Jacques Tati His Life And

The full story of one of France's greatest cinema legends, a clown whose film-making innovation was to turn everyday life into an art form. Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, unmistakable with his pipe, brolly and striped socks, was a creation of slapstick genius that made audiences around the world laugh at the sheer absurdity of life. This biography charts Tati's rise and fall, from his earliest beginnings as a music hall mime during the Depression, to the success of Jour de Fête and Mon Oncle, to Playtime, the grandiose masterpiece that left the once celebrated director bankrupt and begging for equipment to complete his final films. Analysing Tati's singular vision, Bellos reveals the intricate staging of his most famous gags and draws upon hitherto inaccessible archives to produce a unique assessment of his work and its context for film lovers and film students alike.

Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, unmistakeable with his pipe, brolly and striped socks, was a creation of sheer slapstick genius that made audiences around the world laugh at the sheer absurdity of life. This biography charts Tati's rise and fall, from his earliest beginnings as a music hall mime during the Depression, to the success of Jour de Fete and Mon Oncle, to Playtime, the grandiose masterpiece that left the once delebrated director bankrupt and begging for equipment to complete his final films. Analysing Tati's singular vision, Bellos reveals the intricate staging of his most famous gags and draws upon hitherto inaccessible archives to produce a unique assessment of his work and its context for film lovers and film students alike.

Jacques Tati is widely regarded as one of the greatest postwar European filmmakers. He made innovative and challenging comedies while achieving international box office success and attaining a devoted following. In Play Time, Malcolm Turvey examines Tati’s unique comedic style and evaluates its significance for the history of film and modernism. Turvey argues that Tati captured elite and general audiences alike by combining a modernist aesthetic with slapstick routines, gag structures, and other established traditions of mainstream film comedy. Considering films such as Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Play Time (1967), and Trafic (1971), Turvey shows how Tati drew on the rich legacy of comic silent film while modernizing its conventions in order to encourage his viewers to adopt a playful attitude toward the modern world. Turvey also analyzes Tati’s sardonic view of the bourgeoisie and his complex and multifaceted satire of modern life. Tati's singular and enduring achievement, Turvey concludes, was to translate the democratic ideals of the postwar avant-garde into mainstream film comedy, crafting a genuinely popular modernism. Richly illustrated with images from the director’s films, Play Time offers an illuminating and original understanding of Tati’s work.

Life never ceases to give homage to Jacques Tati. Be it on a beach, in an old part of town, or in the glamour of a modern city, we find everywhere the gags which have peopled such films as Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Playtime. If a silhouette crosses us at a street corner, we are quickly reminded of certain scenes in Mon Oncle. Tati was a great film comic who deserves to be placed on the same level as Keaton and Chaplin. Tati created Monsieur Hulot who has now entered the world of screen legends. Above all, Jacques Tati was an exemplary artist who was not scared of taking risks or to invest his entire being in the making of his films. From Jour de fete to Parade, there is a Tati-World which this study invites us to discover.

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994 George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation. David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter "e" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words "père", "mere", and even "George Perec". His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. He died in his mid-forties after a short illness, leaving a truly puzzling detective novel, 53 Days, incomplete. "Professor Bellos's book enables us at once to relish the most wilfully bizarre aspects of Perec's oeuvre and to understand the whys and wherefores of his protean nature" - Jonathan Romney, Literary Review

The French comedy character who inspired Mr. Bean, in a wordless comic strip story for children! Meet Mr. Hulot—he's always in the middle of the action! Created and played by French comic actor and filmmaker Jacques Tati, Mr. Hulot is a beloved charater in France. David Merveille’s comic strip style illustrations depict 23 captivating scenes with a page turn that builds suspense for each surprise ending. From buying a snow globe on a warm summer day—shaking it—and causing the sky to snow, to a crazy visit to the zoo where Mr. Hulot has something in common with every animal at the zoo—Merveille’s creations are a delight to the observant and curious eye.