SEPT 16-26

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Jacques Tati's My Uncle
OCT 29-NOV 1
This rare, restored English-language version of Mon Oncle screens in a
new 35mm print!

"Comedy is the summit of logic."
JACQUES TATI

One of screen comedy’s great geniuses, and one of cinema’s most innovative and influential filmmakers, the actor-writer-director Jacques Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff on October 9, 1907 in Le Pecq, in the western suburbs of Paris, to a Russian father and a Dutch mother. A master of visual humour and the creator of the much-loved Monsieur Hulot character, Tai gained fame as a mime artist and physical comedian in the music halls of Paris in the 1930s before turning his hand to cinema. He was a meticulous filmmaker whose perfectionism and profligate budgets allowed him to complete but five theatrical features (and a sixth for television) in a directorial career that started in the 1940s and extended into the 1970s. His carefully-constructed works meld the classic slapstick comedy of the silent era with contemporary social criticism and satire, and display remarkable formalist innovative and experimentation.

"A film by Bresson or Tati is necessarily a work of genius."
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT

Tati both directed and starred in all five of his theatrical features. Of those, all but Jour de fête, his 1949 feature debut, have Tati as the pipe-smoking, raincoat-wearing umbrella-toting Hulot, a bumbling, scatterbrained, existential everyman who occupies a central place in a great comic lineage that stretches back to Buster Keaton and the films of Mack Sennett and ahead to Pee-Wee Herman and Mr. Bean. Consumerism and conformity, the alienating effects of technology, the plight of humanity and tradition in a world of rampant modernity — these are central themes of Tati’s films. Virtually without conventional dialogue, they abound in inventive visual, spatial and aural gags and setups; unfold on elaborate, often expensively constructed sets; and reveal a great sense of formal play. Indeed, in their daring visual and spatial strategies and impressive sound design they exhibit a level of formal innovation and brilliance that has led many serious critics to hail Tati as one of the cinema’s foremost modernists, at the same time as he is one of modernity’s funniest critics. Tati’s work stands as an important antecedent of and influence on the likes of Godard, an admirer. One critic recently described Tati as “an unlikely amalgam of Buster Keaton and Jean-Paul Sartre” (Lloyd Hughes). Continuing the Keaton analogy (and Buster too was a cinematic innovator and proto-modernist), another observation: “Like Keaton before him, Tati devised gags of such sheer intricacy as to prove on occasion just too beautiful to be laughed at” (Gilbert Adair).

This major retrospective of Tati’s cinema includes rare short films; his little-seen 1974 TV feature Parade; and all five of Tati’s treasured theatrical features, two of them in previously unfamiliar forms: the restored colour version of Jour de fête, a film originally released in black-and-white (due to technical problems with its colour process), and My Uncle, the recently rediscovered and restored English-language version of 1958’s Oscar-winning Mon Oncle (Tati originally shot both French and English versions, each slightly different). Also screening is The Magnificent Tati, a new documentary on the filmmaker’s magnificent work.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: For their assistance and support in the organization and presentation of this exhibition, Pacific Cinémathèque is grateful to the Cultural Services office of the Embassy of France (New York) and Culturesfrance; the Consulate General of France (Vancouver); and Janus Films (New York).