Early work Although he had likely played music hall engagements before, his act was first mentioned in 1935, when he performed at the gala for the newspaper
Le Journal, celebrating the French victory in setting the transatlantic crossing record from
Normandy. Among the honourable spectators was the influential writer
Colette. Tati's act also caught the attention of Max Trebor, who offered him an engagement at the Theatre-Michel, where he quickly became the star act. After his success there, Tati tried to make it in London, playing a short season at the Finsbury Park Empire in March 1936. Upon his return to Paris in the same year, he was immediately hired as top billing at Mitty Goldin's ABC Théâtre, alongside the singer
Marie Dubas, where he would work uninterrupted until the outbreak of the Second World War. It was for Tati's performances of his now-finely tuned
Impressions Sportives at the ABC that the previously impressed Colette wrote, "From now on no celebration, no artistic or acrobatic spectacle can do without this amazing performer, who has invented something quite his own ... His act is partly ballet and partly sport, partly satire and partly a charade. He has devised a way of being both the player, the ball and the tennis racquet, of being simultaneously the football and the goalkeeper, the boxer and his opponent, the bicycle and the cyclist. Without any props, he conjures up his accessories and his partners. He has suggestive powers of all great artists. How gratifying it was to see the audience's warm reaction! Tati's success says a lot about the sophistication of the allegedly "uncouth" public, about its taste for novelty and its appreciation of style. Jacques Tati, the horse and rider conjured, will show all of Paris the living image of that legendary creature, the centaur." From 1937 to 1938, he performed at the (former ) in Berlin. During the 1930s, he began to experiment with film, acting in the following shorts: •
Oscar, champion de tennis (1932). Directed by Jack Forrester; written by and starring Jacques Tati (film lost). •
On demande une brute (1934). Directed by Charles Barrois; featuring Jacques Tati as "Roger" and Enrico Sprocani as "le clown Rhum (Enrico)". •
Gai dimanche (1935). Directed by Jacques Berr; written by and starring Jacques Tati, and featuring Enrico Sprocani. •
Soigne ton gauche (1936). Directed by
René Clément; starring Jacques Tati as "Roger", with Jacques Broido as "Sparring Partner", and Max Martel as "The Postman".
World War II and postwar employment In September 1939, Tati was conscripted back into his 16th Regiment of Dragoons, which was then incorporated into the 3rd Division Legere de Cavalerie (DLC). He saw action in the
Battle of Sedan in May 1940, when the German Army marched through the
Ardennes into northern France. The 3rd DLC retreated from
Meuse to
Mussidan, in the
Dordogne, where the division was demobilised after the
Armistice was declared on 22 June 1940. Returning to Paris, Tati resumed his civilian profession as a cabaret performer, finding employment by at
Le Lido, where he performed his
Sporting Impressions from 1940 to 1942. Considered as a possible substitute for
Jean-Louis Barrault in
Les Enfants du Paradis, Tati played the ghost in
Sylvie and the Ghost, alongside
Odette Joyeux as Sylvie, and also appeared as The Devil in the same film. Here, he met Fred Orain, studio director of St. Maurice and the
Victorine in
Nice.
Tati as director In early 1946, Jacques Tati and Fred Orain founded the production company Cady-Films, which would produce Tati's first three films. With the exception of his first and last films, Tati played the gauche and socially inept lead character,
Monsieur Hulot. With his trademark raincoat, umbrella and pipe, Hulot is among the most memorable comic characters in cinema. Several themes recur in Tati's work, most notably in
Mon Oncle,
Playtime, and
Trafic. They include Western society's obsession with material goods, particularly American-style consumerism, the pressure-cooker environment of modern society, the superficiality of relationships among France's various social classes, and the cold and often impractical nature of space-age technology and design.
''L'École des facteurs (The School for Postmen'') René Clément was first approached to direct ''
L'École des facteurs (1947), but as he was preoccupied directing La Bataille du rail (1946), directing duties fell to Tati, who also starred in this short comedy about rural life. Encouragingly, L'École des facteurs'' was enthusiastically well-received upon release, winning the
Max Linder Prize for film comedy in 1947.
Jour de fête (The Big Day) Tati's first major feature,
Jour de fête (
The Big Day), is about an inept rural village postman who interrupts his duties to inspect the traveling fair that has come to town. Influenced by too much wine and a documentary on the rapidity of the American postal service, he goes to comic lengths to speed up his mail deliveries aboard his bicycle. Tati filmed it in 1947 in the village of
Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, where he had found refuge during the war. Due to the reluctance of French distributors,
Jour de fête was first successfully released in London in March 1949, before obtaining a French release on 4 July 1949, where it became a great public success, receiving the 1950 Le Grand prix du cinéma français. The film was intended to be the first French feature film shot in colour; Tati simultaneously shot the film in black and white as an insurance policy. The newly developed Thomson colour system proved impractical, as it could not deliver colour prints.
Jour de fête was therefore released only in black and white. Unlike his later films, it has many scenes with dialogue, and offers a droll, affectionate view of life in rural France. The colour version was restored by his daughter, film editor and director Sophie Tatischeff, and released in 1995. The film won the Prize for Best Original Script at the
Venice Film Festival.
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (''Monsieur Hulot's Holiday'') Tati's second film,
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (''Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
), was released in 1953. Les Vacances'' introduced the character of Mr. Hulot and follows his adventures in France during the mandatory August vacation at a beach resort, lampooning several hidebound elements of French political and social classes. It was shot almost entirely in the seaside village of
Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, near
Saint-Nazaire. The hotel in which Mr. Hulot stays (l'Hôtel de la Plage) is still there, and a statue memorialising the director has been erected on the beach. Tati had fallen in love with the coast while staying in nearby Port Charlotte with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lemoine, before the war, and resolved to return one day to make a film there. The film was widely praised by critics, and earned Tati an
Academy Award nomination for
Best Original Screenplay, which was shared with
Henri Marquet. Production of the movie also reintroduced Jacques Lagrange into Tati's life, beginning a lifelong working partnership with the painter, who would become his set designer.
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot remains one of the best-loved French films of that period. The film's comic influence has extended well beyond France and can be found as recently as 2007 in the
Rowan Atkinson comic vehicle ''
Mr. Bean's Holiday''.
André Bazin, founder of the influential film criticism journal
Cahiers du cinéma, wrote in his 1957 essay "Fifteen Years of French Cinema": "Tati could easily have made lots of money with sequels featuring his comic character of the little rural mailman. He chose instead to wait for four years, and, after much reflection, he revised his formula completely. The result this time was an extraordinary masterpiece about which one can say, I think, that it is the most radical innovation in comic cinema since the Marx Brothers: I am referring, of course, to
Les Vacances de M. Hulot." Various problems delayed the release of Tati's follow-up to his international hit. In 1955, he suffered a serious car accident that physically impaired his left hand. Then, a dispute with Fred Orain ensued, and Tati broke away from Cady Films to create his own production company, Spectra Films, in 1956.
Mon Oncle (My Uncle) Tati's next film, 1958's
Mon Oncle (
My Uncle), was his first film in colour. The plot centers on Mr. Hulot's comedic, quixotic, and childlike struggle with postwar France's obsession with modernity and American-style consumerism, entwined with the relationship he has with his nine-year-old nephew, Gérard.
Mon Oncle quickly became an international success, and won that year's
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a
Special Prize at
Cannes, as well as the
New York Film Critics Award. In Place de la Pelouse (
Saint-Maur-des-Fossés), there stands a bronze statue of Tati as Monsieur Hulot talking to a boy, in a pose echoing the movie's poster, which was designed by
Pierre Étaix. On receiving his Oscar, Tati was offered any treat that the Academy could bestow on him. To their surprise, Tati simply requested the opportunity to visit
Stan Laurel,
Mack Sennett, and
Buster Keaton. Keaton reportedly said that Tati's work with sound had carried on the tradition of silent cinema. As guest artistic director at
AFI Fest 2010,
David Lynch selected Tati's
Mon Oncle, alongside
Hour of the Wolf (dir.
Ingmar Bergman, 1968),
Lolita (dir.
Stanley Kubrick, 1962),
Rear Window (dir.
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) and
Sunset Boulevard (dir.
Billy Wilder, 1950) to be screened in his sidebar program, explaining: "I picked these particular films because they are the ones that have inspired me most. I think each is a masterpiece."
Playtime Playtime (1967), shot in
70mm, was to be the most ambitious yet risky and expensive work of Tati's career. In an essay for the Criterion Collection, Kent Jones wrote:
Playtime took nine years to make, and Tati had to borrow heavily from his own resources to complete the picture. At the time of its making,
Playtime (1967) was the most expensive film in French history. Of the film, Tati said: "
Play Time [sic] is the big leap, the big screen. I'm putting myself on the line. Either it comes off or it doesn't. There's no safety net." Tati famously built an entire glass and steel mini-city (nicknamed Tativille) on the outskirts of Paris for the film, which took years to build and left him mired in debt. Tati was forced to sell the family house of Saint-Germain shortly after the death of his mother and move back into Paris. Spectra Films was placed into administration, concluding in the liquidation of the company in 1974, with an auction of all film rights held by the company for little more than 120,000 francs. In 1969, with reduced means, Tati created a new production company, CEPEC, to oversee his opportunities in film and TV production.
Spin-offs of Playtime While on the set of
Playtime, Tati made a short film about his comedic and cinematic technique,
Cours du soir (
Evening Classes, 1967), in which he gives a lesson in the art of comedy to a class of would-be actors. In 1971, Tati made an advertisement for England's
Lloyds Bank,
Reception In August 2012, the
British Film Institute polled 846 critics, programmers, academics, and distributors to find "The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time";
Playtime was voted 42nd. In the corresponding "Directors Poll" by the BFI,
Playtime was awarded the accolade of being seen as the 37th greatest film of all time by his fellow directors.
Steven Spielberg has cited
Playtime as an influence on his 2004 film
The Terminal, stating: "I thought of two directors when I made [
The Terminal]. I thought this was a tribute to
Frank Capra and his honest sentiment, and it was a tribute to Jacques Tati and the way he allowed his scenes to go on and on and on. The character he played in ''Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
and Mon Oncle'' was all about resourcefulness and using what's around him to make us laugh".
Trafic (Traffic) The Dutch-funded
Trafic (
Traffic), although originally designed to be a television film, received a theatrical release in 1971, and placed Monsieur Hulot back at the centre of the action. It was the last Hulot film, and followed the vein of earlier works that lampooned modern society. In the film, Hulot is a bumbling automobile inventor, who is traveling from Paris to an exhibition in Amsterdam in a gadget-filled recreational vehicle.
Parade Tati's last completed film,
Parade, a film produced for Swedish television in 1973, is more or less a filmed circus performance, featuring Tati's mime acts and other performers.
Forza Bastia In 1978, Tati began filming "
Forza Bastia", a short documentary focusing on a football match between the Corsican team
SC Bastia and the Dutch team
PSV Eindhoven during the
UEFA Cup Final, which he did not complete. Tati undertook the project at the request of his friend Gilberto Trigano, who was the president of the Bastia club at the time. His younger daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, later edited the remaining footage, which was posthumously released in 2002; Sophie died of lung cancer in 2001.
Unmade films Confusion Confusion, a planned collaboration with American pop duo
Sparks, was to be a story about a futuristic Paris where activity is centered around television, communication, advertising, and modern society's infatuation with visual imagery. In the original script, an aging Mr. Hulot was slated to be accidentally killed on-air. Sparks members
Ron Mael and
Russell Mael would have played two American TV studio employees brought in by a rural French TV company. While the script still exists,
Confusion was never filmed. What would have been its title track, "Confusion", appears on Sparks' 1976 album
Big Beat, with the internal sleeve of its 2006 CD issue featuring a letter announcing the pending collaboration and a photo of the Mael brothers in conversation with Tati.
Film Tati No. 4 (The Illusionist) Catalogued in the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie) archives under the title 'Film Tati Nº 4', and written in the late 1950s, the treatment was to have been the follow-up to
Mon Oncle. It tells the bittersweet tale of a modestly talented magician – referred to only as the Illusionist – who, during a tour of decaying music halls in Eastern Europe, protectively takes an impoverished young woman under his wing. The semi-autobiographical script that Tati wrote in 1956 was released internationally as an animated film,
The Illusionist, in 2010. Directed by
Sylvain Chomet, the main character is an animated caricature of Tati himself. Controversy dogged the release of Chomet's version of
The Illusionist,
with The Guardian reporting: In 2000, the screenplay was handed over to Chomet by Tati's daughter, Sophie, two years before her death. Now, however, the family of Tati's illegitimate and estranged eldest child, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who lives in the north-east of England, are calling for the French director to give her credit as the true inspiration for the film. The script of ''L'illusionniste'', they say, was Tati's response to the shame of having abandoned his first child [Schiel] and it remains the only public recognition of her existence. They accuse Chomet of attempting to airbrush out their painful family legacy again. Tati's grandson, Richard Tatischeff Schiel McDonald, wrote a long letter to film critic
Roger Ebert in 2010, openly criticising the production's interpretation of Tati's intent for the script and explaining the family's understanding of its origins with respect to Tati having abandoned Schiel. ==Personal life, illness and death==