Bendigo Film Society - Themes 2005

Strong Women

Australian Classics

Jacques Tati (notes follow)

Peter Sellers

Films of Peter Greenaway

JACQUES TATI
Jacques Tatischeff was born on October 9, 1908. By his early twenties he was well established as a music hall mime comedian.

He experimented with film as early as 1931, creating a tennis sketch that we will see in M.Hulot's Holiday (screening 26 Feb) Most of his 1930's films were technically poor and not well edited.

After WWII Tati recommenced film making, becoming preoccupied with creating what he termed a twentieth century Everyman who would be a misfit in a variety of settings.

After financial problems, painstaking preparation and several years, the result was M Hulot's Holiday, a film that satirises the universal holiday maker. It also introduces the frightening and endearing character of Hulot, who charges into the seaside resort with all the gusto & sophistication of a three-year-old.

Despite an air of desperate improvisation, Hulot's mishaps were always meticulously planned. Hulot has echoes of many screen clowns in his frenzied attempts to fit in and to keep up appearances.

In Mon Oncle (screening 24 March) Hulot, the gentle anarchist often seems withdrawn, a hermit in his own cosy part of town. The film does not show people at their best in a quietly biased, irresistibly sentimental comparison between the old and the new and the widening gulf between them.

In 1949 his film Jour de Fete (Screening on 8 Sept) won the prize for best scenario in Venice and the Grand Prix du Cinema at Cannes in 1950. The film was carefully made (built up) over four years and illustrates Tati's habit of testing different visual gags on preview audiences. One critic said that you could watch it with a bout of toothache & it would still make you laugh.

Tati continued making films into the 1970s. But the three films BFS members will see in 2005 are probably his best.

Kevin Vallence (Abridged from The Movie: the illustrated history of the cinema, Vol 40, Reflections on French Cinema, and Halliwell's Film and Video Guide 2003).