Jacques Tati: His Life and Art (Panther)

Bellos' biography of Jaqcques Tati do not only provide a detailed historical description, but brings Tati the producer and actor alive right there on the kindle. For the novice, it certainly tantalizes you to Tati's films within a few chapters, confirming the acutely sensitive understanding of the French artist. The historical contexts remained interesting. A good read for any one interested in biography, history, film and art. The rather detailed descriptions of all the film productions perhaps for the specialist reader.

excellent

Well-researched and organized and gave me a lot of insight into the man behind the internationally famous M. Hulot. Interesting production information, but would have been happier with more production details and more detailed credits.

David Bellos's biography/study of Jacques Tati is worth a read, especially since there is no other significant biography of this comic genius, or study of his work. Unfortunately, Bellos's study is seriously flawed, on account of his lack of knowledge of the variety and circus scene in Paris during Tati's times. Circus and variety (music-hall) took a major place in Tati's interests, and therefore informed considerably his work. Tati was a circus buff. Paris had two resident circuses during most of Tati's life, the Cirque d'Hiver and the Cirque Medrano, which renewed their programs every month. Circus enthusiasts (and there were many in Paris then), use to go and see every new show -- as a movie buff would go and see every new film. He certainly did the same with variety shows (the main venues during his times had been the Olympia, Bobino, the Alhambra, the ABC, and there were also minor venues such as Pacra, BaTaClan and others, so he had a vast choice).Enrico Sprocani (Rhum), with whom Tati wrote his first shorts, was not just "a clown;" he was a true circus star, a very creative and prolific "auguste", with a sense of humor close to Tati's. Knowing about Rhum informs our understanding of Tati's approach to comedy. The Veterans, whom Tati filmed at length in "Parade", were a very popular comedy acrobatic act of the time, with whom Tati was very familiar, as was everybody interested in the circus. His obsessive recording of their act was probably due to its richness of details -- details he was well aware of; he probably wanted his audience to see the act as he saw it; this, of course, doesn't eliminate Tati's mix of insecurity and perfectionism. François Bronett, the Swedish "circus specialist" who signed the circus acts for Parade was a little more than just that: he was the owner of Sweden's premier circus, Circus Scott, and himself the son and nephew of a trio of clowns, the Bronetts, who were Northern Europe's equivalent of the Fratellinis. Tati knew who Bronett was, as he was familiar with the acts Bronett hired for the "Parade". (Bronett acted mainly as an agent for the project.) Likewise, the "acrobat" who played an audience member trying to ride Karl Kossmayer's mule was... Karl Kossmayer. His act, as recorded on film, is exactly the same act he performed regularly in circuses all over Europe. Reading Mr. Bellos, one has the impression that Tati staged this act for "Parade", and brought his own vision of comedy into it; this is not the case. Yet Tati had a strong affinity for the kind of comedy such circus artists as Kossmayer or the Veterans performed, and it is what he celebrated in Parade -- which is more a documentary on an aspect of visual comedy rarely celebrated by intellectuals than a pure Tati's creation. It is a kind of humor Tati himself performed, with immense talent, in his music-hall act.Bellos seems also to hint that Tati performed his act in music-halls as if it were something the movie director did as a gift to the public -- as if, in reality, he didn't really belong to that world. On the contrary, Tati was a professional physical comedian (and not a mime!) in a field where they were many others Mr. Bellos didn't know because they never had a movie career... Tati certainly honed his skills in front of his fellow rugbymen, but he learned them watching physical comedians and clowns at the Cirque Medrano and on the music-hall stages: the clowns, comedians, and comic acrobats he saw there informed his approach to humor -- and one has to know these performers and their world to understand Tati's.I know the circus and variety world very well (both historically and practically). I have met Jacques Tati, and my father knew him well and was involved directly or indirectly in three of Tati's movies, "Sylvie et le Fantôme", "Jour de Fête", and "Mon Oncle". Mr. Bellos's Tati is not truly the man I have known, since his vision of the world lay for a large part in a universe David Bellos doesn't know, a fact which distorts somehow his understanding of Jacques Tati's art.

Before he began to direct films, Jacques Tati had a proleptic role in Claude Autant-Lara’s romantic comedy Sylvie et le Fantome, in which he moved like a dancer, was beloved friend to a dog, created a certain amount of deliberate and inadvertent havoc, and was completely silent. Much of this could be a description of his famous alter-ego, Monsieur Hulot, who figured in four of his six feature films and is near the top of the line of comedy’s great assumed incarnations, from Chaplin’s Tramp to Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna Everage. In his superb study of Tati’s work (Jacques Tati, Harvill Press, 1999), David Bellos says of Hulot that he “is expressed first of all by a posture: straight-backed, but leaning forward from the ankles, in defiance of gravity; head held low, like a bird’s, bending from the neck, exaggerating the sense of impending disequilibrium; a jutting pipe underlines the forward tilt; elbows splayed backwards, making a gawky, eloquent and comically elongated silhouette.” Another writer, Michael Chion, described his expression: “indefinable, somewhere between worry, stupidity and polite neutrality.” But it was Penelope Gilliatt who nailed the result of his presence and existence: she said Hulot was “muddle’s natural kin.” Hulot, as someone said of life, is what happens when you’re making other plans. Tati not only invented Hulot (as well as the wonderful Francois the postman, the efficiency-crazed protagonist of Jour de Fete) but profoundly altered (one wants to say confused) the methods of screen comedy. Tati’s films were more physical and gag humor than dialogue humor—no one ever quotes a Tati film, they describe it. He was particularly fascinated by what could be done with sound. In Mon Oncle, Hulot, venturing into his sister’s ultra-modern kitchen, discovers that the water jug is made of plastic, to the point that it bounces; he plays around with it for a minute, like a kid with a basketball, and then, delighted with his discovery, grabs a glass, inspects it with visible anticipation and drops it, obviously expecting it to bounce as well. The glass drops out of view and we hear an awful sound of shattering. Bellos describes a friend of Tati’s one day discovering him spending hours dropping different glasses, to find the one that would make the perfect shattering noise. Part of the second sequence in Playtime takes place in an ultramodern, glass-walled modern waiting room, during which the only sounds are the fwoops, whooshes and thoongs of padded furniture and airtight glass doors. His sight gags are not usually slapstick but visual disorientations: one man asks another to light his cigarette, but they have to walk to a doorway to get this done, as they are on opposite sides of an invisible glass wall. Later in Playtime, five men carrying a vast pane of glass do an elephant-step mambo to music from a radio several stories below. From background and influences as varied as picture-framing, rugby and music-hall performing, Tati gave the world “a particular kind of attention,” not entirely like what we’d seen before. Bellos sketches in Tati’s life and career, which is not an entirely happy story: Tati’s perfectionism, ambition, and detail-mania began to outrun his finances and his friends’ patience. The details of the enormous, budget-crippling set he built for Playtime reminded me of the tales of Erich von Stroheim, who wanted characters’ clothing to be put into the chests-of-drawers on his sets—it’s the story, familiar to anyone who reads film history, of the horribly permeable line between genius and megalomania. And “Playtime,” of course, is in some senses the masterpiece you will never see: filmed in seventy millimeter, its visually complicated gags look almost claustrophobic on the small screen. But Bellos gives us all sorts of technical background, stray surprises and social history, and he captures a good deal of the charm of Tati at his best. Tati is an individual, for some an acquired taste. Probably the way to start off is with his arguable best, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle (all of his films are available on DVD from Criterion). At a double bill of these two features, years ago, a friend of mine was reduced to such helpless, chair-pounding, raucous hilarity that at intermission a nearby viewer asked her “Do they pay you to come here?” They are ingenious, delightful, funny films; but as Pauline Kael wrote, “it is not until afterward—with the sweet nostalgic music lingering—that these misadventures take on a certain poignancy and depth.”--From Glenn's Book Notes

Wow! Money very well spent indeed, from the work of art that is the jacket, to the wonderfully written text, Go for it!!!

Excellent insight on his life and work, offering an original perspective on both.

Great book about the French cinema legend!

Very detailed and readable, an ideal primer for those who enjoy the talent of Jacques Tati and highly recommended to all.

Far from producing a well-informed biography of France's greatest cinematic clown, Jacques Tati, instead Bellos ruthlessly dissects. Despite his clinical approach, there is just enough tantalising information about Tati, the brilliant creator of Monsieur Hulot, to hold my attention.Do I really want to know about the various colour film processes available in France? Not really. Nor do I want to read yet again about the dire financial straits France found itself in after World War I, as well as what was going on in Europe during the years before and after World War II! Acres of text have already been written concerning these times and events.When I purchase a book purportedly written about one of my all-time favourite comedic heroes, I fully expect to read about the man - nothing else. But instead it seems to me that Bellos has turned his book into an intellectual diatribe against Tati, coldly ripping his memory apart. In fact Bellos is more like a mortician, clinically wishing to expose the body lying on the slab before him by carving it up to look at its many parts, rather than to appreciate the whole. He appears to think of Jacques Tati as nothing more than a mere coincidence in the scheme of things, when in fact the reverse is true.Now if only someone would write a truly worthwhile biography about Jacques...