Jacques Tati The Complete Works

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 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.

[Volume 1]. Tati shoots -- [volume 2]. Tati writes -- [volume 3]. Tati works -- [volume 4]. Tati explores -- [volume 5]. Tati speaks.

Oscar-winning French director/performer Jacques Tati (1907-1982) was a fiercely innovative and original filmmaker who found inspiration in the observation of life around him. By creating and playing unassuming characters thrown into the bustle of society--the hapless postman François and the maladroit Monsieur Hulot--Tati brilliantly exposed the ways in which class distinctions, social mores, architecture, and technology affect the basic ways that humans relate to one another. Designed by M/M (Paris), the set includes: Volume I, "Tati Shoots": stills from all six feature films; Volume II, "Tati Writes": the complete screenplays, plus those of the unmade films The Illusionist and Confusion, illustrated by pages from Tati's original drafts; Volume III, "Tati Works": a comprehensive survey of his life and work; Volume IV, "Tati Explores": essays on important themes in his films; Volume V, "Tati Speaks": quotations, interviews, and a previously unpublished memoir by Tati.

Oscar-winning French director/performer Jacques Tati (1907-1982) was a fiercely innovative and original filmmaker who found inspiration in the observation of life around him. By creating and playing unassuming characters thrown into the bustle of society--the hapless postman François and the maladroit Monsieur Hulot--Tati brilliantly exposed the ways in which class distinctions, social mores, architecture, and technology affect the basic ways that humans relate to one another. Designed by M/M (Paris), the set includes: Volume I, "Tati Shoots": stills from all six feature films; Volume II, "Tati Writes": the complete screenplays, plus those of the unmade films The Illusionist and Confusion, illustrated by pages from Tati's original drafts; Volume III, "Tati Works": a comprehensive survey of his life and work; Volume IV, "Tati Explores": essays on important themes in his films; Volume V, "Tati Speaks": quotations, interviews, and a previously unpublished memoir by Tati.

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.

"Classical works have for us become covered with the glassy armor of familiarity," wrote Victor Shklovsky in 1914. Here Kristin Thompson "defamiliarizes" the reader with eleven different films. Developing the technique formulated in her Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Princeton, 1981), she clearly demonstrates the flexibility of the neoformalist approach. She argues that critics often use cut-and-dried methods and choose films that easily fit those methods. Neoformalism, on the other hand, encourages the critic to deal with each film differently and to modify his or her analytical assumptions continually. Thompson's analyses are thus refreshingly varied and revealing, ranging from an ordinary Hollywood film, Terror by Night, to such masterpieces as Late Spring and Lancelot du Lac. She proposes a formal historical way of dealing with realism, using Bicycle Thieves and The Rules of the Game as examples. Stage Fright and Laura provide cases in which the classical cinema defamiliarizes its own conventions by playing with audience expectations. Other chapters deal with Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Play Time and Godard's Tout va bien and Sauve qui peut (la vie). Although neoformalist analysis is a rigorous, distinctive approach, it avoids extensive specialized vocabulary and esoteric concepts: the essays here can be read separately by those interested in the individual films. The book's overall purpose, however, goes beyond making these particular films more accessible and intriguing to propose new ways of looking at cinema as a whole.