Jacques Tati


Jacques Tati was a French mime, filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter. Throughout his long career, he worked as a comic actor, writer, and director. In a poll conducted by Entertainment Weekly of the Greatest Movie Directors, Tati was voted the 46th greatest of all time. With only six feature-length films to his credit as director, he directed fewer films than any other director on this list of 50.
Tati's Playtime ranked 43rd in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made.
As David Bellos puts it, "Tati, from l'Ecole des facteurs to Playtime, is the epitome of what an auteur is supposed to be: the controlling mind behind a vision of the world on film".

Family origins

Jacques Tati was of Russian, Dutch, and Italian ancestry. His father, George Emmanuel Tatischeff, born in 1875 in Paris, was the son of Dmitry Tatishchev, General of the Imperial Russian Army and military attaché to the Russian Embassy in Paris. The Tatischeffs were a Russian noble family of patrilineal Rurikid descent. Whilst stationed in Paris Dmitri Tatischeff married a French woman, Rose Anathalie Alinquant.
Under suspicious circumstances Dmitri Tatischeff died from injuries sustained in a horse-riding accident shortly after the birth of George Emmanuel. As a child George Emmanuel experienced turbulent times, such as being forcibly removed from France and taken to Russia to live. In 1883 his mother brought him back to France where they settled on the estate of Le Pecq, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye on the outskirts of Paris. In 1903, Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff married the Dutch-Italian Marcelle Claire van Hoof. Together they had two children, Natalie and Jacques. Claire's Dutch father, a friend of van Gogh, whose clients included Toulouse-Lautrec, was the owner of a prestigious picture-framing company near the Place Vendôme in Paris, and he brought Georges-Emmanuel into the family business. Subsequently, Georges-Emmanuel became the director of the company Cadres Van Hoof, and the Tatischeff family enjoyed a relatively high standard of living.

Early life

Jacques Tatischeff appears to have been an indifferent student, yet excelled in the sports of tennis and horse riding. He left school in 1923 at the age of 16 to take up an apprenticeship in the family business, where he was trained as a picture framer by his grandfather. Between 1927 and 1928 he completed his military national service at Saint-Germain-en-Laye with the Cavalry's 16th Regiment of Dragoons. Upon graduating the military he took on an apprenticeship in London where he was first introduced to the sport of rugby. Returning to Paris, he joined the semi-professional rugby team Racing Club de France, whose captain was Alfred Sauvy and whose supporters included Tristan Bernard. It was at the Racing Club de France that Jacques Tatischeff first discovered his comic talents, entertaining his teammates during intervals with hilarious impersonations of their sporting endeavours. He also first met Jacques Broido, and they would become lifelong friends.
Between 1931 and 1932 the global economic crisis reached France at the same time he left both the Racing Club de France and, to his family's disapproval, his apprenticeship at Cadres Van Hoof. Giving up a relatively comfortable middle-class lifestyle for one of a struggling performing artist during this difficult economic time, he developed a collection of highly physical mimes that would become his Impressions Sportives. Each year from 1931 to 1934 he would participate in an amateur show organised by Alfred Sauvy.

Career

Early work

Although he had likely played music hall engagements before, his act was first mentioned in 1935, when he performed at the gala for the newspaper Le Journal to celebrate the French victory in the competition to set the transatlantic crossing record from Normandy. Among the honourable spectators was the influential writer Colette. Tati's act also caught the attention of Max Trebor, who offered him an engagement at the Theatre-Michel, where he quickly became the star act. After his success there, Tati tried to make it in London, playing a short season at the Finsbury Park Empire in March 1936. Upon his return to Paris in the same year, he was immediately hired as top billing at the ABC Théâtre alongside the singer Marie Dubas, where he would work uninterrupted until the outbreak of the Second World War. It was for Tati's performances of his now finely tuned Impressions Sportives at the ABC that the previously impressed Colette wrote,
"From now on no celebration, no artistic or acrobatic spectacle can do without this amazing performer, who has invented something quite his own...His act is partly ballet and partly sport, partly satire and partly a charade. He has devised a way of being both the player, the ball and the tennis racquet, of being simultaneously the football and the goalkeeper, the boxer and his opponent, the bicycle and the cyclist. Without any props, he conjures up his accessories and his partners. He has suggestive powers of all great artists. How gratifying it was to see the audience's warm reaction! Tati's success says a lot about the sophistication of the allegedly "uncouth" public, about its taste for novelty and its appreciation of style. Jacques Tati, the horse and rider conjured, will show all of Paris the living image of that legendary creature, the centaur."

During the 1930s he also performed at the Scala in Berlin between 1937 and 1938, and began to experiment with film acting in the following shorts:
In September 1939 Tati was conscripted back into his 16th Regiment of Dragoons which was then incorporated into the 3rd Division Legere de Cavalerie. He saw action in the Battle of Sedan, in May 1940, when the German Army marched through the Ardennes into northern France. The 3rd DLC retreated from Meuse to Mussidan in the Dordogne where the division was demobilised after the Armistice was declared on 22 June 1940.
Returning to Paris, Tati resumed his civilian profession as a cabaret performer, finding employment at Léon Volterra's Lido de Paris, where he performed his Sporting Impressions from 1940 to 1942.
Considered as a possible substitute for Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis, he played the ghost in Sylvie and the Ghost and also appeared as The Devil in the same film. Here he met Fred Orain, studio director of St. Maurice and the Victorine in Nice.

Jacques Tati, director

In early 1946 Jacques Tati and Fred Orain founded the production company Cady-Films, which would produce Tati's first three films.
With the exception of his first and last films, Tati played the gauche and socially inept lead character, Monsieur Hulot. With his trademark raincoat, umbrella and pipe, Hulot is among the most memorable comic characters in cinema. Several themes recur in Tati's work, most notably in Mon Oncle, Play Time and Trafic. They include Western society's obsession with material goods, particularly American-style consumerism, the pressure-cooker environment of modern society, the superficiality of relationships among France's various social classes, and the cold and often impractical nature of space-age technology and design.

"L'École des facteurs" ("The School for Postmen")

was first approached to direct "L'École des facteurs", but as he was preoccupied directing La Bataille du rail, directing duties fell to Tati, who would also star in this short comedy of rural life. Encouragingly, L'École des facteurs was enthusiastically well received upon release, winning the Max Linder Prize for film comedy in 1947.

''Jour de fête (The Big Day)''

Tati's first major feature, Jour de fête, is about an inept rural village postman who interrupts his duties to inspect the traveling fair that has come to town. Influenced by too much wine and a documentary on the rapidity of the American postal service, he goes to hilarious lengths to speed his mail deliveries aboard his bicycle. Tati filmed it in 1947 in the village of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre where he had found refuge during the war. Due to the reluctance of French distributors, Jour de fête was first successfully released in London in March 1949 before obtaining a French release on 4 July 1949, where it became a great public success, receiving the 1950 Le Grand prix du cinéma français. The film was intended to be the first French feature film shot in colour; Tati simultaneously shot the film in black and white as an insurance policy. The newly developed Thomson colour system proved impractical, as it could not deliver colour prints. Jour de fête was therefore released only in black and white. Unlike his later films, it has many scenes with dialogue, and offers a droll, affectionate view of life in rural France. The colour version was restored by his younger daughter, film editor and director Sophie Tatischeff, and released in 1995. The film won the Prize for Best Original Script at the Venice Film Festival.

''Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot's Holiday)''

Tati's second film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, was released in 1953. Les Vacances introduced the character of Mr. Hulot and follows his adventures in France during the mandatory August vacation at a beach resort, lampooning several hidebound elements of French political and social classes. It was shot almost entirely in the tiny west-coast seaside village of Saint-Marc-sur-Mer in the Loire Atlantique region. The hotel in which Mr. Hulot stays is still there, and a statue memorialising the director has been erected on the beach. Tati had fallen in love with the coast while staying in nearby Port Charlotte with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lemoine, before the war, and resolved to return one day to make a film there. The film was widely praised by critics, and earned Tati an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, which was shared with Henri Marquet. Production of the movie would also see the reintroduction of Jacques Lagrange into Tati's life, beginning a lifelong working partnership with the painter, who would become his set designer. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot remains one of the best-loved French films of that period. The film's comic influence has extended well beyond France and can be found as recently as 2007 in the Rowan Atkinson comic vehicle Mr. Bean's Holiday.
André Bazin, founder of the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, wrote in his 1957 essay, "Fifteen Years of French Cinema", that,
"Tati could easily have made lots of money with sequels featuring his comic character of the little rural mailman. He chose instead to wait for four years, and, after much reflection, he revised his formula completely. The result this time was an extraordinary masterpiece about which one can say, I think, that it is the most radical innovation in comic cinema since the Marx Brothers: I am referring, of course, to Les Vacances de M. Hulot."

Various problems would delay the release of Tati's follow-up to his international hit. In 1955 he suffered a serious car accident that physically impaired his left hand. Then a dispute with Fred Orain ensued and Tati broke away from Cady Films to create his own production company, Spectra Films, in 1956.

''Mon Oncle (My Uncle)''

Tati's next film, 1958's Mon Oncle, was his first film to be released in colour. The plot centers on Mr. Hulot's comedic, quixotic and childlike struggle with postwar France's obsession with modernity and American-style consumerism, entwined with the relationship he has with his nine-year-old nephew Gérard. Mon Oncle quickly became an international success, and won that year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a Special Prize at Cannes, as well as the New York Film Critics Award. In Place de la Pelouse stands a bronze statue of Tati as Monsieur Hulot talking to a boy, in a pose echoing the movie's poster designed by Pierre Étaix.
On receiving his Oscar, Tati was offered any treat that the Academy could bestow on him. To their surprise, Tati simply requested the opportunity to visit Stan Laurel, Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton at their nursing homes. Keaton reportedly said that Tati's work with sound had carried on the true tradition of silent cinema.
As guest artistic director at AFI FEST 2010, David Lynch selected Tati's Mon Oncle alongside Hour of the Wolf, Lolita, Rear Window and Sunset Boulevard to be screened in his sidebar program, explaining that,
"I picked these particular films because they are the ones that have inspired me most. I think each is a masterpiece."

Of Tati, Lynch would add in a conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum, "You know, I feel like in a way he's a kindred soul... That guy is so creative, it's unbelievable. I think he's one of the all-time greats."

''Playtime''

Considered by many his masterpiece, Playtime, shot in 70mm, was to be the most ambitious yet risky and expensive work of Tati's career. "After the success of Mon Oncle in 1958, Jacques Tati had become fed up with Monsieur Hulot, his signature comic creation. With international renown came a growing dissatisfaction with straightforward scenarios centered around one lovable, recognizable figure. So he slowly inched his way toward a new kind of film, a supremely democratic film that would be about "everybody". It took nine years to make, and he had to borrow heavily from his own resources to complete the picture. "At the time of its making, Playtime was the most expensive film in French history." "'Play Time' is the big leap, the big screen. I'm putting myself on the line. Either it comes off or it doesn't. There's no safety net." On the outskirts of Paris, Tati famously built an entire glass and steel mini-city for the film, which took years to build and left him mired in debt.
In the film, Hulot and a group of American tourists lose themselves in the futuristic glass and steel of commercially globalised modern Parisian suburbs, where only human nature and a few reflective views of the old city of Paris, itself, still emerge to breathe life into the sterile new metropolis. Play Time had even less of a plot than his earlier films, and Tati endeavored to make his characters, including Hulot, almost incidental to his portrayal of a modernist and robotic Paris. Play Time was originally 155 minutes in length, but Tati soon released an edited version of 126 minutes, and this is the version that became a general theatre release in 1967. Later versions appeared in 35mm format. In 1979, a copy of the film was revised again to 108 minutes, and this re-edited version was released on VHS video in 1984. Though Play Time was a critical success, it was a massive and expensive commercial failure, eventually resulting in Tati's bankruptcy. "Tati had approached everybody from Darryl F Zanuck to the prime minister Georges Pompidou in a bid to get the movie completed. His personal overdrafts began to mount, and long before 'Play Time'was finished," Bellos notes, "Tati was in substantial debt to the least forgiving of all creditors, the Collectors of Taxes." When he failed to pay off his loans, his films were impounded by the banks". Tati was forced to sell the family house of Saint-Germain shortly after the death of his mother, Claire Van Hoof, and move back into Paris. Spectra Films was then placed into administration, concluding in the liquidation of the company in 1974, with an auction of all movie rights held by the company for little more than 120,000 francs.
In 1969, with reduced means, Jacques Tati created a new production company, CEPEC, to oversee his opportunities in movie and TV production.

Spin-offs of ''Play Time''

While on the set of Play Time, Tati made a short film about his comedic and cinematic technique, Cours du soir, in which Tati gives a lesson in the art of comedy to a class of would-be actors.
In 1971 Tati "Suffered the indignity of having to make an advert for Lloyds Bank in England", in which he depicted a dehumanized bank of the future, with money dispensed by a computerized counter. "The message of the advert was that however modern Lloyds are, technology isn't everything and you'll always be able to speak to a "friendly member of staff or understanding manager" in their branches".

Reception

In August 2012 the British Film Institute, polled 846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors to find "The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time" and Play Time was voted 42nd in the list In the corresponding "Directors Poll" by the BFI, Playtime was awarded the accolade of being seen as the 37th greatest film of all time by his fellow directors.
Steven Spielberg has said he was paying a "very slight homage" to Play Time in his 2004 film The Terminal, adding, "I thought of two directors when I made Terminal. I thought this was a tribute to Frank Capra and his honest sentiment, and it was a tribute to Jacques Tati and the way he allowed his scenes to go on and on and on. The character he played in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle was all about resourcefulness and using what's around him to make us laugh".

''Trafic (Traffic)''

The Dutch-funded Trafic, although originally designed to be a TV movie, received a theater release in 1971 and placed Monsieur Hulot back at the centre of the action. It was the last Hulot film, and followed the vein of earlier works that lampooned modern society. In the film, Hulot is a bumbling automobile inventor traveling to an exhibition in a gadget-filled recreational vehicle. Despite its modest budget, Trafic was still very much a Tati film, carefully staged and choreographed in its scenes and effects.

''Parade''

Tati's last completed film, Parade, a film produced for Swedish television in 1973, is more or less a filmed circus performance featuring Tati's mime acts and other performers.

''Forza Bastia''

In 1978, Tati began filming a short documentary on Corsican football team SC Bastia playing the UEFA Cup Final, "Forza Bastia", which he did not complete. His younger daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, later edited the remaining footage, which was released in 2002 after her own death from lung cancer in 2001.

Unmade films

''Confusion''

Before his death, Tati had plans for at least one more film. Confusion, a planned collaboration with pop duo Sparks, was a story about a futuristic city where activity is centred around television, communication, advertising, and modern society's infatuation with visual imagery.
In the original script an aging Mr. Hulot was slated to be accidentally killed on-air. Ron Mael and Russell Mael would have played two American TV studio employees brought to a rural French TV company to help them out with some American technical expertise and input into how TV is really done. While the script still exists, Confusion was never filmed. What would have been its title track, "Confusion", appears on Sparks' 1976 Big Beat album, with the internal sleeve of its 2006 re-mastered CD featuring a letter announcing the pending collaboration, as well as a photo of the Mael brothers in conversation with Tati.

Film Tati No. 4, ''The Illusionist''

Catalogued in the CNC archives under the title 'Film Tati Nº 4', written in the late 1950s, the treatment was to have been the follow-up to Tati's internationally successful Mon Oncle. It tells the bittersweet tale of a modestly talented magician – referred to only as the Illusionist – who, during a tour of decaying music halls in Eastern Europe, protectively takes an impoverished young woman under his wing.
The semi-autobiographical script that Tati wrote in 1956 was released internationally as an animated film, The Illusionist, in 2010. Directed by Sylvain Chomet, known for The Triplets of Belleville, the main character is an animated caricature of Tati himself.
Controversy dogged the release of The Illusionist, with The Guardian reporting:
In 2000, the screenplay was handed over to Chomet by Tati's daughter, Sophie, two years before her death. Now, however, the family of Tati's illegitimate and estranged eldest child, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who lives in the north-east of England, are calling for the French director to give her credit as the true inspiration for the film. The script of L'illusionniste, they say, was Tati's response to the shame of having abandoned his first child and it remains the only public recognition of her existence. They accuse Chomet of attempting to airbrush out their painful family legacy again.

Tati's former colleagues at the Lido de Paris were appalled at his caddish behaviour and shunned him. As a result, he moved first to Berlin then to the village of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, which later inspired his hugely successful film, Jour de Fête.

Personal life

At the Lido de Paris he met and fell in love with the young Austrian/Czech dancer Herta Schiel, who had fled Vienna with her sister Molly at the time of the Anschluss. In the summer of 1942 Herta gave birth to their daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel. Due to pressure from his sister Nathalie, Tati refused to recognise the child and was forced by Volterra to depart from the Lido at the end of the 1942 season. In 1943, after a short engagement at the ABC, where Édith Piaf was headlining, Tati left Paris under a cloud, with his friend Henri Marquet, and they settled in the Village of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre. While residing there they completed the script for L'École des facteurs that would later provide material for his first feature, Jour de fête.
Herta Schiel would remain in Paris throughout the war, where she would make acquaintance with the physician Jacques Weil when he was called upon to treat her sister Molly for the then-incurable tuberculosis. Through Weil, second in command of the Juggler network of the SOE F Section networks, both sisters were recruited into the French Resistance.
In 1944, Tati returned to Paris and, after a brief courtship, married Micheline Winter.
On 23 October 1946 Tati's second child was born, Sophie Catherine Tatischeff.
1949 was the year of the birth of Tati's son, Pierre-François Tatischeff, also known as Pierre Tati. Both Pierre and Sophie would go on to work in the French film industry in various capacities, beginning in the early 1970s. Notably, they both worked on Jean-Pierre Melville's last film, Un flic.

Death

Weakened by serious health problems, Tati died on 5 November 1982, of a pulmonary embolism, leaving a final scenario called Confusion that he had completed with Jacques Lagrange.
In Paris Match, Philippe Labro reported the death of Jacques Tati under the heading,
"Adieu Monsieur Hulot. On le pleure mort, il aurait fallu l'aider vivant !"

Legacy

During the 1980s, concerned that their father's legacy would be permanently lost, Pierre and Sophie Tatischeff tracked the rights to their father's oeuvre to a bank in Switzerland. The bank, unable to trace the owner who had made the deposit, eventually returned the rights to Pierre and Sophie as heirs to their father's estate.
In 1995 after a year of meticulous work, Sophie with the aid of film technician Francois Ede was able for the first time to release a colour print of Jour de fête as Tati had originally intended.
Having lost her brother Pierre to a traffic accident and having herself been diagnosed terminally ill, Sophie Tatischeff took the initiative to set up Les Films de Mon Oncle in 2001 to preserve, restore, and circulate the work of Jacques Tati. Enrolling the service of Jérôme Deschamps, the artistic and cultural mission of Les Films de Mon Oncle is to allow audiences as well as researchers to discover the work of Tati the filmmaker, his archives, and to ensure its influence around the world.
The restoration of PlayTime began in 1998 when Sophie Tatischeff made the acquaintance of Jean-Rene Failot, technical director of the Gulliver Arane, the only remaining large-format film laboratory in Europe. Because of difficulties acquiring appropriate funding, the restored version of PlayTime was not presented until 2002 at the 55th Cannes Film Festival, eight months after the death of Sophie Tatischeff. In 2004, Les Films de Mon Oncle completed the restoration of My Uncle, the English version of Mon Oncle. This was followed by demanding editorial work for the DVDs of these films including original bonuses and a double CD titled Tati Sonorama! with the complete collection of film scores and soundtrack clips.
In 2009 the partner of Deschamps, Macha Makeïeff, designed the exhibition "Jacques Tati, deux temps, trois mouvements" at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, for which she is co-curator along with :fr:Stéphane Goudet|Stephane Goudet, and installed the full-scale mythical Villa Arpel, the set of Mon Oncle created by Jacques Tati and his friend :fr:Jacques Lagrange |Jacques Lagrange, at the 104.
In 2014 Les Films de Mon Oncle formed a partnership with StudioCanal, entitled Vivendi, who now oversee international distribution of the oeuvre of Jacques Tati, having released digitally restored versions of all his short and long films as boxsets in both DVD and Blu-Ray.
Rowan Atkinson cited Tati as an inspiration for the physical comedy approach of his internationally renowned character Mr Bean, claiming, when asked about what influenced him, "I think it was particularly a French comedian called Jacques Tati. I loved his movies, and you know, "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" I remember seeing when I was 17 -- that was a major inspiration. He opened a window to a world that I'd never looked out on before, and I thought, "God, that's interesting," how a comic situation can be developed as purely visual and yet it's not under-cranked, it's not speeded-up, Benny Hill comedy -- it's more deliberate; it takes its time. And I enjoyed that".
On an interview at "The 11", independent animation director Bill Plympton labeled Tati as a major influence on his work. According to Plympton "his jokes are very visual, there is not a lot of verbal interplay and talking, which I like. He's such a great character. are surreal, they are very dry, its not slapstick where you trip on a rake and fall on the ground, its very subtle humor, very sensitive humor, and very ironic humor. I love the irony in his works. He's a very good example of one of my influences."

Filmography

Awards