Jacques Tati
Jacques Tati was a French mime, filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. In an Entertainment Weekly poll of the Greatest Movie Directors he was voted 46th, though he had directed only six feature-length films.
Tati is perhaps best known for his portrayal of the character Monsieur Hulot, featured in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Mon Oncle, Playtime and Trafic. Playtime ranked 23rd in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made.
As David Bellos puts it, "Tati, from 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, Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff, was born in Paris, the son of Dmitry Tatischeff, 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, Dmitry Tatischeff married a French woman, Rose Anathalie Alinquant; Russian sources indicate that Alinquant was a circus performer and that the couple were never actually married.Dmitry Tatischeff died under suspicious circumstances from injuries sustained in a horse-riding accident, shortly after the birth of Georges-Emmanuel. As a child, Georges-Emmanuel experienced turbulent times, such as being forcibly removed from France and taken to live in Russia. 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 Vincent van Gogh, was the owner of a prestigious picture-framing company near the Place Vendôme in Paris whose clients included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 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 was born on 9 October 1907 in Le Pecq. He seems to have been an indifferent student, but excelled in tennis and horse-riding. He left school in 1923, at the age of 16, and his grandfather trained him as a picture framer in the family business. Between 1927 and 1928, he completed his national military service at Saint-Germain-en-Laye with the Cavalry's 16th Regiment of Dragoons. On leaving the military, he took on an apprenticeship in London, where he was first introduced to rugby. Returning to Paris, he joined the semi-professional rugby team Racing Club de France, captained by Alfred Sauvy, and whose supporters included Tristan Bernard. It was there that he first discovered his comic talents, entertaining his teammates during intervals with impersonations of their sporting endeavours. He also first met Jacques Broido, with whom he became lifelong friends.The global economic crisis reached France in 1931–32. Tati 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 to be a struggling performing artist during hard economic times, he developed a collection of highly physical mime routines that would become his Impressions Sportives. Each year from 1931 to 1934, he participated 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, celebrating the French victory in setting 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 Mitty Goldin's 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."
From 1937 to 1938, he performed at the in Berlin.
During the 1930s, he began to experiment with film, acting in the following shorts:
- Oscar, champion de tennis. Directed by Jack Forrester; written by and starring Jacques Tati.
- On demande une brute. Directed by Charles Barrois; featuring Jacques Tati as "Roger" and Enrico Sprocani as "le clown Rhum ".
- Gai dimanche. Directed by Jacques Berr; written by and starring Jacques Tati, and featuring Enrico Sprocani.
- Soigne ton gauche. Directed by René Clément; starring Jacques Tati as "Roger", with Jacques Broido as "Sparring Partner", and Max Martel as "The Postman".
World War II and postwar employment
Returning to Paris, Tati resumed his civilian profession as a cabaret performer, finding employment by at Le Lido, where he performed his Sporting Impressions from 1940 to 1942.
Considered as a possible substitute for Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis, Tati played the ghost in Sylvie and the Ghost, alongside Odette Joyeux as Sylvie, 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.
Tati as 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, Playtime, 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 also starred in this short comedy about 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 comic lengths to speed up 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 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 seaside village of Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, near Saint-Nazaire. 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 also reintroduced 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 film criticism journal Cahiers du cinéma, wrote in his 1957 essay "Fifteen Years of French Cinema":
"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 delayed 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.