The Jacques Tati Collection

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knives
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#101 Post by knives » Sat May 04, 2013 10:04 pm

Gregory wrote:Je ne comprends pas.
I don't think anyone would deny that Playtime is a film featuring a number of different stories with some loosely connected characters. Likewise it is hard to deny that much of the mastery of the film comes from how Tati uses the frame to tell these stories in the same instant. We may in a dinner party have Hulot fudging around confused about something or other while a man and woman are arguing in an upper corner and a waiter is desperately trying to fulfill an order for a disgruntled client.

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MichaelB
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#102 Post by MichaelB » Sun May 05, 2013 4:52 am

TMDaines wrote:Christ, I thought exactly the same when I watched it last week, but decided against posting. It's kind of the same for the next two Tatis too. I read in one of the booklets that Tati refused to have his films subtitled initially, as he felt it lended the dialogue too much importance. However, if you're going to subtitle the films then at least do it properly.
Given that the BFI is normally extremely conscientious about these things, there's every chance that they're respecting the wishes of Tati and his estate - it's certainly true that Tati was famously/notoriously antipathetic towards subtitles.

For a parallel example, when I watched Edition Filmmuseum's DVD of Straub/Huillet's Class Relations a few years ago, I originally thought that the subtitles were woefully inadequate - and bafflingly so, as the rest of the package could hardly be more English-friendly. But then I discovered that Danièle Huillet personally insisted on a bare-bones précis rather than a full translation, as she wanted the audience to listen to the dialogue and watch the actors' delivery as opposed to constantly reading the bottom of the screen, even if it meant that they might not understand everything that was going on. I don't think my German had quite so much of a workout since I sat the O-level exam a quarter of a century earlier!

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manicsounds
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#103 Post by manicsounds » Sun May 05, 2013 8:42 am

I guess I could understand that Tati would want limited subtitles, as much as possible, so the physical comedy could play out for the eyes.

But considering DVDs or Blu-rays I wish there was an option for multiple English subtitles, one "approved by Tati" original theatrical subs and one fully translated subtitles. I just felt there was quite a lot of minor things I missed out since I don't know any French, even if it was just incidental stuff.

I know Criterion's "Knife In The Water" also had subtitles which were not fully translated, but this was translated and approved by Polanski himself, who wanted the viewers eyes to see the performances and nuances more than the words on the screen.

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MichaelB
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#104 Post by MichaelB » Sun May 05, 2013 11:47 am

manicsounds wrote:I know Criterion's "Knife In The Water" also had subtitles which were not fully translated, but this was translated and approved by Polanski himself, who wanted the viewers eyes to see the performances and nuances more than the words on the screen.
I always understood that this was primarily because there's dialogue in the film that was only put there as a sop to the Polish censor, and so deliberately not subtitling it was a convenient way of "removing" it retrospectively without doing a George Lucas and interfering with the film's actual content.

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knives
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#105 Post by knives » Sun May 05, 2013 1:57 pm

Yeah, Polanski's mentioned a few times his annoyance at the 'political' content of the film. That said I wish they subbed the radio because that's some funny stuff that works as a nice commentary on the whole situation.

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zedz
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#106 Post by zedz » Sun May 05, 2013 4:15 pm

Gregory wrote:
knives wrote:That said Tati uses this technique well in Playtime as all of the shorts occur at once since his large canvas shows several completely unrelated events from any one instance allowing the film to largely be a chose your own adventure type thing.
Je ne comprends pas.
I think what knives is getting at here, and what really hits home when you see Playtime on a big screen with a big audience, is that there's no possibility of a single person managing to keep track of everything (and, more to the point, every gag / micro-narrative) that's occurring onscreen simultaneously. Thus you get a completely different viewing experience depending on where you happen to be looking at any one instant. With a big appreciative crowd, you're multiplying this effect and the laughter of those around you cues you in to something you missed, making the film interactive like no other. At some points, a particularly inspired gag might have been spotted by only one person in the audience, and the laughter catches up to them as others do the necessary 'Where's Wally' manoeuvres.

Theoretically, you could zoom in and isolate each of those micro-narratives into its own comic short (now there's an avant garde project for somebody with a lot of time to kill), though that would destroy Tati's marvellously oblique staging. Most of the gags work because they're 'thrown away' (but nevertheless meticulously crafted).

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Gregory
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#107 Post by Gregory » Mon May 06, 2013 12:42 am

Got it, that's a great description of parts of Playtime (though not all of it is like this) where Tati stages deliberately confounding scenes without an obvious focal point. A lot of activity, appropriate for a portrait of modern Paris, and you have to search for yourself to see where the interest is. What an amazing, unique comedy it is.

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#108 Post by colinr0380 » Mon May 06, 2013 7:02 am

I more think of Tati's films (including Playtime, though it gets more complex there, especially in the restaurant sequence where everything is multiplied exponentially!) as having 'major' and 'minor' jokes. There are usually 'major' jokes that are played centre-stage, focused on for longer than perhaps necessary, and played broadly so everyone in the audience sees it. Then there are tons of little 'minor' jokes (which are often funnier and better timed!) that embellish around the edges, that can be noticed or not and add the colour, joy and sense of anarchy to the film.

Some of the 'major' jokes, which often are the basis for entire sequences (say the apartment sequence viewed from the street) could potentially become excrutiatingly overstretched if that was the entire joke, yet that one 'major' gag gets used as the structure on which lots of different variations, or muscial-style movements, of 'minor' gags can be placed into.

Those 'minor' jokes can often feature the most witty comments on the 'major' jokes, or simply be bizarre visual (the waiter pouring the drinks/watering the patron's flowery hats) or satiricial (the neon sign beckoning/leading drunks inescapably back into the club) gags. Or the 'major' jokes, after their moment of focus, can become 'minor' ones if they are going to be running gags (the waiter being used for spare parts, say), adding extra texture to the world.

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#109 Post by Zot! » Mon May 06, 2013 11:05 am

I truly love his other films but Playtime, for me, was too ambitious. City Symphonys aren't really my bag to begin with, but combine that with a three ring circus and I get worn out. The terrific gags and pacing of the other films is lost for me here, and replaced with an unnecessary grandeur. Mon Oncle is also my favorite, and probably the easiest one to "like". I still enjoy Playtime, but it is probably my least favorite.

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Gregory
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#110 Post by Gregory » Mon May 06, 2013 2:07 pm

The grandeur of it seems totally necessary because of the nature of the place that the film is about: an artificial Paris in which things are exaggerated to great effect. But one of the things that I enjoy most about it is that it works on even more abstract levels, playing tricks with space, time, sound etc. and not just by way of sight gags that are necessarily laugh-out-loud funny.
One of my favorite examples is the set that has a receptionist in a Plexiglas cube with everything laid out in a symmetrical grid around her. Hulot sees her, keeps walking, and she turns 90 degrees so that when Hulot turns a corner and then looks in a different direction he sees the seems the exact same view of her that he'd just seen, but from a different place, and it seems like the laws of physical space no longer apply. There are so many moments of disorientation that are as perfectly executed as the Mirror Maze shootout in The Lady from Shanghai, but in cleverer ways that play tricks both on us, the viewers, and on Hulot or another character while the workings of the trick are revealed in any number of ways. And the gags and tricks and elaborate detail are put to a different purpose than they served in a film like Les Vacances, creating brilliant social satire.

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zedz
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#111 Post by zedz » Mon May 06, 2013 3:56 pm

Gregory wrote:Got it, that's a great description of parts of Playtime (though not all of it is like this) where Tati stages deliberately confounding scenes without an obvious focal point. A lot of activity, appropriate for a portrait of modern Paris, and you have to search for yourself to see where the interest is. What an amazing, unique comedy it is.
M. Hulot's Holiday is obviously a much-scaled down version of the same thing, but it still, in my experience, has a similar 'big screen' impact. When I was about 20, I saw a 35mm screening with a friend from university, and we both found it hysterical. A little later on, it was broadcast on TV, and I recorded it so we could share it with other friends, but when we all watched it, disaster. Not only did the other folk find the film completely unfunny, but even my friend and I could barely see what we'd loved so much about the film the first time. It seems that the change in scale was absolutely crucial to our appreciation of the film (and, extrapolating from that, I think the proportion of the figures and the gags to the frame is an essential element of Tati's comedy). Since then I've never been particularly surprised when people who have only seen Tati on a small screen just can't see what the fuss is about.

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knives
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#112 Post by knives » Mon May 06, 2013 4:00 pm

Funnily Holiday is the only one I've seen theatrically and it is pretty clearly the weakest to me.

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colinr0380
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#113 Post by colinr0380 » Mon May 06, 2013 4:17 pm

I'm shocked that people don't like the Tati films! M. Hulot's Holiday is a wonderfully perfect seaside postcard of a film. I like to think of it as the life-affirming antithesis to Death In Venice, where everything is unruly, messy, misinterpreted and falling apart but that shows just how vital and alive everything is compared to Bogarde's hermetically sealed (except to the plague!), classy and proper yet lifeless and dangerous world!

And Playtime is also life-affirming in showing that even when the world becomes totally urban, rule driven and confusing that there is always the potential for 'real life' and humanity to occur. As someone who gets rather nervous any time I have to walk around in a big city, I'm usually put at ease by Tati's vision whenever I watch the film!

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Gregory
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#114 Post by Gregory » Mon May 06, 2013 4:29 pm

And Playtime is also life-affirming in showing that even when the world becomes totally urban, rule driven and confusing that there is always the potential for 'real life' and humanity to occur. As someone who gets rather nervous any time I have to walk around in a big city, I'm usually put at ease by Tati's vision whenever I watch the film!
Huh. For me, it's practically dystopian science fiction, building upon ideas that began with M. Hulot's Holiday, in which people still work and do what is expected of them even while on holiday, then developed even further in Mon Oncle, in which the Arpels work like machines to afford all the newest things but don't have time to enjoy them or spend time with their son.
By the time we get to Playtime, every square inch of land has been paved and built over in a grey landscape, an urban monoculture in which nothing really lives. Ill-conceived innovations in the name of convenience and glamour fail to work as planned and have made life almost impossible to cope with, especially for those (like Hulot) who cannot adapt. The world of the past has been all but erased. People can still have fun, but only if they're the right kind of people: fashionable, respectable, white people with money to spend. Anyone else will get 86-ed, banished to some never-seen ghettos and skid rows. Virtually everyone in the film is white except the jazz combo, and there's that very brief moment when one of the musicians is almost peremptorily tossed out of the restaurant the moment he shows his face, before the staff realize that he's there to provide entertainment.
Everything is new, everyone must conform and have the latest things, and Hulot is the outsider, an emblem of freedom, but one who can move about freely only because he's so innocuous and almost invisible amid all the bustle.

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#115 Post by colinr0380 » Mon May 06, 2013 5:13 pm

Yes those are good points. (I especially agree on the conformity aspect, along with the black jazz band. Although it is perhaps interesting that they are also 'authorised' and give up in disgust once the set falls apart, to leave our heroine and the singer (the film's 'authorised' entertainers?) to pick up the slack) People are powerless in the world, as they are in the face of situations in the earlier films, and there is the sense that only those selected architects and desginers are given a contract to create ideas for, say, the uncomfortable looking chairs, which then become ubiquiotous (and mass replicated) in the landscape once they have been approved of. (Maybe it is just a personal response on my part having grown up in a society where urban alienation is a norm rather than a strange new occurrence as it might have been for Tati?)

Yet then we see the architect in the restaurant struggling to keep his vision together, and even he is powerless in the face of it all collapsing around him. Even the most impersonally designed, inhuman urban environment can be affected once real human beings are entering and interacting with it, breaking the rules and moving things around to better suit their short term needs. Though I agree that there is always a parade of minor characters who are officious, trying to maintain order and getting upset about things, and working themselves to death to little effect.

There is that stark vision of oppressive wide society at the wide level, which Hulot and everyone are really powerless to, or at least not in any position to, change or influence, but then that has always been the case (as the earlier films show). Yet there is a celebration on the smaller scale of the way that everything is breaking down or imperfect and still needs the human touch, and the presence of small moments to prove individuality - most of the jokes refute the darker sense of a dystopian society, and some of the best gags, such as the workmen moving the plate of glass which gets made magical by one of the onlookers humming an Egyptian worker theme over them, acknowledge that oppression while also providing an individual reaction that suddenly makes the scene amusing and magical! An escape from the oppressive horror of your environment can be through something as simple as a trick of the mind, shifting perspective so that streetlights look like flowers and an inescapable roundabouts become fun merry-go-rounds!

It might not cause any permanent physical change to the landscape but at least the outside world might be prevented from totally overwhelming the individual! (Not that I do it, but I think this is the perfect film to amp someone up for a night of Banksy-esque graffiti spraying!)
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#116 Post by bugsy_pal » Mon May 06, 2013 9:17 pm

I saw Playtime for the fist time on a big theatrical screen a few years back - I think it was a new/restored print. Anyway, it looked superb, and the whole experience had a huge impact on me. The use of colour in the film is amazing, as are the sets and the previously mentioned moments of disorientation. I loved the scene where the doorman was left holding the door handle with no door.

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#117 Post by maxcherry » Sat May 11, 2013 7:29 am

What's happened to Mon Oncle' dual format edition? It is not available from amazon.co.uk (and zavvi) anymore...

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#118 Post by MichaelB » Sat May 11, 2013 9:32 am

maxcherry wrote:What's happened to Mon Oncle' dual format edition? It is not available from amazon.co.uk (and zavvi) anymore...
I don't know precisely when the BFI's Tati titles are going OOP, but it's definitely sooner rather than later.

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#119 Post by swo17 » Sat May 11, 2013 9:44 am

It probably doesn't help that it was recently heavily discounted on Amazon (along with the other Tatis) where I imagine a lot of people scooped it up.

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TMDaines
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#120 Post by TMDaines » Sat May 11, 2013 12:21 pm

maxcherry wrote:What's happened to Mon Oncle' dual format edition? It is not available from amazon.co.uk (and zavvi) anymore...
It's still cheap at the four Base.com sister stores and Moviemail. I don't know what their foreign shipping charges are though.

http://www.find-dvd.co.uk/blu-ray/Mon-Oncle/1118254.htm

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#121 Post by maxcherry » Sat May 11, 2013 12:59 pm

I see there was something in this topic about Studio Canal snatching rights for Tati' films... Not so good.

Thanks TMDaines, looks like Moviemail is the only chance now to get Mon oncle as this is the only store that ships to Ukraine. Or maybe wait for Criterion release sometime in the future...

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HJackson
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#122 Post by HJackson » Sun May 12, 2013 2:11 am

Wow, who knew it would be gone so quickly. Wasn't it only upgraded less than a year ago? Anyway, just hopped on MovieMail and ordered myself a copy of both Mon Oncle (easily my favourite Tati) and Jour de Fête, so thanks for the heads up!

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#123 Post by MichaelB » Sun May 12, 2013 3:18 am

HJackson wrote:Wow, who knew it would be gone so quickly. Wasn't it only upgraded less than a year ago?
As soon as the BFI found out that they couldn't renew the Tati rights after their licensing period expired, they rejigged their plans for the second half of last year to get Mon Oncle and Jour de fête out on Blu-ray in time for Christmas. That's why the remaining Cassavetes releases and some others got delayed after their initial announcement.

It's hard to exaggerate how important Tati is/was to BFI DVD Publishing's bottom line, so even bringing them out for a few months (including the all-important Christmas run-up) is financially worth it.

But the answer to your first question is "everybody who's been reading this thread over the last few months" - the news of the BFI Tati discs' imminent OOPness has been in the public domain for nearly a year, so it really shouldn't be a huge surprise.

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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#124 Post by whaleallright » Mon May 13, 2013 3:21 am

n/a
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Re: The Jacques Tati Collection

#125 Post by MichaelB » Mon May 13, 2013 4:29 am

jonah.77 wrote:It's good to know these sell well. I wonder how many folks who aren't your classical cinephiles are buying Tati DVDs.
Quite a few, I reckon, going from the sales figures. The British Transport Films catalogue is in a similar position - there's a reason there are now eleven double-disc volumes and an eighteen-disc box set!

This was one of the best investments the BFI ever made - it turned out (not too surprisingly) that train buffs are significantly more numerous than film buffs, with all that that implies in terms of sales figures, even though the BTF discs often don't register on film fans' radar at all.

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