Jacques Tati

Abstract

Jacques Tati (b. 1907–d. 1982) is generally regarded as one of the greatest postwar European filmmakers. In his films, Tati crafted a distinctive visual and aural style, a dedramatized narrative form, and an innovative type of comedian comedy that was indebted to, but departed significantly from, the comedy of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and other film comedians. Due to the creative control he was able to exert over his films, and to their uniqueness, Tati is widely considered an exemplary auteur. Tati started his career performing comic impersonations on the music-hall stage in France in the 1930s while also starring in several short comedy films. After World War II, he directed his first film, a comic short titled L’école des facteurs (1947), which he also wrote and starred in. The film was both a critical and commercial success, winning the Max Linder Prize, and Tati used its story as the basis of his first feature-length film, Jour de fête (1949), which won the prize for Best Original Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival. Tati shot the film in both black-and-white and color, but due to technical problems only the black-and-white version was released. As with all his subsequent features, Tati wrote, starred in, and directed Jour de fête, in which he plays François, an accident-prone postman in a rural French village. While a traveling fair is visiting, François tries and fails to adopt the modern American postal methods he has learned about in a documentary film shown at the fair, and Tati would go on to address the theme of the postwar modernization of France in all but his last feature film. In his second feature, the black-and-white Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Tati introduced his comic character Monsieur Hulot, who has trouble adapting to the modern environments and lifestyles of postwar France. Tati would star as Hulot in his next three feature films, all in color: Mon Oncle (1958), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1959 and which concerns Hulot’s relationship with his sister’s family, the Arpels; Play Time (1967), which, while today considered Tati’s masterpiece, was a commercial failure that led to Tati’s bankruptcy and is about Hulot’s interaction with a group of American tourists over one night in Paris; and Trafic (1971), in which Hulot works as a designer for a car company. Tati’s final feature-length film, Parade (1974), which was made for Swedish television, captures an ostensibly live performance by Tati and a troupe of circus entertainers in which Tati revisits the sporting impressions and other live comic acts that originally made him famous in the 1930s.