Jacques Tati

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Jacques Tati as Monsieur Hulot.
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Jacques Tati as Monsieur Hulot.

Jacques Tati (October 9, 1908 – November 5, 1982) was a noted French filmmaker. He was born Jacques Tatischeff, the son of Russian father Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff and Dutch mother Marcelle Claire Van Hoof, in Le Pecq, Yvelines, and died in Paris.

Originally a mime, in the late 1930s Tati recorded some of his early supporting cameos on film with some success and thus began his career as a filmmaker. His films have little audible dialogue, but instead are built around elaborate, tightly-choreographed visual gags and carefully integrated sound effects. In all but his very last film, Tati plays the lead character, who - with the exception of his first and last films - is the gauche and socially inept Monsieur Hulot. With his trademark raincoat, umbrella and pipe, Hulot is among the most memorable comic characters in cinema. There exist several recurrent themes in Tati's comedic work, most notably in Mon Oncle, Playtime, and Trafic . These include Western society's obsession with material goods, particularly American-style consumerism, the pressure cooker environment of modern society, the superficiality of relationships among France's various social classes, and the cold and often impractical nature of space-age technology and design.

Tati's first major feature, Jour de fête (Festival Day), tells the story of an inept rural village postman who interrupts his duties to inspect the traveling fair that has come to town. Influenced by too much wine and a documentary on the rapidity of the American postal service, he goes to hilarious lengths to speed his mail deliveries aboard his bicycle. Released in 1949, the film was shot in a new color process that turned out to be too difficult to process, and Jour de fête was subsequently released in black-and-white. The color version was discovered, restored, and released in the 1990s.

His second film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot's Holiday), was released in 1953. Les Vacances introduced the character of M. Hulot and follows his adventures in France during the mandatory August vacation at a beach resort, lampooning several hidebound elements of French political and social classes along the way. The film was widely praised by critics, and earned Tati an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay which was shared with Henri Marquet.

Tati's next film, Mon Oncle (My Uncle), was his first film to be released in color and perhaps his best-known work. The plot centers on M. Hulot's comedic, quixotic and childlike struggle with postwar France's mindless obsession with modernity and American-style consumerism. Mon Oncle quickly became an international success, and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958.

Playtime (1967), shot in 70mm, was Tati's most daring and most expensive work of his career; it took him nine years to complete and he was forced to borrow heavily from his own resources to complete the picture. For Playtime, Tati fabricated a set (dubbed 'Tativille') on the outskirts of Paris that emulated an entire modern city. In the film, Tati and a group of American tourists lose themselves in a futuristic glass-and-steel Paris, where only human nature and a few hints of an older France still emerge to breathe life into the city. Narratively, Playtime had even less of a plot than his earlier films, and Tati endeavored to make his characters, including Hulot, almost incidental to his portrayal of a modernist and robotic Paris.

While on the set of Playtime, Tati made a short film about his comedic and cinematic technique, Cours du Soir (1967). In the film, Jacques Tati gives a lesson in the art of comedy to a class of would-be actors.

Playtime was originally 155 minutes in length, but Tati soon released an edited version of 126 minutes, and this is the version that became a general theatre release in 1967. Later versions appeared in 35mm format. In 1979, a copy of the film was revised again to 108 minutes, and this re-edited version was released on VHS video in 1984. Though Playtime was a critical success (François Truffaut praised it as "a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently"), it was a massive and expensive commercial failure, eventually resulting in the filmmaker's bankruptcy.

After Playtime, Tati made two more films, with far more modest budgets. The first, Trafic (Traffic), was released in 1971. Trafic was the last Hulot film, and followed the vein of earlier works that lampooned modern society. In the film, Hulot is a bumbling automobile inventor travelling to an exhibition in a gadget-filled recreational vehicle. Despite its modest budget, Trafic was still very much a Tati film, carefully staged and choreographed in its scenes and effects. Tati's last completed film, Parade, a film produced for Swedish television, is a simple story of two children who visit a small circus. In 1978, Tati began filming a short documentary on an French (Corsican) soccer team, 'Forza Bastia', which he did not complete. His daughter later edited the remaining footage which was released in 2002.

Tati had plans for at least one more film. Confusion was a story about a futuristic city (Paris) where activity is centered around television, communication, advertising, and modern society's infatuation with visual imagery. Not intended as a comedy, in the original script an aging M. Hulot was slated to be accidentally killed on-air. While the script is still in existence, Confusion was never completed or filmed.

An animated film titled The Illusionist, based on an unproduced Tati script, is currently in production and expected to be released in 2009. Sylvain Chomet, also known for The Triplets of Belleville, is the director and the main character is expected to be an animated version of Tati himself. It is estimated to cost around £10 million and is being funded by Pathé Pictures. The Illusionist is a script Tati wrote in collaboration with famed screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière between Mon Oncle and Playtime.

Contents

[edit] Trivia

  1. Tati was voted the 46th greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
  2. In an interview, Rowan Atkinson noted that Tati's characters were a source of inspiration for the creation of the British Mr Bean.
  3. The animated film Les Triplettes de Belleville makes direct references to Jour de fête and Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot.
  4. From 19 February to 2 May 2004, the Architectural Museum of Munich held an exhibition "The City of Monsieur Hulot" in 2 big rooms, one of which had a small cinema sector where Tati's films were played. Some of Tati's original drawings for his sets, posters, a scale model of Villa Arpel, furniture of his design and several video shows were part of the exhibits.
  5. Tati was the subject of a Frank Black song called "The Jacques Tati".

[edit] Filmography

[edit] Director

[edit] Actor

  • Oscar, champion de tennis (1932)
  • On demande une brute (short film) (1934)
  • Gai dimanche (short film) (1935)
  • Soigne ton gauche (short film) (1936)
  • Retour à la terre (short film) (1938)
  • Sylvie et le fantôme(1945)
  • Le Diable au corps
  • L'École des facteurs (short film) (1947)
  • Jour de fête (1949)
  • Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1953)
  • Mon Oncle (1958)
  • Cours du soir (short film) (1967)
  • Playtime (1967)
  • Trafic (1971)
  • Obraz uz obraz (TV series) (1972)
  • Parade (1974)

[edit] Writer

  • The Illusionist (2009)

[edit] External links

[edit] Bibliography


Jacques Tati

Gai dimanche (1935) • School for Postmen (1947) • Jour de fête (1949) • Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) • Mon Oncle (1958) • Playtime (1967) • Trafic (1971) • Parade (1974)
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