JACQUES TATI(1907-1982) France.

Presented by Sounak Kar

Grandfather was a Russian Military general. Mother was partly Dutch, partly Italian. Tati was brought up in a thoroughly French

middle-class home in Paris and was simulated to a French identity.

Father had a good picture framing business. He was taken as an apprentice in his family

business but it never interested him.

Childhood and Family

After graduation his main preoccupation become

sports. He joined a Rugby team. He started entertaining his fellows by acting out

the actions of a rugby player. He became a mime and invented an act named

“sporting impressions”. Some them the famous ones included a fisherman,

a boxing match, a tennis match, a horse riding act. He joined the music hall as a mime actor.

Professional career

He started acting in short films none of which became very famous. His mime act was spotted by an important producer, who casted him

as a postman in a short film after the war in 1945. The film called “School for postman” became so successful that he

got the chance to write it into a full-length movie. “Jour de Fete” was the story of a quintessential French village fair

within which he tells the story of the postman As the originally hired director backed out he got to direct it himself.

Coming to films

Shot on small township of Saint-Sévère,

where he had taken refuge during the occupation, with actual people whom Tati had observed during his stay.

Introduced his key theme – overreliance of Western society on technology to solve their problems.

Great success all around the world. But he set himself up to make completely

different style of comedy.

Jour de Fete (1949)

Instead of continuing with the character of the postman, he invents

a new character – a dreamy, well meaning, innocent and clumsy Monsieur Hulot.

Takes the idea of comedy to a new territory of an almost ballet like sequences.

Makes the audience laugh not so much at the comedian but at the world.

Humor is observational. It’s not enforced upon the audience or upon the movie itself. Uses elements from everyday life present all around us.

Tries to as just as funny as Chaplin by being the opposite of Chaplin.

Monsieur Hulot’s holiday (1953)

No narrative. Rather a sketchbook logic recalling the highlights of a

summer vacation at a seaside, based on Tati’s own memories. Camera doesn’t stick to Hulot making him a buffoon alone in the

crowd. There are no close-ups of him. Uses frequent long shots of scenes with multiple characters to

focus audience attention at the comic nature of humanity, when interacting as a group.

Dialogues are least important. Uses natural and man-made sounds for comic effect.

Monsieur Hulot’s holiday (1953)

Goes further with unique styles developed in Holiday and fresh

visual gags. Designed his shots like paintings, where the audience could focus

on one character or a group or a gag happening, on any particular sound or the music all happening at the same time.

Instead of intercutting between shots to focus on the action he kept the shots wide using sound to focus on desired action. This was completely original.

No extraordinary man or situation for comedy. Portrays absurdities of everyday life in a French countryside and a rich neighborhood and interplay between them. Satire on bourgeois life and French perfectionism.

Mon Oncle (1958)

Tati’s masterpiece. The perfect film where he could do what he

really wanted to do with cinema. He wanted to use it as a celebration of the beauty and comedy of the world and not any individual.

Shot in 70mm, which Tati thought resembled the shape of the modern world. Used this huge widescreen, chosen for rich spectacles, to do something very simple and anti-spectacular, like making the spectator aware of the various little things occurring throughout the huge spaces.

He filmed it in "Tativille," an enormous set outside Paris that reproduced an airline terminal, city streets, high rise buildings, offices and a traffic circle.

Playtime (1967)

Instead of plot it has a cascade of incidents, instead of central characters it

has a cast of hundreds, instead of being a comedy it is a wondrous act of observation.

He believed it to be the only real star in his film. All other characters including Hulot just wanders through it.

No close-ups, reaction shots, over the shoulder shots so that all the character movements are visible.

Unfolds entirely in a public space defined by that set. Even the sequence of adjacent living room is shot entire from the streets.

The Royal Garden sequence, making up roughly half of the film, may be the most formidable example of mise-en-scène in the history of cinema.

Playtime (1967)

People walks in straight lines and turned in right angles. Only near the end

they loosen up in a restaurant as they set aside their assigned roles and learns to enjoy themselves after a series of opening night disasters.

Film starts with dull colors in the environment, people wearing mostly shared of grey. As they lose their normal social inhibitions, Tati intensifies the color. Late arrivals in the restaurant arrive in vibrant colors.

It directs us to look around at the world we live in, and at each other, and to see how funny that relationship is and how many brilliant possibilities we still have in a shopping-mall world that perpetually suggests otherwise. These can become a kind of comic ballet, one that we both observe and perform.

Playtime (1967)

“Tati’s film [is] the first in the history of cinema that must be seen not only

several different times, but from several different distances. It is probably the first really ‘open’ film. Will it remain the only one?” – Noel Bunch.

“…only man in movie history to get laugh out of a neon sign.” – Leonard Martin.

“Jacques Tati's ‘Playtime,’… is one of a kind, complete in itself, a species already extinct at the moment of its birth… It occupies no genre and does not create a new one.” – Roger Ebert.

“Never, perhaps, has a film placed so much confidence in the intelligence and activity of the spectator: the challenge was too great to find a commensurate response.” - Jean-André Fieschi.

Playtime (1967)

Had to word outside of France because in France he was bankrupt. He

collaborated with a Dutch filmmaker Bart Hanstraa for Trafic. The larger role played by Hulot in Trafic is a conscious regression,

undoubtedly dictated by commercial necessities. Parade was a film for the Swedish TV which captured the acts performed by

a circus in Stockholm. He himself was part of the acts performing his earlier mimes. He caught the audience of the circus themselves in their acts too.

It was a deceptively modest and boldly experimental last feature, Parade (1973), which carried the radical principle of equating spectators with performers even further, gently insisting that, as Tati liked to put it, “the comic effect belongs to everyone.”

Trafic (1971) and Parade (1974)

Changed cinema from the base level. Didn’t belong to any cultural group or

movement. A visionary who showed people ways at

looking and smiling at the world that came through his unique vision and skill of using the arts of sight, song, music, acting.

Left absolutely no legacy. Nobody could or actually did imitate him afterwards.

Jacques Tati

THANK YOU!