Edinburgh
Filmhouse 26 November 6.15pm + intro Glasgow
Film Theatre 27 November 6.00pm + intro
We are delighted to present
the world premiere of a new factual
film on the life and work of Jacques Tati. This documentary
tells of Tati's rise and fall in the world of cinema. From his
origins as a mime on the Parisian music-hall stage to his Oscar
winning film Mon Oncle the film then tells how Tati lost it
all on his masterpiece Playtime. The film includes clips from
every Tati film and interviews with Tati experts and those who
worked with Tati. It culminates with clips of contemporary artists
paying tribute to Tati's work. Featured are: Sylvain Chomet,
Mike Mills, Frank Black, Professor David Bellos, Marie-France
Sielger, Stephane Goudet, Gamarjobat, Craig McKracken, Sparks,
Macha Makieff, Martine Beugnet and Tati himself.
Glasgow
Film Theatre 27 November 6.00pm
+ The Magnificent Tati Edinburgh Filmhouse
28 November 2.00pm/4.00pm London Ciné
Lumière (+ Playtime) 2 December 2.00pm
Watch
Your Left / Soigne ton gauche
(U)
A country bumpkin tries his luck at boxing and becomes an overnight
success.
1936. 11 mins School for Postmen
/ L'ecole des facteurs
(U)
A post office official instructs three postmen on how to deliver
the mail.
1947. 14 mins Evening Classes
/ Cours du soir
(U)
A comedy professor teaches class.
1967. 26 mins
Glasgow
Film Theatre 15 November 5.30pm London
Ciné Lumière 1 December 3.00pm Edinburgh
Filmhouse 20 December 6.00pm
Lane, in The New Yorker.
Godard said of Tati’s debut: “With him, French neorealism
was born. Jour de fête resembled Rome Open City in inspiration.”
Tati plays a village postman who sees a newsreel championing
the superefficient U.S. mail system. His attempts to modernise
his own delivery methods make for high velocity comedy. The
film was shot on now-extinct Thomson colour stock and released
first in black and white and then in an unsatisfactory hand
stencil-tinted version. Tati’s daughter turned to Raul
Ruiz’s cinematographer to help her in the seemingly impossible
task of restoring the film to its original colour version. Their
hard-won success, in which the colour scheme was reconstructed
shot by shot, means that we can now see Jour de fête as
Tati intended and which he could only dream of; he died without
ever seeing the project completed. La Fondation GG pour le Cinéma,
la Fondation Thomson pour le Patrimoine du Cinéma et
de la Télévision, Les Films de Mon Oncle and with
the support of la Cinémathèque française.
Cast
Jacques Tati, Paul Frankeur Director
Jacques Tati
1949. 90 mins <top>
M
HULOT'S HOLIDAY / LES
VACANCES DE MONSIEUR HULOT (U) Restored version
Warwick
Arts Centre 21 November 2.00pm Glasgow
Film Theatre 22 November 5.30pm London
Ciné Lumière 25 November 8.40pm Dundee
DCA 28 November 1.00pm Edinburgh
Filmhouse 29 November 6.00pm St
Andrews NPH 6 December 6.00pm
Is there a funnier
film than Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot? “The importance
of Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot should not be underestimated,”
André Bazin pronounced. “It is not only the most
important comic work in world cinema since the Marx Brothers
and W.C. Fields, it is an event in the history of sound film.”
A pivotal work of modernist cinema – such critics as Noël
Burch, Jean-André Fieschi and Kristin Thompson give it
pride of place in the vanguard – it has become a populist
classic of screen comedy. There have been many comedies about
the hell that holidays can be, but none as transcendentally
absurd as this. Monsieur Hulot, who was to become Tati’s
alter ego for the rest of his career, makes his first appearance
here. Hulot’s seaside vacation begins badly – the
choreographed confusion at the train station is priceless –
and gets worse. Hulot tilts from mishap to mishap in what one
critic called a state of “Zen-like serenity,” innocently
causing damage and distress wherever he goes. It took four years
for Tati to make Les vacances de M Hulot and it shows: its “symphony
of slapstick” is orchestrated with Swiss precision. This newly restored copy was first shown at this year’s
Cannes Film Festival. Restored by the Fondation Groupama
Gan pour le Cinéma
Cast
Jacques Tati, Nathalie Pascaud, Micheline Rolla, Valentine Camax,
Louis Perrault, André Dubois, Lucien Frégis, Raymond
Carl, René Lacourt, Marguerite Gérard Director
Jacques Tati
1954. 114 mins <top>
Dundee
DCA 21 November 1.00pm Glasgow
Film Theatre 26 November 6.00pm London
Ciné Lumière 4 December 3.00pm Edinburgh
Filmhouse 6 December 5.45pm
Delirious – Tati
at his wittiest. Winner of both the Academy
Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the
Jury Prize at Cannes, Mon Oncle was an enormous international
success. It is a brilliant satire about the impersonality, tedium,
mechanism and sterility of modern life. Tati plays the “uncle”
of the title, whose casual, shambling abode is contrasted with
that of Monsieur Arpel, a plastics manufacturer. The latter
is a white horror of hygienic perfection, with a pristine yard,
an arsenal of gadgets, and a fountain that reminds one not of
nature but of the factory that produced it. Bringing chaos into
this cold, soulless place with its forbidding gate and garden,
Tati delights his nephew with his aptitude for accidents. Tati
orchestrates some of his best gags – malfunctioning garage
doors, a sexually charged party, a very long car trying to manoeuvre
into a small parking space – to comment on the way modern
life traps humanity within its contrivances. Ironically, the
film’s visual compositions and soundtrack are precisely
(and technologically) designed to achieve Tati’s effects,
thereby indulging in what the director is criticising. We will
be presenting both the English version of Mon Oncle (not dubbed
– Tati made it in both languages) as well as the original.
MY UNCLE Restored by the Fondation
Groupama Gan pour le Cinéma
Cast
Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Zola, Adrienne Servantie, Lucien Frégis,
Betty Schneider, Jean-François Martial, Dominique Marie,
Yvonne Arnaud, Adelaide Danieli, Alain Bécourt, Régis
Fontenay, Claude Badolle, Max Martel Director
Jacques Tati
1958. 120 mins <top>
Macrobert
Stirling 18 November 7.30pm London Ciné Lumière (+shorts)
2 December 2.00pm Edinburgh Filmhouse 25 November 8.45pm Glasgow Film Theatre 29 November 1.00pm
A work of inexhaustible invention,
Playtime cannot be seen too often or praised too highly; it
is one of the glories of the cinema. M Hulot, affectless as
ever, wanders through a modernist maze of glass and steel full
of American tourists. He ends up at the opening of a chic new
night club, which, in what is perhaps Tati’s greatest
set piece, collapses, quite literally, into anarchy. This awe-inspiring
sequence took seven weeks to shoot. Decor and design predominate
in Tati’s densely composed images of modern Paris; the
frames abound with rigorously planned, simultaneous and sometimes
subliminal gags, and the soundtrack is a precisely orchestrated
musique concrète of clicking heels, whooshing chairs,
and cocktail music. Look at or listen to one thing and you’ll
miss another joke unfolding in another part of Playtime’s
teeming screen and soundtrack. Critic David Kehr said: “Playtime
is alone a lifetime’s achievement – a film that
liberates and revitalizes the act of looking at the world.”
Restored by the Fondation Groupama
Gan pour le Cinéma
Cast
Jaques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Rita Maiden, France Rumilly, France
Delahalle, Valérie Camille, Erika Dentzler, Nicole Ray,
Yvette Ducreaux, Jaqueline Leconte, Oliva Poli, Alice Field,
Sophie Wennek, Evy Cavallaro, Laure Paillette Director Jacques Tati
1967. 124 min <top>
TRAFIC
(U)
Edinburgh
Filmhouse 15 November 3.30pm Dundee
DCA 22 November 1.00pm Glasgow
Film Theatre 25 November 6.15pm London
Ciné Lumière + Tati Shorts 29 November
2.00pm
Trafic rivals Playtime as the most
beautifully designed and wildly funny of Tati’s films.
M Hulot is a car designer whose company sends his latest creation,
a camper car decked out with all manner of ridiculous gadgetry,
in a convoy from Paris to the Amsterdam Motor Show. Pursued
by the company’s brash, “swinging” American
publicist, Hulot heads north into an endless series of accidents
and misfortunes. A slow motion car crash is as funny and beautiful
as the traffic jam in Godard’s Weekend. Though Tati intends
the automobile to signify the impersonality of modern life,
he is obviously transfixed by the dream-like stream of traffic
on the superhighway or by a gleaming acre of auto chrome on
a parking lot.
Cast
Jacques Tati, Marcel Fraval, Honoré Bostel, Francois
Maisongrosse, Tony Knepper, Franco Ressel, Mario Zanuelli, Maria
Kimberley Director Jacques Tati
1971. 96 mins <top>
PARADE
(15)
London
Ciné Lumière 27 November 6.30pm Glasgow
Film Theatre 3 December 6.30pm Edinburgh
Filmhouse 13 December 6.15pm
Tati’s final feature is a
carnival of jugglers, yodellers, duff tricks and early 70s
fashion, playing children, cossack dancers, an oompah band and
blink-andyou’ll- miss-them visual jokes. As the audience
enters, a decorator backstage paints a flower in a lion's mouth,
and Tati cuts to the same flower on a woman's dress. Later,
a props man puts a ‘professional’ magician to shame,
with their own duel disrupted by a member of the audience who
turns a few neat tricks of his own. To the consternation of
his wife, a suited man jumps out of the audience to ride a bucking
mule, while a toddler with red and white stripy tights enters
a door to applause from inside. Tati is then shown wearing the
same colour socks as he performs his impressions sportives –
the mime acts with which he began his career. Offering gloriously
funny visual gags that flow beautifully from one act to another
– including several of his most famous pantomimes –
Parade is the perfect final stage for Tati’s comic genius.
Cast
Jacques Tati, Karl Kossmayer, Pierre Bramma, Michéle
Brabo, Pia Colombo, Johnny Lonn, Bertilo, Jan Swahn, Bertil
Berglund, Monica Sunnerberg Director
Jacques Tati
1973. 83 mins <top>
