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Jacques Tati (1908-1982)
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Jacques Tati is a man of contradictions: He claimed not to have read much of anything, but his films were nevertheless embraced by France's intellectual elite as vanguard Modernist works. He is praised in equal measure for reviving the silent comedy and revolutionizing the sound film. In his films he used state-of-the-art technology to critique a society being smothered by automation and gadgetry. Tati is perhaps best known as and inseparable from his iconic creation M. Hulot, who wanders silently through his four most famous features, attired in a rumpled trench coat and slouch hat, observing or (more often) inadvertently instigating comic catastrophes. Like Chaplin's Little Tramp, Hulot is baffled by technology and has bad luck with jobs. In Mon Oncle he manages to nearly destroy an entire factory on his first day of work, though in all fairness the factory, which seems to be engaged in making one infinitely long hose, isn't the most efficient operation to begin with. Infected with a clumsiness that marks his encounters with mechanical devices and people alike, Hulot endures these humiliations with a Buster Keaton-like stone face. Tati's films feature extraordinary visual and sound design.
His masterpiece, Playtime, takes place on a vast labyrinthine set (dubbed Tativille), where gags proliferate with such rapidity and in so many areas of the screen, that it is impossible to catch them all in one viewing. His soundtracks abandon the illusion of naturalism in favor of abstract collages of noises, voices and music that raise his gags to levels of transcendental absurdity. In Mr. Hulot's Holiday a tennis ball makes an audible popping sound as it bounces off the head of a young girl in the middle of curtsying. In Playtime, obnoxious American tourists thread their way through the film on a current of babbling voices and clacking heels. Due in no small part to this meticulousness, he was only able to make six features over the course of thirty years. Before taking up directing himself, Tati acted in a number of comedies by Claude Autant-Lara, Rene Clement and others. In Clement's Soigne ton gauche, Tati - drawing on a mime routine he performed in music halls - plays a gawky farmhand with dreams of becoming a champion boxer. L'ecole des facteurs, Tati's first directorial outing, is a sketch for Jour de Fete filled with comic charms of its own including Tati's distinctive version of the jitterbug. Anthony Lane said it best when he wrote in the New Yorker, "Everyone loves Jour de fete." Tati plays Francois, a bicycle-riding small-town mailman who, after seeing a newsreel extolling the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, tries to modernize his methods, with hilarious results. Grandly designed and fantastically inventive, Tati's masterpiece is a multi-layered symphony of sight and sound gags set in a hyper-modern Paris of endless, maze-like glass-and-steel office blocks. Jokes unfold in various parts of the frame simultaneously, and the soundtrack, a meticulously composed cacophony of footsteps, gibberish and lounge music, only adds to the absurdity. [Adapted from Cultural Services of the French Embassy ]
The Great Books: Jacques Tati
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Jacques Tati
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