.11.25.80 or website: www.museedefunes.fr
Prices: 7 euros for adults, 4 euros for groups, free for under 18s, students and job seekers.
Var-Matin
