With true auteurist fervor Truffaut once declared that “a film by Bresson or Tati is necessarily a work of genius a priori, simply because a single, absolute authority has been imposed from the opening to ‘The End.’’’i2 The similarities between the two directors are enlightening. Both made tentative starts on their film careers during the 1930s, worked on films during the war, and became prominent in the early 1950s. Both spent years on each film; Tati’s output, with only six features between 1949 and 1973, was even slimmer than Bresson’s. Both directors experimented with fragmented, elliptical narratives and unusual uses of sound.
Unlike Bresson, however, Tati made some very popular films. Since he was a performer as well as a director, he also became an international celebrity. From this perspective, Tati resembled Bunuel in pushing modernist tendencies toward accessible, mainstream tradition. At one level, Tati’s films are satiric commentaries on the rituals of modern life—vacations, work, housing, travel. Declaring himself an anarchist, he believed in freedom, eccentricity, and playfulness. His films lack strong plots: things simply happen, one after the other, and nothing much is ever at stake. The film accumulates tiny, even trivial events—like the microactions of Italian Neorealism (p. 364), only treated as gags.
Jour de (ete (“Holiday,” 1949) set the pattern for most of Tati’s subsequent works. A small carnival comes to a village, the townsfolk enjoy a day off, and the carnival leaves the next day. In the midst of the celebration, the local postman, Fran<;:ois, played by Tati, continues to deliver the mail and decides to adopt American methods of efficiency. The circumscribed time and place, the contrast between humdrum routine and bursts of zany amusement, the bumbling character who disrupts everyone else’s life, and the recognition that only children and eccentrics know the secret of fun—all these elements would reappear throughout Tati’s later work. The loose plot, built out of elaborately staged gags and motifs rather than a strong cause-and-effect chain, would become a Tati trademark.
Jour de fete also inaugurated Tati’s characteristic style. The comedy is not verbal (very little is said, and that often in a mutter or mumble) but visual and acoustic. A stiff-legged beanpole capable of outrageously mechanical gestures, Tati was one of the cinema’s great clowns. Like Keaton, he was also one of its most innovative directors, relying on long shots that spread elements across the frame or in depth. Changes in sound source or level shift our attention from one aspect of the shot to another. In Jour de fete, for example, a depth shot shows a farmer staring at Fran<;:ois on the road, thrashing his arms about (19.53). As Fran<;:ois moves on, we hear a buzzing noise and see the farmer begin flapping away at the invisible bee (19.54); then the buzzing fades, and, as the shot ends, Fran<;:ois begins flapping his arms again (19.55).
An even bigger success was Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances de M. Hulot, 1953). The scene is a seaside resort to which various middle-class city people repair; the action consumes the one week of their stay. The disruptive force is Mr. Hulot, who insists on making the most of his vacation. He shatters the routine meals,
19.56 A non-gag in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday: the painter suspects Hulot of accidentally releasing his boat into the sea; both stand awkwardly for several moments.
19.57 Two women greet one another in Mon Oncle: the winding pathway keeps them from walking straight toward each other. (Note the fish fountain, turned on only when a guest arrives.)
Arranged outings, and quiet evenings playing cards. His splenetic car disturbs the guests, his outrageously unprofessional tennis game defeats all comers, and his antics on the beach bring woe to bystanders. Tati’s performance captivated audiences around the world and was credited with single-handedly reviving the pantomime tradition of Chaplin and Keaton. Again, sound guides our eye and characterizes people and objects, from the percussive chugging of Hulot’s car to the musical thunk of the hotel restaurant’s door to the harsh ricochet of a ping-pong ball as it invades the hotel parlor. Just as im
Portant, Tati the director had composed a film with a firm structure that owes little to traditional plotting. By alternating strong visual gags with empty moments that invite the spectator to see ordinary life as comic, Mr. Hulofs Holiday points forward to the more extreme experiments of Play Time (19.56).
Back in Paris, Hulot launches a hilarious attack on modern work and leisure on Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958). The windows of a modernistic house seem to spy on passersby; plastic tubing extruded from a plant becomes a giant serpent. Again, Tati’s long shots show in-
19.58 A production still showing a portion of Tativille.
Dividuals at the mercy of the environment they have created (19.57). The result is a comic version of Antonioni’s portrayal of urban alienation.
The international success of Mon Onde, which won the Academy Award for best foreign film, encouraged Tati to undertake his most ambitious project. On the outskirts of Paris he built a false city, complete with paved roads, water and electricity, and traffic (19.58). He shot the film in 70mm, with five-track stereophonic sound.
The result was Play Time (1967), one of the most audacious films of the postwar era. Aware that audiences would watch for Hulot, Tati played down his presence. Knowing that viewers rely on close-ups and centered framings to guide their attention, Tati built the film almost completely out of long shots and scattered his gags to all corners of the frame (19.59). Sometimes, as in the lengthy sequence of the disintegration of the Royal Garden restaurant, he packs simultaneous gags into the frame, challenging the spectator to spot them all (19.60). Tati’s satire of tourism and urban routine encourages us to see all of life as play time.
Since Tati initially insisted that Play Time be shown in 70mm, it did not get wide distribution and quickly failed. Tati went into bankruptcy, and his career never recovered. To the end of his life, he hoped to establish one theater somewhere in the world that would show Play Time every day, forever.
He made two more films. In Traffic (1971), Hulot helps a young woman deliver a recreational vehicle to an Amsterdam auto show. Simpler than Play Time or Mr. Hulofs Holiday, Traffic satirizes car culture. Parade (1973), shot for Swedish television, is a pseudodocumentary celebration of the circus and its audience. As usual, Tati blurs the boundary between performance and the comedy of everyday life (19.61).
Before his death, Tati was planning another Hulot film, Confusion, in which his hero would work in television and be killed on camera. But the debts of Play Time haunted him, and in 1974 his films were auctioned off at an absurdly low price. Over the next two decades, however, rereleases of all his films demonstrated to new audiences that Tati had left behind a rich body of work that invites the spectator to see ordinary life as an endless comedy.
World History
