With a Tati film you can really just, its like a - its like a its an experience to have multiple times.

He's a maverick film maker, he's someone who stands apart.

Its everything that commercial cinema does not have space for but he makes it in his films and that's, that's very precious.

If you don't have the patience for it, then you're never gonna have the patience for it.

You have to just shut-up and listen and watch.

And then when you see the light its like ah!

okay.

And then you can go back again and again and again and again.

Jacques Tati, as he liked to say, was a European cocktail.

His paternal grandfather was a Russian military attaché in Paris.

On the other side of his family he was partly Dutch and partly Italian.

This is all a time and a period, the beginning of the 20th century where people assimilated to a French identity very quickly and he was actually brought up in a throughly French, middle class rather comfortable home to the west of Paris.

He was a rather idle and dreamy sort of boy, he wasn't very good at school.

He seemed to be very happy at home...

He didn't seem set on any, very great career... Tati's father married the daughter of a very famous, well established picture-framer who had premises on the Place Vendôme in the center of Paris.

When Tati was sixteen he was taken on as an apprentice and he started in the family business learning the very slow and painstaking skills of carving ornate frames for classical paintings.

Rugby was the strange route by which Jacques Tati became the Jacques Tati we know.

Tati joined the racing-clubs third rugby team and trained on Thursdays and Fridays and played matches on Saturdays.

In the after match junkets that rugby players have, that Tati started to entertain his fellows by acting out the moves and the passes, and the - the great moments from the match that was played and he taught himself to become a mime... Tati was so good at these after match mimes that when the club held its gala event Tati invented his own act called sporting impressions.

One mime act where he pretends to be a fisherman, one called the boxer's first match, one is the tennis match and then the most famous one, the most spectacular one is the horse and rider where Tati mimes himself riding a horse and where his great long gawky legs seem to be both his own and the horse's.

Thats what he took on the stage when finally he got so bored with being a picture-framer that he just closed the door on his fathers house and set off to earn his living as a Mime in the music-hall.

Mime tries to embrace every aspect of human beings at its best.

Embrace all kinds of different points of view.

You can be old, you can be fat, you can be small, you can be tall.

All the twists on reality, meaning this ability to produce an ideal reality that could be in a painting, could be in a dream.

The thing that Tati does - he reconstructs reality.

What he's showing almost looks like life but its much better, there is more rhythm, more choreography, the characters are hyper precise.

So, in that sense the theatricality, the choreographic theatricality of the film's of Jacques Tati, the first time I saw it I said this is a Mime.

Paris was the avant-garde capital of the world in the 20s and the 30s a new way of doing things was there in theater, it was there in the cubist in Paris, it was there in the music coming out of Paris, it was everywhere, like that.

Even entertainment had took on an air of the avant-garde if you look at the Dadaists and the Surrealists they have that air of music-hall comics and music-hall painters almost in a sense like that.

and I think that Tati fell right into the middle of that.

He went from being someone who entertained his friends, and, you know its fun, little by little as he's was going along he's growing as an artist and next thing you know he starts to see things in that frame of - Ahh, we can try that, and then once he got into that, it is like that artistically its always like that, there is an idea in the air, there is an idea about this and that... what Tati was doing with the- when he would be doing the rugby sketches and things like that is because he had that innate talent inside him of a Mime.

it had to be there.

If he didn't have it, he wouldn't have been what he was.

He would have been a picture framer.

In the1930s, working in the music-hall and making comedy shorts for the cinema, were really the same job.

And Tati with virtual pocket money started trying to make short comic movies.

They weren't very successful but those shorts that have survived because we think that there are probably some that have been lost forever but those that have survived contain little nuggets that we will see reappearing in the post war period.

Tati was performing his sporting impressions routine in one of the few music-hall jobs he could get during the war under the occupation, in occupied Paris.

He was spotted by a producer, a producer of a very important kind who had just agreed to take on Les Enfants du Paradis its a huge historical drama set in the 19th century and its about a mime artist.

Jean-Louis Barrault had sort of been contracted to play the mime in this movie but there were some doubts as to whether he would actually be able to meet his engagements, the producer eyed Tati and thought he would be a very good understudy and perhaps even, was preferable because he was free and available.

In fact that didn't happen and Barrault managed to extricate himself from his other engagements.

But that producer set himself up independently, became a producer of short movies.

One of the first things he thought of doing was getting back this mime he'd seen and nearly hired for the big film.

And that is how Tati's, as it were, second film life began in 1945 with a short film about a country postman.

The comic short about the postman was such a success and so appreciated, Tati got his big break to write and act in a full length movie.

Film director René Clement had originally been hired to direct as the film was going to be written by Tati and also starring Tati, doing his routines but Clement backed out and low and behold there was a vacancy for a director and Tati stepped into it.

And so he filled all these roles on a first time basis, immensely courageous.

Jour de fête is the story of a fair, the village fair, the village of central France the quintessential, totally French, unchanging heart-of-France kind of village.

Much of the film is taken up with the arrival of the fairground, the setting up of the Maypole, the whole frame of the film is just the day of the fair but within that frame it tells the same story as the short film L'Ecole de Factuers, The School for Postman because the village postman is, of course, Jacques Tati with his funny uniform, riding his funny bicycle.

Shooting Jour de fête the team enjoyed themselves enormously and they were being filmed by two cameras.

It was an attempt to make the first french color movie and it was using an entirely new process, one that had never been used before.

But just in case the producer decided to have a back up black and white camera - and thank goodness.

It was a WOW!

A great success in France and then all around the world.

And it put Tati in a position... to do his own thing, he was now a film director as well as an actor and writer.

And he set himself up to make a completely different kind of comedy film.

Mr. Hulot's Holidays is a movie that takes the idea of comedy into a kind of new territory of almost ballet-like, dreamy sequences in which, quite curious and quaint things happen.

Its a quite different kind of a way of making you laugh, not so much at the comedian but at the world.

Chaplin is terribly comical, because he is constantly being clever and getting himself out of scrapes.

Whereas the much dreamier, gentler, innocent Mr. Hulot without meaning to, is forever pushing the world into a scrape.

Its as if, coming 20 or 30 years later Tati is saying well I can be the anti-Chaplin, or perhaps... Its possible to be just as funny as Chaplin by being the opposite of Chaplin.

You don't have to be like that, you don't have to be the clever little fellow.

You can be the tall and useless fellow and create a different kind of comedy movie even so.

Tati has created a kind of concrete symphony in sound that's most unusual in the cinema.

The dialogue, the actual human dialogue is the least important part.

This does come from his background in mime, because it is not true that mime is a completely silent art.

In mime you can also use the plonk of a cello string or the bang of a drum or indeed, many sound effects.

Mr Hulot's Holidays seems to me to be a kind of multiplication of the art of mime, taken to new, complex, lavish heights... LesVacance is just one of the most perfect movies ever made and it was seen as such when it was first shown in Paris, and had a tremendous success in France and all around the world.

And very quickly Tati was an established figure of French cinema, Not part of any cult or a group or movement, just a unique figure there with a film that was popular with children and adults the world over.

He could do anything And he was offered huge contracts to make "Mr. Hulot goes West" in Hollywood, or "Toto é Tati" in Italy, he turned them all down.

He took things slowly.

He wasn't a fast worker by any means and he wanted to wait until he had the next right project.

A gentleman of international reputation, one of Europe's finest comedians.

I am sure a great many of you saw him a couple of years back in his wonderful movie, Mr. Hulot's Holiday and I know that you will get a tremendous kick when you see him in his new picture Its called "My Uncle".

Here he is the director, writer and star of "My Uncle", Jacques Tati.

Bonsoir Monsieur Tati Bonsoir Monsieur Allen, ca va?

Well that will take care of that.

Now we'll switch to my language.

Mr. Tati you are the writer, director and star of your new picture.

Isn't that an awful lot of work?

It is it really is a lot of work.

Well, if so, why do you do it?

Well, because nobody would want to do it, you see.

You couldn't get anybody - well that's a... First can you give the folks a little idea of the story.

Its difficult to say about the story because lots of people find there is no story in my pictures you see.

When I saw My Uncle that was... That was the real mind-blower!

The relationship of the father with his son and the, you know, the uncle they didn't want around necessarily and... but of course he and the son connect.

And there is this... kind of, sad thing with the father and son not connecting.

There's this emotional thing that really kind of, gets me.

The scene there with the boys when they are playing in the scrappy field and they run to find the jam and bread man.

There is this pot-bellied guy with the hot bread and he is spreading the jam and his hands are covered with soot, it's just so, so beautiful...

He's mourning the loss of the old ways and he's announcing the jet-age - here we are.

If you're flicking through channels and you're not even watching the TV you're lets say eating or reading the paper, your flicking through channels and you hit a Tati film you will hear it and you'll know it.

Tati's films are 100% post production meaning 100% of the sound was done after production and that includes the dialogue.

So all the sounds, so they basically would go into a foley stage like this and recreate all the sounds that we hear in the film.

What's important is that they're not just mimicking them mechanically, you know They're interpreting them To give them a comedic effect.

There's three broad movements.

One would be you would do the footsteps.

Then you would do all the cloth movement Separately you would do what is called the props, which would be the bouncing of this pitcher, I tell you this is hard...

The cabinet and then the glass falling.

This is modern stuff, what would Tati - what would be the equivalent in Tati's life time?

He would have used tape He would basically record it to tape, a magnetic tape and then he would have actually had to cut it, physically cut it, like you used to cut film.

What we do is if we layer it, it's called layering, we bring them together we don't know what it's gonna sound like, it is all experimentation Basically we play them And that's that alone, and then together So this is something he would have done, He would have done it differently, he would have slowed down the tape, played it slower, but it's the same concept.

The role sound plays in his films I think is critical because of his visual style, his visual style are these very wide shots, we need to know where to focus our attention.

And instead of editing, like most people do, starting with a wide shot and saying this is the world and then we are going to go and look at, you know, use the editing to focus peoples attention, he's great!

He uses the sound to focus our attention.

So he uses sound in a way that I don't think many, that is completely original.

I don't know any other film maker that uses like that in such an extensive - as part of their whole film aesthetic.

The idea that Mon Oncle was his bid for world cinema status is clearly in his mind from before he began to shoot.

That is really underlined by the fact that he shot the film twice.

The film is shot in French with the school signs in French and all the writing on the roads and the buildings in French.

He then shot it again with all that wiped out and where it says 'ecole' it says 'school'.

And with an English soundtrack, specifically for distribution in America.

Anything that you could possibly say about Jacques Tati its really demonstrated really wonderfully in that film.

You can just focus on one character, or you can focus on the potpourri of sounds that are happening, you can focus in on the gag that's going on or you could focus in on the music, you know what I mean?

You can just watch that in a viewing, its like a great painting or a great book or something you can just keep looking at it over and over.

Who could have wished for more, the result was the 1959 Oscar for best foreign film.

Very few French films had won Oscars by that date and really Jacques Tati became 'Mr French Cinema'.

It could have been an afternoon with Elisabeth Taylor or anything at all, but what he chose and it's really interesting for understanding Tati.

Stars of the silent screen of that earlier pre-Chaplin comedy that had no doubt fed Tati's love of the cinema when he was young and these were all old men now living in old-age homes.

After Mon Oncle, since Tati was now wealthy and could command vast resources he came across the Rolls Royce of all movie devices and that was the 70mm wide technicolor film.

Most feature movies for many many years were made on film that was 35mm wide.

But there was this wonderful toy - a film twice as wide to produce images on huge wide screens They had this panoramic aspect ratio to them.

And it was really the availability or the idea of the widescreen and of a movie in which the spectator would just have to crane and turn his or her neck to see, to be encased in the whole visual experience that led to Tati to formulate and then to firm up on just what this Tati #4 would be.

So I think the idea of the wide screen comes first.

After all wide screen movies of that time were usually Roman chariots or horsemen thundering across and he said - I want to use this huge luxurious technology for something so simple like making the spectator aware that a pin is dropping in that corner and another pin is dropping that corner.

To do something completely anti-spectacular with a spectacular tool.

But to do that, in Tati's mind, you had to have a real set of huge proportions, to fill the big screen.

So, he built a city.

And he built a whole city on waste ground to the south-eastern corner Paris he rented a large amount of ground and he put up studio complex that was extraordinary clever.

The tarmac was real tarmac, the traffic lights were real traffic lights there were roads and everything.

painted and built on little railways that ran back and forth.

This was Tativille and it cost a fortune.

As it went along, I think he really thought that this would be the future studio of France.

And he imagined that the film school would be there and people from all over the world would come visit the set, it was so incredible.

You could do anything there, you could do a musical in the streets, It was the most wonderful modern set.

PlayTime is Tati's masterwork, it was intended as his masterwork from the start, where he could really do what he wanted to do with the cinema.

It's quite hard to explain what he wanted to do if you haven't seen this extraordinary movie.

Tati did not want to use the cinema to tell stories, He wanted to use the cinema as a kind of celebration of the beauty and comedy of the world and not the individual.

This kind of cinema is still to be made.

It is the kind of cinema that invites an active viewer, an active spectator that would engage with the screen and would not be just satisfied with having his or her gaze completely directed, focused on one particular action or one particular element.

WIth Tati you've got a much more free approach to the screen.

There's a lot of sequences which are gratuitous, you know, which is not a term that is well liked in commercial cinema.

And the narrative just stalls and starts and doesn't go anywhere... hesitates, and its inconclusive, its everything that commercial cinema and modern life does not have space for.

He said - I don't want to be Hulot, there are Hulot's in the street, and if you walk out, his idea was, you walk out of PlayTime and you continue to see PlayTime in the street.

PlayTime was planned to be a big movie from the start, to be an expensive movie, to be a movie that would really change the cinema, but fairly early on it became obvious that the film would have to make an immense amount of money to pay back what was either already spent or committed.

His backers got cold feet even half way through the shoot, even before the film was released it had become so difficult that he had to mortgage his own house, that he had committed his mothers money, he had committed his sisters money, everything was in hawk.

The renters of the camera, the 70mm camera they came on the set and just took the lens off the camera and walked off with the lens.

So there was heavy negotiation after that and the lens came back, but I mean everybody just... OK what can you do without the lens?

It was kinda rough, rough moments.

It really is a new completely original and unexpected kind of film and people walked away.

People didn't react.

They didn't understand and they didn't react.

Some people understood but most of them did not.

I think a lot of people watch it now and the sound kind of sends you back a little bit.

It's hard to get into in a way.

To me I link it to the timing in that way In that the timing isn't calibrated to our contemporary pace or way and in that way they are both very... they're more disturbing and odd and a thorn in your side than they kinda get credit for, it seems so trying to disrupt the status quo.

That is so counter, especially film history that came from America, came from Hollywood where it is so protagonist driven and ONE.

You know, one crisis, one man, one issue, one death, one gun... you know, like that.

And something as simple as having a multi-viewer scene its very weird and I think why a lot of people can't really deal with this film.

PlayTime, its life and its so close to reality that is why a lot of people didn't find it funny because it is too close to reality.

People didn't like it, well what he did about that?

Its quite extraordinary is that he came to the cinema where it was showing everyday and shortened it and cut a few frames out and over a period of 8 weeks, trying to get it right for the public the film got shorter and shorter and shorter.

And the version of PlayTime that we now have is just under 2 hours in length, there's 20 missing minutes He was always trying to get approval from the public, but of course now with the time, you know, as the time has gone by, you realize that whatever he could do to cut up or change PlayTime it still would not be understood because because that wasn't the atmosphere of the times.

It was a film that was so futuristic that if you didn't understand it, its not cutting it up or making it shorter that would make any difference.

He wanted the set that he'd built to be used by other film-makers to become a kind of a permanent film-making place like Cinecittà outside Rome.

He really hoped that the French government would keep this and Malraux at the time who was the minister of culture was not interested in film and they wanted to do a clover-leaf highway there so he had to destroy it and it cost him a lot to destroy it.

Financially but also morally it was horrible for him to destroy that.

PlayTime is the most beautiful movie ever made but in 1967 and 1968 it was a disaster.

It was a disaster because the public didn't like it, it was a disaster because the critics sneered at it, it was a disaster because as a result of that, the American distributors didn't buy it and in fact the film still has never had a full US release.

It was a disaster because Tati had borrowed so much money for it that he was quite unable to payback.

He lost all the things that he had put in security against those loans, his own house in St. Germain, his mothers inheritance, his sisters savings.

It really was awful.

And Tati was made penniless.

And yet he had made the film he wanted to make.

It was exactly what he had wanted to do.

I did feel that I was obliged to do PlayTime you see.

I wouldn't like to have just make that movie and be in the cinema only for money.

And if we don't, if a man like me don't do it, well it would be only a business situation and I have done it with free artistic control and free artistic control is something that we must never get out from cinema.

Otherwise there will be nothing new and we always do the same pictures.

He became sick.

Obviously from the disaster, the disappointment.

Of course a failure like that, you know, he felt that it was his fault.

But it is the fact that he was such a visionary, and I think that is the tragedy of all great men, is that they are not understood.

The 1970s is a strange period in Tati's life.

He had to work outside of France because in France he was bankrupt.

The first of these out-of-France projects involved collaborating with a Dutch film maker Bert Haastrsa.

Trafic was going back into the old type of comedy with Hulot being the central character.

He had fun doing Trafic but on an intellectual point of view it was very secondary it was not interesting for him.

Trafic is the absolute end of Mr. Hulot.

He's had an umbrella as one of his permanent props since his first appearance at the seaside in 1952.

He keeps his umbrella when he rides his little mobylette around Paris in Mon Oncle in 1958.

He keeps his umbrella even when stalking the corridors of the vast conglomerate business in PlayTime but it never rains.

But in the end of Trafic, finally, it comes down and Mr. Hulot for the first and last time puts up his umbrella.

I think Tati knew what he was doing there that this... this is his farewell.

Once that umbrella is unfurled then it's no longer Mr. Hulot and that's the end.

Trafic was a modest success, it wasn't a total disaster.

After Trafic, Tati was contacted by some young people working for Swedish TV who had the crazy idea of getting Tati to make a series of comedy TV programs for Sweden.

I say its a crazy idea because Tati scorned television, he'd always felt that it was beneath him.

And eventually a plan emerged, it was quite different from the original idea of 'Tati TV' and it involved hiring a circus, a real circus in the centre of Stockholm, its called Parade, which is a French circus word, can't really translate it into English.

Tati the master of ceremonies in the top hat and the tails bringing in circus acts from the music-hall network that even all those years later Tati had remained faithful to, remained in touch with.

And it is a circus performance, with a lot attention paid to the audience as well as to the acts that are in the ring.

And of course, the star turn is, the master of ceremonies' own music-hall circus act.

Tati does the act that first made him famous way back in 1935-36, that mime act of being the horse and rider at the same time, its very moving to see him exit at the end of this act with the spot light on him.

You can feel both that he is still the man that he was but he is getting old.

And in fact we know post-history is that actually after that take he passed out and spent a day in hospital just recovering from the sheer exhaustion of it.

I think he was a very courageous man, I can't say that he would let himself wallow in depression at all.

He was ill for ten years and fought that.

What an example of courage to have written a script, the last script, called Confusion that he knew, deep inside, he knew he would never make.

He had this project called Confusion.

He thought we could be perfect for.

The thing about him that impressed us was that we were able to see when we met him how his films and how what he did in his films came to be.

In his films there is a lot of both being in an environment and also kind of being an outsider and an onlooker of the environment.

And he was doing that in real life all the time, he would take the subway or the bus to get to wherever we might be meeting and just looking at people.

All the while that we were aware of his situation where, the unfortunate situation that he didn't have access to lots of money.

Even to this day we're kinda, you kinda think - well, where are all the patrons of the arts that could have helped him make yet another film?

And its just disappointing.

There were health issues that were also entering into the situation too.

And that we were becoming aware of so not only was there the financial side but there was his health issues.

And then it had gotten on for several years then had passed, and then one day I think what we had heard was just that Tati had died.

Without the long devotion of Sophie Tatischeff to her father's work we wouldn't have what we have now.

After Tati's death his affairs were in an awful mess, sorting out the affairs of a bankrupt father is not easy for a daughter.

I don't think he's got a very cinematographic way to work Tati he is a painter, he's a guy who is framing an action, its closer to stage than it is actually to cinema, its never any closer, camera moves a little and you always see the feet of the characters and that's really something he was doing stage as well.

Like in theater you've got a big frame, you see all the background, all the characters and yourself you do your own editing, you do your own close-ups.

So its really interesting the way that people when they are viewing Jacques Tati's films they actually participate.

Tati pays attention to the small things, he makes lots of small details and maybe some people miss it.

Even you're watching in the big screen or in your daily life, there are so many funny moments in your life but he watches that and he brings it to the film.

The most obvious reference to Tati in my own work is in the PowerPuff Girls.

I wanted them to live in a normal neighbourhood but have a very odd modern house that stuck out from everybody.

And as soon as I started it I was just like - I'm going to make it the Arpel's House That's the best looking modern house that I've ever seen.

I've got to make it the Arpel's House, so the PowerPuff Girls live in the Arpel's House its just I've added one more round window.

So every single episode there is a slight tribute to Tati.

Its like a feeling or an emotional state that's sort of imbued throughout his work that is hard to point out, but I know that I idenified with and again found comfort that there's someone else that knew about that place and could talk about it and even have it in a film.

So its like a little, small, anti-lonely pill watching one of his films.

♪ Dance the Jacques Tati ♪ ♪ Now we must all try and understand ♪ ♪ The films of Jacques Tati ♪ So let's declare it a dance ♪ And carry on the legacy ♪ ♪ Dance the Jacques Tati ♪ Dance the Jacques Tati Some of my songs are just cliff notes for a particular film or a film maker in the case of the Jacques Tati song, its like Oh, OK I've got this Jacques Tati thing I want to tell you about and I've only got 2 minutes to tell you so here it is.

♪ Dance the Jacques Tati Part Russian, part Italian, part Dutch but absolutely French, A creator who in a sense has left no legacy, because nobody can ever make movies like that or in that way again.

A legacy that is not real because nobody could imitate or pretend to be Mr. Hulot.

It just doesn't work and nobody would want to.

But the legacy is even more important than a school or a tradition.

Tati has educated us all and even if we don't realize it we now have ways of looking at the world, ways of smiling at the world that came to us first through Tati's unique vision and unique skill in using the arts of the cinema, of sight and sound and music and acting and mime and music-hall to make the world look, well, funny but also, not a threatening place.