July 31 - August 11

ALL NEW 35MM PRINTS!

“Tati and Bresson are the twin giants of French cinema.” – Marguerite Duras

“Jacques Tati has a feeling for comedy because he has a feeling for strangeness.” – Jean-Luc Godard

“Comedy is the summit of logic.” – Jacques Tati

A summer vacation in itself: a complete retrospective of one of the greatest artists in all cinema, in new 35mm prints imported from France.

One of cinema’s most celebrated comedians and influential directors, Jacques Tati (1907 – 1982) began as an actor in short films by such leading figures of Thirties French cinema as René Clément and Claude Autant-Lara. (Colette, reviewing Tati’s music-hall performance in 1936, immediately recognized his singularity: “He has the suggestive power of all great artists.”) It took a decade for Tati to become autonomous, working as actor, writer and director on one short and six features before his death in 1982. Tati’s first feature, Jour de fête (1949), quickly established his reputation for deadpan virtuosity and technical experimentation, despite being released without many of the visual innovations he had planned for it. (The main one, the use of colour, was restored in the print we present in this series.)

Four years later, with his greatest international success, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, a film which, according to many critics, ushered in the modern cinema, Tati introduced the character who was to be central to the rest of his career. Tati placed at the centre of the film’s meticulously choreographed and cruelly observed chaos a bourgeois man in a mackintosh, the figure who was to become Tati’s eternal alter ego: Monsieur Hulot. Advancing like a starched ostrich – several critics have come to grief trying to describe Hulot’s gawky walk – tilting into one mishap after another, the absurdly angular Hulot was characterized most memorably by André Bazin as a “scatter-brained angel.” Transposed from the beach to the city, the hapless Hulot became in Tati’s subsequent films a bumbling signifier of individuality, introducing what Bazin called “a disorder of tenderness and liberty” into the sterile, standardized postwar world of urban Europe.

Our retrospective chronicles the career of the “scatter-brained angel” who, with a small body of work,