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frenchculture.org (cinema - The Genius of Tati) Sergio Tofano (Sto) James Thurber Achille Campanile Totò Kurt Vonnegut Il mondo dei doppiatori Carol Burnett Jacovitti Federico Fellini Don Rickles Marty Feldman | ||||||
French director Jacques Tati (1908-1982), a master of film comedy. Although Tati was best known to film goers as the bumbling and bewildered on-screen character Hulot, behind the camera he was a perfectionistic and painstaking craftsman. He spent years on each production, and made only six feature films in his lifetime : Jour de Fête, Mr. Hulot's Holiday, Mon Oncle, Traffic, Playtime, and Parade. Each was a landmark in screen comedy. As a writer, director, and actor, Tati worked with an absolute creative control that reminded François Truffaut of another great French filmmaker, Robert Bresson. "A film by Bresson or Tati is necessarily a work of genius, a priori," wrote Truffaut, "because a single absolute authority has been imposed from the opening to 'The End.'" With his elaborately choreographed visual style and his inventive use of sound, Tati was indeed one of the most accomplished and original filmmakers of his time. Yet the roots of his comedy can be found in his early days as a cabaret performer in 1930's Paris. His popular mime routines, which drew on his passionate love of sports, formed the basis of Tati's comic persona, a gawky yet graceful man adrift in the modern world. In Mr. Hulot's Holiday, Tati introduced his on-screen alter ego, Monsieur Hulot. With his tall frame cocked at an angle and a sheepish expression on his face, Hulot bounces from one catastrophe to the next in his crumpled raincoat, casually unaware of the havoc he is leaving behind. Film critic Michel Chion described the character as "indefinable, somewhere between worry, stupidity, and polite neutrality." André Bazin christened him "the scatter-brained angel." As clumsy as he might be, Hulot's movements are carried out with agility and precision worthy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. His emphasis on visual humor and slapstick hark back to the tradition of silent screen comedy. In Tati's films, dialogue is practically nonexistent, treated as little more than background noise. The sight gags are precisely punctuated by inventive and incongruous sound effects. An absolute perfectionist, he painstakingly rehearsed his gestures - while making them look improvised - and taught his actors to perform "Tati-style," so that all of the performances reflect his unique style of movement. Tati's meticulous work ethic and the exorbitant amount of time he spent refining every detail of his films resulted in a career plagued by production delays and financial problems. Yet while he completed just six feature films during a span of three decades, he created an oeuvre that is accessible and timeless. A consummate observer of the world around him, Tati's deceptively "plotless" films transformed the ordinary into the surreal, and introduced a new way of looking at the modern world. | |||||||
