Original subtitles

It's just half past the hour.

- Shall I turn it on? - By all means.

Tonight as each night at the same time

we bring you Prof. Platoff!

Today's subject: "Work it out yourself"

Jacques Tati Fallen From The Moon

The year is 1958.

Jacques Tati is in New York, dressed as Mr. Hulot,

the character he invented a few years earlier.

With his nose in the air and trousers too short,

he hauls his figure through the city's streets.

Tati isn't there for a vacation.

He's accompanying the release of his new film,

Mon Oncle, which is about to be a hit in the United States,

Like everywhere it's shown.

It will soon be in the running for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

Already, Tati is thinking about his next project.

He is about to embark on the biggest and most ambitious film of his life.

The one into which he'll pour his genius,

his energy, his health, his house.

The one that will burn his wings and ruin him.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Before stumbling, one must first climb the mountain.

Before the fall, we must tell the ascent,

step by step.

The story begins in the mid-1930s,

in a music hall club.

Jacques Tati performs his show Sporting Impressions,

in which he mimes the gestures of a tennis player,

a goalkeeper, or a boxer.

A good comedian, Tati would say, is above all a good pair of legs.

From his very first short films as an actor,

and later as writer and director, he applied this principle.

He makes his body and movements the raw material of his cinema.

Jacques Tati was 40 when he set out,

just after the war, to make his first feature film,

Jour de fête.

He reprised the character of François,

which he had already played in The School for Postmen,

and his unique way of using his body.

From one scene to the next, he makes his character twirl,

To spin, waltz as if by accident.

A bit like in the films of the silent-era legends of American cinema,

Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, whom Tati greatly admired.

Tati made his first comedy with string and glue.

He had a very small team of technicians,

some of whom also acted in the film.

He recruited extras in the village of Sainte-Sévère,

where he had spent a few months during the war.

He had promised the locals he would come back to make a film.

And so, we plunged into this adventure with full commitment.

It was like waking up one morning and deciding to make a film.

People said "You're crazy, you want to shoot a short film?"

"No, it's a feature film!"

Tati didn't hesitate to take risks.

He shot his film using a new process,

Thompson Colour, which was supposed to make Jour de fête

one of the first French feature films in colour.

Insoluble technical problems eventually forced him to give it up.

Tati resigned himself to releasing the film in black and white,

but no distributor wanted to screen it in cinemas.

For a year, the film-maker searched in vain for a distributor.

Fortunately, Tati had the perseverance of a long-distance runner.

Jour de fête eventually made its way into cinemas.

Released in 1949, the film was a great success with audiences.

Tati's career was launched.

But the film-maker did not forget the people of Saint-Séver.

In June, he returned to the village to share his success with them.

You, who live all year in nervousness,

agitation, turmoil.

You're thinking about it.

You, who spend most of your life in offices,

factories, workshops — You're thinking about it.

You, who are already beginning to have obligations and worries.

You, who are burdened with responsibilities.

You, miss.

You, sir.

Well, rejoice,

because soon, you're all going on vacation.

Here comes summer.

Here comes the beach.

Here is a film where you'll find all the atmosphere of vacation.

It's the great comic revelation of Jour de fête,

Jacques Tati.

Tati has an independent spirit.

He likes to experiment with each new project.

For his second comedy, set in a small seaside resort on the Atlantic coast,

he invents a new character, once again played by himself.

This character, who will go down in cinema history,

is Monsieur Hulot.

A dreamy, almost mute man

whom Tati makes instantly recognisable by his look and his accessories.

Monsieur... Monsieur?

What?

Allow me.

Hulot.

Tati, the mime, gives Hulot a tall, lanky silhouette,

a way of standing up very straight on his legs,

while remaining supple in his joints.

But most of all, Tati gives Hulot a way of walking that is uniquely his own.

Monsieur Hulot is a lunar character,

Tati would say.

In fact, his walk proves it, since he barely puts his heels on the ground.

He walks only on the balls of his feet, as if trying to get closer to the Moon.

As a child, Jacques Tati-Chef could spend hours lost in his own world.

He loved doing impressions and was not a very good student in school.

I had the good fortune of being sent to the corner quite often.

And from the corner, since you're a language professional,

you notice that the teacher you saw from the front and who seemed perfect,

from the corner you see that he's lowered his socks a bit,

he's scratching his calves — that is, you get to see behind the scenes.

That's how observation begins.

It's how I started to realise there was more

than just impeccable and proper people.

From a good Franco-Russo-Dutch-Italian bourgeois family,

he left high school before his baccalaureate

and failed the entrance exam for arts and trades.

He preferred to party.

He married late in life, to Micheline Winter,

whom he falsely loved.

But his mother-in-law, who organised the wedding with an iron fist,

refused to invite his Music Hall friends.

Tati never adapted to bourgeois codes.

Tati would often claim that Monsieur Hulot is a bit of an everyman.

But he is still very much himself:

the nonconformist, who causes chaos and never does anything quite like others.

Tati plays with sound and dialogue like no one before him.

In his directing, the film-maker adopts a method he will never abandon.

Before filming a scene,

he mimes every gesture for the actors to perform in front of the camera.

Tati is an obsessive film-maker

who meticulously prepares every scene

and sometimes shoots more than 20 takes to get exactly what he wants.

He also has to deal with the wind and the whims of the weather.

Grains of sand get into the camera

and cause irreversible scratches on the film.

Tati has to reshoot some sequences

even though the summer of 1951 is already over.

Making a comedy is not exactly a vacation.

And creating the impression of lightness is the hardest thing of all.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot.

In the middle of winter 1953,

Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot is released

and is a triumph with the public.

The film is promptly selected for the Cannes Film Festival,

where it wins the International Critics Prize.

But Tati, likely not yet famous enough,

is not filmed by the news cameras.

A few months later,

the cameras are definitely there when he is awarded the Louis Delluc Prize,

A kind of cinema competition rewarding the best French film of the year.

The film-maker plays the society game and quietly continues his rise.

Abroad, Jacques Tati begins to make a name for himself,

notably in England, where Mister Hulot is showing at London's chicest cinema,

and where the film sparks a true British passion.

The film-maker comes to witness his success in person and,

keen to adapt to local customs,

he equips himself with an umbrella that he will soon entrust to Monsieur Hulot.

In June 1954, Tati lands in New York to attend his film's premiere

on the other side of the Atlantic.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot soon becomes

the most successful French film ever in the United States,

surpassing The Baker's Wife by Marcel Pagnol,

which had held the title for 15 years.

Tati takes advantage of his stay in New York

to re-enact his sports impressions

in front of photographer Philippe Halsman's lens.

But above all, he spends his days observing American gigantism

and the conquering modernity in the land of progress.

He observes the human species in its American variant.

By watching passers-by, he draws ideas for a character or picks up a gesture.

Tati is a film-maker in constant reconnaissance.

I flirt a little, I take my time.

Yes, I find it pleasant.

And I walk and observe on the street,

then I see if my subject holds up, if really,

yes, it's good like that, that's it.

Then little by little, while observing, I build and tell my story.

Back in France, Tati could rest on his laurels.

Why not allow himself a detour into the world of advertising,

as his impresario suggests?

Tati's response is cutting.

I'd like to point out that I particularly love my work

and under no circumstances do I do it to promote some brand of auto-mobile,

let alone the quality of spaghetti.

Tati thinks only of his art and his next film.

This time, there's no question of changing character.

But Tati wants to continue renewing himself and experimenting.

His new comedy, entitled Mon Oncle,

Will be shot in colour, and for the first time,

He decides to film partly in a studio.

He asks one of his artistic collaborators,

the painter-architect Jacques Lagrange,

to design the plans for an ultra-modern villa,

like a robot-house, with windows shaped like eyeballs.

More than just a set, it will be a true character at the centre of the film,

revealing bourgeois snobbery and convention.

"Everything is connected," says Tati's heroine, Madame Arpel.

But in this sterile villa, no one is connected to anyone.

In his third film, Tati innovates again with the soundtrack.

He uses it to make a visionary critique,

Not of technology itself, but of how it is used.

As usual, Tati takes the time to mime every gesture to each of his actors.

He even does it for Dacky, the Arpels' dog,

who stands out as the disruptor in a world that runs too smoothly.

Oh Dacky!

Come here!

- I'm sure it's its fault. - Dacky!

We've got to get it to walk in front of the sensor again.

Dacky, will you come here?

- Come on! - Ah, he's coming.

Come on, Dacky, come.

- Dacky! - It's not working any more.

What are we going to do?

Oh, listen...

Go, Dacky. Go on, go.

Of course he'll go if you scold him.

We need to get out of here, right? We'll have to call Georgette.

In Mon Oncle, the surprising Mr. Hulot

has traded his vacation attire for city clothes.

And his rickety car from the previous film must have given up the ghost.

He is the uncle who gives the film its title,

but above all, its free and offbeat spirit.

For Mr. Hulot struggles greatly

to conform to the harsh laws of social life.

And he cares little for the illusions of success

pursued by his sister and brother-in-law.

Oh, you're not coming in?

If you hadn't gone into cinema, what would you have liked to do?

I worked in a shop—my grandfather was a framer.

- A framer? - Yes, a framer.

The framer of Toulouse-Lautrec, a friend of Van Gogh.

My father took over the shop.

Normally, I should be working in that shop,

framing paintings by Buffet.

Would you like that?

I'd rather be framed.

I'm in too much of a rush to be a framer.

Yes, of course.

Jacques Tati is a workaholic.

After six exhausting months of filming,

he devotes fifteen months to finishing his film,

working ten hours a day.

Finally, in the spring of 1958,

the perfectionist is ready to face the public eye.

Five years after Mr. Hulot's Holiday,

Jacques Tati's new film is selected to compete at the Cannes Film Festival.

The film-maker insisted on coming with his entire technical team and cast.

On the evening of the awards ceremony,

Mon Oncle receives the prestigious Special Jury Prize,

for the originality and comedic strength of the work.

Mon Oncle is a huge success in France,

and across Europe, where Tati embarks on a tour to accompany the film.

In Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden, he is welcomed like a star.

In Rome, Tati takes the opportunity to visit Federico Fellini.

The Italian director offered him the role of Don Quixote

in an adaptation he hoped to make someday.

But sadly, the film would never be made.

In September 1958, Tati leaves for a two-month tour of America,

travelling from city to city to present Mon Oncle,

in a version specially made for the American audience.

His tour culminates in Los Angeles,

where Mon Oncle is in competition for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

And the winner is... My Uncle.

I would like to say a few words with my very bad English.

I find that people who speak the worst English

want to talk more than the others.

But for my first visit to Hollywood,

I feel I'm doing fine.

After the ceremony, Jacques Tati—French star among Hollywood stars...

specifically requests to meet his silent film idols,

including Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.

Back in Paris, he is welcomed as a victor.

The film-maker is at the height of success,

but there's no question of him taking himself too seriously.

In the small town hall of Le Pecq, the city where he was born 52 years earlier,

he performs a low-budget remake of the Oscars ceremony,

surrounded by his mother, his wife, and his friends.

From the mayor of his town to the President of the Republic,

Jacques Tati is congratulated by all of official France.

Tati meets De Gaulle,

but he politely declines the medal of Arts and Letters

the government wishes to bestow upon him.

"My behaviour in the exercise of my profession

allows me to walk the streets whistling," he writes.

"Hands in pockets, in the least formal outfits,

and I would feel obliged, in order to wear this decoration with dignity,

to change my habits,

which are the safeguard of my artistic and philosophical independence.

"Tati fully intends to remain free.

At the beginning of the 1960s, he gives up a film entitled The Illusionist,

which would have told of his beginnings in the music hall,

likely judging it too conventional.

He embarks on his boldest project,

his most difficult, the film that would become his greatest masterpiece.

"I'm taking all the risks," he declares.

"Either I succeed, or I fail.

There is no middle ground."

During his international tour,

Tati observed the latest inventions in the service of efficiency and speed.

Well-ordered office lives,

but also a new kind of architecture beginning to rise.

Tati decides that his next film, Playtime,

will take place entirely in a standardized

and ultra-modern urban environment.

Far from the small village of Jour de Fête

or the seaside resort of Mr. Hulot's Holiday.

He begins a location scouting campaign that lasts ten months.

He collects photos of new buildings in European cities:

Berlin, Milan,

Helsinki, or Geneva.

In Paris, the La Défense district does not yet exist.

But Tati closely follows the construction of Orly Airport

and films scouting footage there.

Today, when you take a flight from Orly,

You have an airport very similar to the one in New York.

And when you arrive in London,

you find almost the same layout as in Stockholm.

And since the chairs in homes also look the same,

you find at your friends' place the same chairs as at Orly Airport,

the same chairs at Orly as in New York,

and soon you begin to wonder why you even travel.

Natural locations are deemed too limiting by Tati,

Who decides that most of his film should be shot in an open-air studio.

It would no longer be just one house, as in Mon Oncle,

but an entire business district

that Tati has designed by production designer Eugène Roman

and built in the Paris suburbs starting in September 1964.

This enormous construction site is filmed,

as will be all the upcoming stages of Tati's extraordinary project.

An 8-hectare vacant lot, 50,000 cubic metres of concrete,

4,000 square metres of plastic, 1,200 square metres of glass,

a piping system, asphalted roads,

traffic lights and street lamps are built specifically.

Thanks to these two power stations,

Tati's set could supply electricity to a town of 15,000 inhabitants.

It is the largest set ever built for a French film.

Here we are in front of the model of Tativille.

Mr. Tati, it’s a truly ultramodern city.

Why call it "Tativille"?

Because I don’t have a name for the city.

You co-designed this city with architect Roman.

- It’s a modern city. - Yes, it's a highly functional city,

that's what it is.

There is glass, steel. Why all these ultramodern materials?

I don't believe it's ultramodern;

I think it's what is being built today,

and we're not here to criticise modern architecture.

Once the set is completed,

the film-maker starts casting the inhabitants of Tativille.

He often hires non- professional actors who,

in real life, do the job they will portray on screen.

Because Tati seeks accurate gestures:

the right body posture or the correct way of moving.

Tati leaves nothing to chance.

He tests bright colours

that must stand out in the sea of grey dominating the first part of the film.

He even takes time to test the colour of Mr. Hulot's socks,

matching the rest of his costume.

Will they be grey with mimosa yellow stripes,

with brown suede shoes and slate grey trousers?

Or perhaps greenish socks,

with black leather shoes and charcoal grey trousers would suit better?

To Tati, these details matter.

Especially since he decided to shoot his film in 70mm.

A large format film that shows every detail clearly

and is usually reserved for big blockbuster productions.

Tati's new film will be a poetic comedy

shot with the technical resources of a Hollywood epic.

Every set element is calibrated, measured like a mannequin,

according to its size and proportions.

Tati also has extras photographed in frozen poses,

as if caught mid-motion.

These photos are then cut out and become life-size silhouettes,

which will populate Tativille

and coexist with real flesh-and-blood extras.

Like here, on the right of the screen,

where a cut-out silhouette stands next to a motionless man,

like a robot whose battery has died.

For Tati, businessmen are robots and their movements form a strange ballet.

For the lead female role, Tati definitely did not want a major star.

He chose a former au pair of a couple of friends

who worked as a secretary at Findus, in Frankfurt.

- What's your name? - Barbara Dennek.

- That's your name in Playtime as well. - That's right.

- Is this your first role? - Yes. I've never acted before.

- Do you know the script? - No, I don't.

Why not?

Mr. Tati doesn't want us to read the script.

He thinks it would make our acting feel unnatural.

It is through Barbara's eyes that we will discover the big city,

which, Tati says, must be the film's only real star.

Why does the character of Mr. Hulot appear again?

Because I like Mr. Hulot.

The character proved successful and was well received abroad.

Audiences like him in America, and they like him in England.

I have no other heroes. He's simply mine.

At the start of filming, in spring 1965,

Tati focuses on scenes where Mr. Hulot wander through a maze of offices.

More than ever, Hulot is a misfit character,

lost in a world devoid of any human warmth.

But in Playtime, Tati refuses for Mr. Hulot to occupy the film's centre.

The film-maker stages the calculated withdrawal of his character,

who sometimes steps aside to let others take centre stage.

Tati even plays with fake Mr. Hulots,

who appear from time to time around a scene's corner.

In the month of June 1965, filming of Playtime is interrupted by a storm.

Tativille suffers considerable damage

and the production falls irreversibly behind.

But it would take more than that to throw off Tati,

Who has committed himself to a magnificent slow-motion race.

The film-maker applies his usual method before filming each scene.

But on Playtime, there are many actors involved.

So everything takes longer.

Tati's direction becomes a choreography,

a show in itself.

The director and mime occasionally grants himself a small role.

Which he enjoys placing in the background,

an invitation to observe every detail of the image.

I put the film before my private life and before my personal comfort,

whereas often, to make things easier,

people sign quickly for other films

just to change their car or their bathroom.

Tati has doubts.

He searches for release.

He rehearses for hours, sometimes for entire days.

He always wants a better take.

Some members of his technical team start calling him "Tatillon".

The film-maker doesn't mind.

He's not there to bend to the constraints of his massive crew,

but to pursue his dream and stage his vision of the modern world,

in a film like no one has ever made before.

The shoot drags on.

As the months go by, tensions rise.

Bills pile up, bankers and suppliers grow impatient.

The company renting the camera orders the seizure of a lens during the shoot.

All means are considered to try to bail out the ship.

Tati, who is also the producer of his film,

decides to mortgage his house.

A grand quixotic epic,

the shooting of Playtime finally ends after 365 cumulative days of work,

spread out over nearly three years.

The athlete is exhausted by this mammoth production,

but his fight is not yet over.

He works day and night, fine-tuning his piece until the very last minute.

But what is that little background music we're hearing?

Wait, I'll tell you the exact spot.

Several times, Tati delays the film's release,

Unable to feel fully satisfied.

People sometimes say a Tati film is never completely finished, is that true?

- That's not a very kind thing to say. - But it's true, you said it yourself!

Yes, I think so, because we're always afraid it's not quite right,

that something is missing.

In December 1967, after five years of relentless work,

Tati finally premieres his film at the Cinéma L'Empire.

He is surrounded by his family, his team,

and all of Paris from the French film world.

Tell him I'm at the Royal Carrefour.

The day after the premiere, François Truffaut writes to Tati,

Playtime is unlike anything that already exists in cinema.

No other film is framed or mixed like this one.

It's a film that comes from another planet,

where films are made differently.

Playtime is perhaps Europe of 1968 as seen by the first Martian film-maker.

He sees what we no longer see,

hears what we no longer hear, and films differently from us.

The film audiences discover on screen indeed resembles no other.

It culminates in a grand, euphoric scene

that responds to the robotic ballet at the start of the film.

Playtime is a dazzling artistic success.

But it cost so much to make that French audiences alone can't cover its deficit.

A success in the United States, where his previous films had done so well,

could still save Tati from financial ruin.

But nothing goes as planned.

Playtime finds no takers in America.

The film-maker had dreamed that his set would survive the filming of Playtime

and be used by film school students.

On the day they're demolished,

he throws the film's script under one of the collapsing façades.

For Tati, the consequences of Playtime's commercial failure are brutal.

He must sell his house before seeing his company placed in receivership

and his first four films put under sequestration.

Now that Playtime is over, it really was a long adventure, a difficult one.

I’d probably scare the production manager, Bernard Maurice, if I said,

“Alright, on Monday we’ll think about the first shot of the next film!”

But no, I need to take a break.

You're going to rest. Will you change environments?

I don't know.

I've had... enough.

From the end of the 1960s, Tati is no longer in demand.

Hindered from realising his dreams

or achieving the miraculous rise he had hoped for.

French producers turn away from him.

He works thanks to foreign investors.

In 1971, he makes Traffic,

produced in the Netherlands and partly filmed to try to pay off his debts.

What happened?

Traffic is a more modest film than Playtime,

But it offers a unique gaze—both poetic and unsparing...

on the standardized civilisation of the car.

For the only time in all of Tati's work,

Mr. Hulot opens his signature umbrella.

Jacques Tati, will we ever see M. Hulot on screen again?

Yes, yes, yes, I hope so, because I believe that as he gets older,

he's going to become even more eccentric.

And I think at that point, I have nothing to do with the story,

on the contrary, I think we can really let loose as we get older.

In 1973, Tati stages Parade,

produced thanks to Swedish television and filmed at the Stockholm circus.

In front of the camera, he recreates acts from his musical hall performances,

sporting impressions that had made him famous in his youth.

After a long battle, Tati manages to recover the rights to his films,

which are re-released in theatres and find a new audience.

Proof that he hadn't lost his spirit and was still seeking innovation,

Tati decides to shoot new scenes for the canoe sequence in Mr. Hulot's Holiday,

which he integrates 25 years later into the final edit of his film.

Shortly before, Tati had seen Steven Spielberg's Jaws,

which he had found very impressive.

One November night in 1982, Jacques Tati takes his final holiday,

without his final screenplay, Confusion,

which was to open with the death of M. Hulot, ever being filmed.

Shortly before his death, he had declared

"Playtime caused me great suffering,

physically and financially, but it's truly the film I wanted to make.

I'm proud of Playtime, it will always be my finest film."