Jacques Tati (1908–1982) was the great comedian of French film, probably the greatest movie mime and visual comic since Chaplin and Keaton. Like Robert Bresson, Tati worked slowly, controlling every detail of his films himself from script to cutting; also like Bresson, Tati refused to compromise with either technicians or producers. As a result, though his first film appearance occurred as early as 1932, Tati made only six feature films. Like Chaplin and Keaton, Tati came to films from the music hall. Before taking to the stage, however, he took to sport — tennis, boxing, soccer. And Tati's comedy often combined the athletic field and the music hall. But he was sensitive not only to the comic possibilities of his body but also to the visually comic possibilities of film.

Also like Chaplin and Keaton, Tati played essentially the same character in each of his pictures. That character is inevitably a loner, an outsider, a charming fool whose human incompetence is preferable to the inhuman competence of the life around him. Tati's Monsieur Hulot (even the name recalls Charlot) merely goes about his business, totally unaware that the world around him has gone mad and that his naïve attention to his own affairs turns its orderly madness into comic chaos. Again like Chaplin and Keaton, Tati's Hulot neither looks nor moves like anyone else in the universe. He leans forward at an oblique angle — battered hat atop his head, pipe thrusting from his mouth, umbrella dangling at his side, trouser cuffs hanging two inches above his shoes — an odd human construction of impossible angles, off-center and off-kilter.

In his first feature film, Jour de fête (1949, right), Tati plays a village postman who, struck by the "modern, efficient" methods he sees in a short documentary on the American postal system, decides to streamline his own operations. The satiric theme that runs through all of Tati's work — the coldness, even inefficiency and wastefulness, of modern technology — is already well developed, but, more importantly, so is the visual style. Many of the gags in Jour de fête depend on the use of frame-lines and foreground objects to obscure the comic event — not so as to punch home the gag, but to hide and purify it, so to speak, to force the spectator to intuit and sometimes invent the joke for himself.

Tati took four years to make his next film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), which introduced the character he was to play for the rest of his career — an apparently traditional, easygoing, middle-class gentleman who comes to spend a conventional week at a completely conventional middle-class resort. However, Hulot's troubles with bathers on the beach, with his sputtering car, with a violently bucking horse, even with the twang of the hotel's dining-room door, and, finally, with a warehouse full of fireworks, reduce the conventional, routine-driven tourist resort to unconventional hysteria. Tati's comic attack thus exposes the resort — supposedly a place devoted to leisure and fun — as the domain of the dull, the monotonous, the dead. Monsieur Hulot is the force that converts this dead place of play into a genuine funhouse by bombarding it with uncanny objects, sounds, and movements. We in the movie theatre, like those few vacationers who take the time to notice Hulot's spontaneous, disruptive activities, also discover what genuine, active fun really is. The warmth of Hulot's characterization, plus the radiant inventiveness of the sight gags, made Les Vacances an international success, yet the film already suggests Tati's dissatisfaction with the traditional idea of the comic star. Hulot is not a comedian in the sense of being the source and focus of the humor; he is, rather, an attitude, a signpost, a perspective that reveals the humor in the world around him.

Mon Oncle (1958), Tati's first film in color, features Monsieur Hulot again — this time as an old-fashioned, simple, mild-mannered uncle of a family of upper-middle-class suburbanites. Here, Hulot's traditional and somewhat archaic lifestyle in an old quarter of Paris is contrasted with the antiseptic and mechanistic environment of his brother-in-law, Arpel, who lives in an ultramodern house in the city's new suburban wasteland and works as an executive in a plastics factory. Hulot's unaffected ways naturally clash with the complicated machinery of his suburban relatives' lives: their fancy gadgets that open the garage doors and kitchen shelves; their bizarrely shaped furniture that is designed for everything but comfort and function; their gravel-lined, flagstone-paved "garden" that is suitable for everything except growing things and enjoying the sun. In this struggle of humanity versus the artifact, the gadgets win the battle (as they always do in physical comedy), but Monsieur Hulot wins the satirical war.

Tati's next film, Playtime (1967), took him three years to complete and was shot in color and 70mm Panavision with five-track stereophonic sound. Here Tati offers a series of quietly humorous vignettes about a group of American tourists who come to see the "real" Paris and end up experiencing a space-age city of steel, glass, chrome, and plastic. Hulot was now merely one figure among many, weaving in and out of the action much like the Mackintosh man in Joyce's Ulysses. Widely regarded today as a modernist masterpiece, Playtime is a film not of belly laughs but of sustained, intelligent humor, and it clearly represents Tati's finest achievement.

As in Les Vacances, the underlying theme of Playtime (right) is the creative use of leisure and the genuine fun that can result from active perception rather than the passive acceptance of planned or canned routines. The American tourists of Playtime parallel the vacationers in Les Vacances, and in Playtime they eventually do have fun, despite their overly packaged tour, simply by observing the oddities of Hulot and, even more important, the surprising oddities of the world itself. Like Les Vacances, Playtime is very much about itself, about our having fun by watching a film closely and by finding its comic inventions for ourselves rather than being fed them by a pre-packaging film director. Indeed, this is a motion picture that liberates and revitalizes the act of looking at the world. Its geometric modern city planned and constructed by Tati himself, Playtime invites us to explore its vast spaces without a dictatorial guide. Just as Tati the actor refuses to use his character to guide the audience through the film, so does Tati the director refuse to use close-ups, emphatic camera angles, or montage to guide the audience to the humor in the images. Playtime is composed almost entirely of long-shot tableaux that leave the viewer free to pick up the gags that may be occurring in the foreground, the background, or off to the side. The film in this way returns an innocence of vision to the spectator, for no value judgments have been made or hierarchies of interest been established for him.

Playtime was a multimillion-dollar commercial failure, however, and since he had financed it himself, the director was nearly bankrupted. To recoup his losses, Tati made Traffic (1970), a minor Hulot film that comments upon the auto mania of modern industrial society. His last work was Parade (1974), a sixty-minute children's film made for Swedish television that featured Tati performing pantomimes at a circus show. After this, he developed the scenario for another Hulot film to be called Confusion but was unable to find backing for it. Although Jacques Tati had made only six features when he died at the age of seventy-four, in their blend of social satire, wry charm, imaginative physical gags, and ingenious aural as well as visual devices, these movies have not been surpassed by those of any other postwar cinematic comic — French or otherwise. Moreover, they deserve to be ranked with the greatest of silent film comedies.

The following essay by Bazin (below) was first published in Esprit in 1953 and then reprinted in Volume 1 ("Ontologie et langage") of Bazin's Qu'est-ce que le cinéma (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958, pp. 109-116). "Monsieur Hulot and Time" is one of the first serious considerations, if not the very first one, of Jacques Tati as a film artist. It is translated into English here for the first time with the written permission of his late wife, Janine Bazin.

It is commonplace to note how little genius for the comic there is in French cinema — and it has been like this now for at least the last thirty years or so. In this context, it is appropriate to recall that it was in France where, in the early years of the twentieth century, slapstick comedy — which found its exemplary personification in Max Linder — was born, the very school of comedy whose formula Max Sennett took with him back to Hollywood. There it flourished to an even greater extent, since it enabled the growth of actors such as Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and above all Charlie Chaplin. But we know that Chaplin himself recognized his master in Max Linder. Nevertheless, French silent comedy, if we exclude the final films of Linder produced in Hollywood, didn't last for long past the year 1914, surpassed as it was by the overwhelming, justified success of American film comedy. Since the emergence of the talkies, even apart from Chaplin's achievement, Hollywood has remained the master of comic cinema: first in the physical, visual tradition, revived and enriched by W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and even, on a different level, Laurel and Hardy, and then in a new genre that emerged which was similar to the theater: screwball comedy.

In France, by contrast, the spoken word served almost no purpose except to tempt disastrous adaptations of comedies from the Boulevard theater. If one wonders what or who, in the way of film comedy, has emerged since the 1930s in our country, we're almost limited to only two actors: Raimu and Fernandel. But strangely, these two superstars of laughter have made almost nothing but bad movies. If there hadn't been Marcel Pagnol and the six or so passable films we owe to him [Regain (1937), Le Schpountz (1938), La fille du puisatier (1940), Naïs (1945), Topaze (1950), and Carnaval (1953)], you couldn't cite a single picture worthy of these two stars' talent. (There is the possible exception of the curious and little known Francis the First [1937], by Christian-Jaque; and, for good measure, let's add to the list of notable comic performers the likeable but lightweight Noël-Noël.) It is significant in this regard that after the failure of Le Dernier Milliardaire (above) in 1934, René Clair left the French studios first for England and then for Hollywood. Thus one sees that what was missing in French cinema was not gifted actors but a style, a comedic conception, which only a director of Clair's caliber could provide.

It is by design that I neglected to mention above the only original effort made in an attempt to regenerate the French tradition in comedy. I allude to the work of the Prévert brothers, Jacques and Pierre. Certain people wanted to see a renaissance of comic cinema in their films L'Affaire dans le Sac (1932), Adieu Léonard (1943), and Voyage-Surprise (1947). These were great and uncompromising works, it was said, if only we could understand them correctly. But I can no more convince myself of the worth of these movies than could the public that turned away from them at the time of their release. They are interesting attempts, certainly, and in every way on behalf of a sympathetic cause, but all three were destined for failure by their intellectualism. That is to say, with the Préverts, the joke is always an idea whose visualization comes a posteriori, in such a way that it isn't funny until you make the mental leap from visual gag to intellectual intention.

This is also why one of our best comic illustrators, Maurice Henry, has never managed to conquer the cinema as a gag writer. To the overly intellectual structure of a gag that does not induce laughter except by ricochet, he, like the Préverts, found it necessary to add the kind of grating humor that requires an unearned complicity on the part of the viewer. But filmic comedy (undoubtedly like that of the theater) cannot work without a certain communicative generosity; the private joke is not its cup of tea, if you will. Only one film I can think of, proceeding from this type of (let's call it) Prévertian humor, approaches anything like success: Bizarre Bizarre (1937). But another influence comes into play here as well, for in this picture Marcel Carné usefully remembers Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928), itself inspired by English humor.

Into this impoverished tableau from film history, Jour de fête (right) inserted itself with a success that was as unexpected as it was exceptional. We know the backstory of this film, made almost in haste and for very little money, and which no distributor would touch. It was the blockbuster of the year, however, and it brought in ten times its initial cost. All of a sudden, Jacques Tati became famous. But everyone was wondering whether the success of Jour de fête wouldn't artistically exhaust its author. This original work was composed of sensational comic turns, no doubt, although it did mine precisely the vein of ore better known as silent film comedy. On the one hand, we told ourselves that if Tati had such genius he shouldn't have let it vegetate, as he did, in the music halls for twenty years; on the other hand, the very originality of Jour de fête inspired the fear that its director would not be capable of a second film to match it. What we would get would inevitably be other adventures of the popular mailman in the tradition of Fernandel's Don Camillo [in five films from 1952 to 1965], which would only serve to make us regret that Tati hadn't had the wisdom to quit while he was ahead.

Now, not only did Tati fail to exploit the character that he had created and whose popularity was a gold mine, but he also took four years to give us another film, which, far from suffering by comparison, relegated Jour de fête to the status of an elementary first draft. Only the second of Tati's feature films, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot nonetheless cannot be overestimated. It is not only the most important cinematic comedy since the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, it is also a signal event in the history of sound film. Like all great comedians, before making us laugh, Tati creates a universe on screen. From the beginning, a world organizes itself around his character and then crystallizes, like an oversaturated solution, around the grain of salt that has been thrown in. Certainly, the character Tati creates is funny, but in an almost accessory fashion, and in any case always relative to the universe he inhabits. Mr. Hulot himself could personally be absent from the most comical of his gags, because he is nothing but the metaphysical incarnation of a disorder that continues long after his departure.

Nevertheless, if one wants to begin with the character, one sees immediately that his originality, in contrast with the tradition of commedia dell'arte, resides in a sort of incompleteness. The typical figure from the commedia dell'arte represents a comic essence whose function is clear and always the same. Contrarily, the peculiarity of Mr. Hulot lies in his not daring to exist completely. He is an ambling, indeterminate man, an unassuming being, who elevates timidity to the level of an ontological principle. But, of course, the lightness of touch Mr. Hulot uses on the world will be the precise cause of a number of catastrophes, because he never acts according to the rules of moral propriety and social efficiency. Mr. Hulot has a genius for the inopportune, let us call it.

This is not to say that he is awkward and clumsy. On the contrary, Mr. Hulot is full of grace; he is a kind of angel, and the disorder that he brings is one filled with freedom and exuberance as well as compassion. Indeed, it is significant that the only characters in Les Vacances (right) who are similarly both gracious and amicable are children. Yet they by themselves cannot embody the spirit of vacation. That is left to Mr. Hulot, who doesn't surprise or scare them, for he is their brother: always available and, like children, ever ignoring the shams of life's game and its elevation of duty over devotion, of work over pleasure. If there is just one dancer at a masked ball, that will be Mr. Hulot, blithely indifferent to the vacuum that has been created around him. And if someone has a storage room filled with old fireworks, it will be Mr. Hulot's match that lights all the fuses.

But what would Mr. Hulot be without vacation? We can easily imagine a career, at least an occupation, for each of the temporary inhabitants of the strange beach in Les Vacances, but we cannot do so for Mr. Hulot. We could assign an origin to each of the cars and trains that converge at the start of the film, at this city-by-the-sea, and which invade the place all at once as if by a mysterious signal from outer space. But Mr. Hulot's Amilcar is ageless and really does come out of nowhere; in fact, it transcends Time. We can even imagine that Mr. Hulot himself disappears for ten months of the year and then reappears spontaneously, in a kind of jump cut, on the first of July, when the alarm clocks finally stop and, in certain privileged places on the French coast and in the countryside as well, a provisional time creates itself, between parentheses as it were — a duration softly whirling, closing in upon itself, like the cycle of oceanic tides. This is Time for the repetition of useless gestures, for minimal mobility, and especially for stasis at the siesta hour. But it is also ritual Time, given a rhythm by the vain liturgy of idle pleasure more rigorous than the work of any office hour.

Such a conception of Time is the reason why it is impossible to have a "script" for Mr. Hulot. A story presupposes a direction that goes from cause to effect, a beginning and an end from which can be derived an overarching meaning. Les Vacances, however, cannot be anything other than a succession of events at once wholly coherent and dramatically independent. Each one of the hero's adventures and misadventures should therefore begin with the caption "Mr. Hulot at some other time." Without a doubt, up to this point in the history of cinema, Time has never been the basic material, almost the very object, of a film. Even better and even more so than in films that experiment with "real time," Les Vacances (below) illuminates the temporal dimension of human existence.

In this universe on vacation, timed actions look absurd. Mr. Hulot is never on time for anything, precisely because he is immersed in the fluidity of Time, whereas others fiercely try to establish a meaningless order out of Time: the kind of order provided, for example, by the rhythmic click of a restaurant's swinging door. But these people succeed only at lengthening Time, as do a bunch of marshmallows slowly roasting over the fire of a confectioner's grill, tormenting us as we wait for them to be finished. Mr. Hulot is the Sisyphus of this roasted confection, a man whose very mortality perpetually makes way for his reincarnation.

More than the images, however, it is the soundtrack that gives Les Vacances its temporal weight. This is Tati's biggest discovery and, technically, his most original. It has been said, and wrongly so, that the film's soundtrack was created by a sort of sonorous magma on which the occasional, indistinct phrase or snatch of conversation floats along. But this is only the impression received by an inattentive ear. In fact, indistinct sound elements are quite rare in this picture (like the announcements on the train station's loud-speakers, but there the joke is realistic). On the contrary, Tati's shrewdness consists entirely in destroying clarity through clarity. The dialogue is in no way incomprehensible, but it is insignificant, and its insignificance is revealed by its very clarity. Tati achieves such an effect, above all, by playing with the relationship between sound levels, occasionally even going so far as to include the sound of an off-screen scene in an on-screen, silent one.

Generally speaking, Tati's sound "décor" is composed of realistic elements: bits of dialogue, random shouts, and diverse reflections, none of which is housed in a strictly dramatic situation. And it is in relationship to this sonorous background that an untimely noise can take on an absolutely unreal dimension. For instance, in the evening at the hotel, where guests read, talk quietly, or play cards: Hulot plays ping-pong instead, and his celluloid ball makes a disproportionate noise, smashing through this half-silence like a billiard ball; at each rebound, in fact, it seems to grow louder and louder. Thus at the base of this film there are authentic sounds, actually recorded in a hotel or on a beach, on which artificial sounds — no less precise than the rest but consistently off-the-wall — are made to impose themselves. From the combination of this realism and formalism is born the eminently sonorous inanity of Hulot's world, which is nonetheless undeniably human.

Without a doubt, the sheerly physical aspect of speech, its anatomy if you will, has never been so mercilessly brought to the fore as in Les Vacances. Accustomed to the meaning of such speech even when it does not really have any, we do not step back from it with irony in the same way we do for sight. Here words walk around naked with a gorgeous indecency, unfettered by the social complicity that once dressed them up with an illusory dignity. One imagines some of these words coming out of the radio like a string of red balloons, others condensing into little clouds over people's heads and then moving through the air by will of the wind to lodge right under someone's nose. Yet the worst thing is that these words do indeed have a definable meaning, a sustained attention to which — accompanied by an effort to eliminate all adventitious noises, in part by closing one's eyes to them — ends up restoring them to their original function. It also happens that Tati surreptitiously weaves completely extraneous sound into this sonorous twine, without our ever even thinking of protesting. Thus in the sound effect of fireworks, though it is difficult to hear if one doesn't try hard, one can identify the sound of a bombardment.

It is the sound, then, that in the end gives Mr. Hulot's universe its weight, its moral dimension. Ask yourself where, at the end of Les Vacances, the intense sadness, the disproportionate disenchantment, comes from, and you might find that it is from the sound — in this case the sound of silence. Throughout the film, the shouts of playing children have inevitably accompanied our view of the beach, and, for the first time, the kids are silent, their silence signifying the end of summer vacation. Mr. Hulot, for his part, remains alone, ignored by his hotel companions, who will not forgive him for having ruined their fireworks display. He approaches two of the departing children and exchanges a few fistfuls of sand with them. Then, quietly, his friends come to say goodbye to him, as does the old Englishwoman who kept score at the tennis matches, the child of the man on the telephone, the strolling husband: all those individuals in whom, alone among the crowd connected with Mr. Hulot's vacation, a small flame of poetry and liberty still burned. The supreme delicacy of this ending without a definitive dénouement is not unworthy of Chaplin at his best.

Like all major comedies, Les Vacances achieves its success as the result of cruel observation. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem — and this may be the surest sign of the film's greatness — that Tati's comedy is pessimistic, at least no more so than any of Chaplin's movies. His character maintains, against the world's obdurateness, an incorrigible lightness of being. That is, Mr. Hulot is proof that the unexpected or the incongruous can always occur and disrupt the order of imbeciles, in the process transforming an inner tube into a funeral wreath, or a mournful burial into a pleasurable celebration . . . of life.