"My Uncle"
"Mr. Hulo's Holiday"
《Festival》
"Traffic Accident"
◎ Black Selection Ming
"Silent Laugher" is an underestimation of Jacques Tati
Mr. Appel, a senior member of the plastics company, complained to his wife that his brother-in-law Yu luo had nothing to do all day and took our son out all day to go out to the wilderness, which would bring the child to ruin. The wife said, "All my brother needs is a goal. "She means a stable job, a stable family and so on. However, that was exactly what Yu luo did not need the most.
"My Uncle" (1959), the opening film of this year's Jacques Tati retrospective, still attracts laughter. It is worth mentioning that the movie tickets for the six films in this retrospective exhibition were sold out almost at the first time, and the tickets for "Playtime" were sold out in just a few minutes. It is no wonder that the French Cultural Counsellor is so precious in his speech, only those who really understand cinema can be as comfortable as he says, this is the real cultural self-confidence.
"Silent Laughter" is the title of this film festival, but it also inadvertently reveals that professional academic film festivals need professional guidance, and the understanding of Tati has yet to be deepened. The title reflects the superficial conclusion that is easy to draw at first glance at tati's films: "silent" refers to the silent film comedy style; "Laughter" positions him as a film director of a certain genre. However, neither direction points to the essence of Tati's film, or rather, underestimates Tati's significance.
A "can't finish" movie
Perhaps because Tati movies are the kind of films that can't be seen once – it's naturally uncomfortable for audiences who are used to fast food movies today and watching world famous books in three-minute short videos. Each shot of Tati's film is designed with a wealth of detail, and there are usually several layers of story working in a shot at the same time, so many details that it completely deviates from traditional cinema.
Some people say that his next few films are good, but in fact, he has shown extraordinary scene scheduling ability since the beginning of "Festival", and for movies like "Playtime", I am afraid that I will have to see more than five times to see the passage of "Royal Garden Restaurant" completely, because each time our eyes can only take care of a few of them. Similarly, many of the comedic images in this film are usually seen several times before we can grasp them, which brings the surprise of "waking up from a dream", because the first time we watch it, we will ignore it - this technique is much like what Shklovsky calls "defamiliarization".
This technique is already evident in Mr. Hulo's Vacation, where Mr. Hulo seems bored to watch a lot of things we are accustomed to, for example, the window opens automatically in the background — but a novel sense of humor happens here, as Godard puts it, Tati's comedic feeling comes from his feelings of singularization (i.e., defamiliarization). But the audience doesn't always get a feel for him. For example, at the beginning of Playtime, the audience rarely notices the confusion between the hospital and the airport — we haven't had time to get into Tati's game yet. For another example, the staff of the travel agency signaled mr. Yu Luo to let go, they were going to close the door after work, he pulled down the roller shutter door, and when he bent down to the doorknob, the two doorknobs looked like the two horns he suddenly grew, which surprised Mr. Yu Luo. And the vast majority of the audience won't notice this – their eyes are already busy looking at something else... There are so many similar shots that we can summarize this as "humorous situations that the audience ignores."
Not only that, but Tati's films have plenty of "potential humorous situations" — such as Mr. Hulo kicking a sponge, which he thought was cheese, and putting it on the counter — and the audience who noticed it naturally expected someone to buy it, but the audience's expectations didn't happen. Similar details can be said to be very many in Tati's films, so many that they hinder and delay the "funny" of the film itself, because once the audience thinks about it, it will become serious, and this is the most positive meaning of the European laughing culture tradition - Tati film has created a new film form that cannot be defined by "comedy film". If you look at it in the context of the "funny film" as you usually understand it, then the Tati movie is not "funny", and from the perspective of the "laughing artist", the audience satisfaction will not be very high.
"French Chaplin"? wrong!
However, Jacques Tati undoubtedly belongs to the list of the greatest masters of cinema (if there are only ten places), and his creative peak overlaps with that of the French New Wave, but he completely surpasses the New Wave; he is approachable, never showing a avant-garde appearance, but undoubtedly more avant-garde than the avant-garde. Duras makes sense to juxtapose Tati and Godard as "most worthwhile" directors. Such an artist is usually recognized many years later, when Playtime failed at the box office and won an award in the director's hometown of Moscow (Tati has Russian ancestry), but today no one as a serious film critic dares to despise him.
Therefore, it is completely inappropriate to refer to Tati as "French Chaplin". Not only because among the previous masters of comedy, Tati had little interest in Chaplin — he privately shupped Buster Keaton, but Buster Keaton may have only influenced him on the level of expression, body control, and other performances. Tati films are not genre films at all, and no comedy genre film can have as many empty shots as "Mr. Hulo's Holiday"—like Ozu Yasujiro's films.
While parody can be extremely elegant in the European comedy tradition, and the art of clowns is often the most profound tragedy, the genre of the film industry has undoubtedly hindered this. Both Chaplin and Keaton are part of Hollywood's industrial assembly line, which makes the audience almost completely deprived of other viewing skills.
And Tati has undoubtedly constructed a new tradition. It implied a new cinematic possibility that has so far been little realized. It's so far ahead: Or take Playtime, for example, which can almost be seen as a web browsing — Mr. Hulot is the navigation system, through which we see a dizzying array of information on the page, and the director throws out so many tricks of the game, and most of it is "unfinished", such as the cheese example mentioned above – so that the audience can participate in it as much as today's gamers, which is similar to the way we "watch" on the Internet. In fact, browsing the web and constantly finding new points of interest is exhausting – needless to say, watching Playtime is indeed exhausting, but not because it is dull or incomprehensible, but because the sheer volume of details that attract our attention constantly stimulates our conscious system, and playing games excessively is absolutely exhausting us – which is why Playtime cannot be watched in one screening.
Did Mr. Yu Luo "lie flat"?
But this in no way means that Tati is a formist that the public thinks. Rather, true "formalism" is about reaching a new understanding of life with the viewer (the reader). Mr. Hulo looks like a somewhat outdated middle-aged man who has "laid flat" in advance, as if "let it go", but in fact his pipe, old Barken trench coat, bow tie, and short pants are just a deceptive disguise.
On the surface, Mr. Hulo is only an observer or even a wanderer of life, but it may be the opposite. The postman François and the car designer Mr. Hulot are the same person - they are people who never have a playful or sophisticated attitude, but with the greatest goodwill to be deeply involved in life and work, and they are rare people who do not follow the trend.
The only people who really do things seriously in "Traffic Accident" are Mr. Yu Luo and the female publicist (maybe that's why they finally came together?). François, the postman in "The Festival", is precisely the most honest man in the whole town. A large part of the film's joy comes from the absurdity of the pomp and circumstance surrounding their honest encounters. In "Traffic Accident", Mr. Yu Luo bravely rescued the wounded on the road, sent him to his home late at night, and accidentally ripped off the vines of the entire façade of the house because the door had been unanswered for a long time. The joy happens when Mr. Yulo has to restore the vines to their original state after doing a good job, so he climbs the tree - the body language he strives for is part of comedy, and the other part is that just at this time, the son of the injured person comes here with a female publicist (looking for Yuluo). Mr. Hulo in the tree tries not to make a sound, because he thinks that something is going to happen to this beautiful pair of handsome men, but what he sees is that this fashionable girl firmly refuses the other party's courtship, she is not a casual girl at all, and at the beginning of the film we may have this stereotype (a fashionable, hippie-style American girl). And such comedic scenes are obviously an important propeller of the film's hidden emotional line.
If we see some social issues in these films, or the symptoms of modernity (especially "Playtime"), it is Mr. Hulo's gentle reminder.
Perhaps we can compare the fundamental difference between Tati and Chaplin at this point. As we all know, Chaplin films are considered to be of a strong social or even class issue, and in some historical contexts, they will be considered to represent "progress". His iconic character, the tramp Charlot, is often considered "insulted and damaged" and is often self-substituted by the viewer (of course, Chaplin's own class and wealth are another matter entirely). But what we tend to overlook is that Charlo's eyes are cunning, he can do whatever it takes to achieve his ends, that is, he can act for "reasonable purposes", and whether such actions will hurt others or even bring bloodshed is beyond his consideration.
The postman, François or Mr. Hulot, was not. This involves a fundamental understanding of freedom: true freedom is the freedom to be able to do it without harming others. The freedom to keep others unfree is questionable. There is a funny scene in "Festival": François helps the jugglers who come to the town to perform at the festival to erect the stake in the middle of the carousel, but the sledgehammer always can't smash the nail of the base, it turns out that he is a squint, so he always smashes to the other side - the tall and rough François quickly dropped the stake in a different direction - this time it went smoothly, everything was resolved so gently. It's funny, and at the same time it's not embarrassing, and it has a gentleness — that's Tati.
Mr. Hulo is not the "unlucky egg" of traditional comedy, he is the "destroyer" – destroying and then reorganizing. His "destruction" was actually to help. The biggest scene of destruction in "Playtime" - Mr. Hulo pulled down the newly renovated ceiling of the restaurant, and the whole restaurant was in chaos, but because of this, these reserved tourists really entered the "playtime" to release themselves - before they came to Paris seemed to be just to take pictures. What bad heart can Mr. Yu Luo have... Did he have to "criticize" anything, whether it was people or social phenomena? Perhaps this criticism comes more from our own understanding of the audience.
"My Uncle" has a subtle satire on the middle class, but Mr. Appel is not the object of Mr. Hu luo's criticism, the main reason for Mr. Hu Luo's existence in this story is to make the gap between Mr. Andel's father and son disappear, to reconcile father and son, and when Mr. Appel learns to be naughty with his son (we can see this as Yu Luo's inspiration), the moment when his son takes the initiative to hold his father's big fat hand, Uncle Hu Luo has left and taken the train to the provinces.
"Silent"?
He was a modernist master of sound
The use of "silent" for Tati films can easily lead to misunderstandings. Because sound happens to be a characteristic of Tati – he is a modernist master who consciously uses sound. For the audience, Tati films are an art that needs to be re-learned to listen. In Mr. Hulo's Vacation, the use of voiceover and noise is brilliant. Sound is no less important than any of the actors, and it has an important narrative function (think of the scene on the tennis court).
In Playtime, the use of sound is even greater than the average comedy audience can accept. There is a lot of sound and picture misalignment in this film, and the sense of humor caused by this misalignment is exactly where the director intends. In addition, in this film, the sound seems to have a suspended, plastic feeling. Human voices (greetings), footsteps, noise, and broadcast sounds have all been "defamiliarized" by Tati. Not only that, but there are also many voices of tourists who do not appear in the image at all. They also provide a lot of humorous details – this is another specialized research topic.