M. Hulot’s Holiday + Watch Your Left

M. Hulot’s Holiday
(Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot)
France 1953. Director: Jacques Tati
Cast: Jacques Tati, Nathalie Pascaud, Michèle Rolla, Valentine Camax, Louis Perrault

Jacques Tati’s first incarnation as the inimitable M. Hulot — henceforth his alter ego — has the lanky, gawky, pipe-smoking refugee from the French middle class on hilarious holiday at a Breton seaside resort, triggering misadventures and mishaps at every turn. Full of inventive sight gags and elaborately orchestrated comic sequences, with minimal dialogue that serves as just another aural element in the creative sound design, M. Hulot’s Holiday is a masterpiece of visual comedy in the best tradition of Keaton and Chaplin. Many a serious critic also credits the film with advancing a radically open, non-directive way of seeing that harks back to cinema’s pre-Griffin era, before the narrative conventions of film editing were codified, and points ahead to the vanguard of cinema modernists! “Without M. Hulot there would be no Godard, no Straub, no Duras — no modern cinema . . . Tati drove the first decisive wedge between cinema and classical narration” (Dave Kehr). “M. Hulot is not only the most important comic work in world cinema since the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, it is an event in the history of sound film” (André Bazin). “Hulot leaves you not knowing whether to pee your pants or sign up for Semiotics” (Cinematheque Ontario). B&W, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 88 mins.

Watch Your Left
(Soigne ton gauche)
France 1936. Director: René Clément
Cast: Jacques Tati, Max Martel

Godard’s 1987 feature Soigne ta droite punned on the title of this delightful 1936 short, co-written and starring a young Jacques Tati, and notable also as the directorial debut of René Clément (Forbidden Games). Tati plays a dimwitted farmhand who fantasizes about being a boxer, only to unexpectedly get his big chance in the ring. The film’s bicycle-riding postman, played by Max Martel, inspired two subsequent Tati works, 1947’s The School for Postman and 1949’s. B&W, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 12 mins.