Scene: After a swim at the beach, a man attempts to dry himself off while standing in front of a light post. He flings the towel around his back, inadvertently wrapping the towel around the post behind him. He pulls the towel back and forth (around the post, not his back) and is confused about why he cannot get dry. The man is frustrated and he goes home dripping wet. The audience shrieks with laughter.
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| Malcolm Turvey |
“Tati is interesting for a number of reasons,” Turvey remarks. “His first three films (The Big Day, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, and My Uncle) were very, very popular with ordinary people. When they were released they did well in the theaters, and they’ve since gone on to have a long afterlife. On the other hand, he also cultivated a very challenging–some even say avant-garde–style of filmmaking. So he brings together this highly idiosyncratic, difficult, challenging visual and oral style, and combines it with the more popular genre of comedy. He exemplifies a trend in avant-garde art of the twentieth century, which is to draw on comedy.”
Hidden Comedy
Some are quick to relegate comedy to the category of mere distraction, but Turvey sees much more in Tati’s art. “One of the unusual things about his films is you always notice something new when you rewatch them,” Turvey says. “He deliberately hides a lot of the gags and comedy in his movies. He exemplifies this kind of larger commingling of avant-garde, advanced art, and popular comedy.”
After speaking with Turvey, it is very clear that Tati’s art of comedy is special. It is not simply gag after gag watching someone with incredible abilities entertain. Tati is trying to do something with his work. “If you watch a Charlie Chaplin film, Chaplin comes off as a very extraordinary person. He’s different from everyone else.” Turvey explains. “Tati wanted his major comic character, Monsieur Hulot, to be totally ordinary.” And herein lies the element of Tati’s filmmaking that makes him so unique among his peers: Tati did not shoot to be an outlier. As Turvey points out, Tati wanted to portray characters that you felt you knew–your friend, your uncle, your teacher. Rather than elevate comedy as a spectacle, Tati sought to make comedy accessible to everyone. He wished to “suggest that comedy is not something that only experts can do, but rather it’s something that anyone and everyone can be involved in.” He wanted to “democratize comedy, and take it out of the hands of specialists.”
Comic Modernity
Tati took special care to bring comedy to the masses. He took the emphasis off of himself, and invited a kind of participatory spectatorship. Other comedic directors tended to frame something funny in a close up, so the viewer is fed the joke. Tati, however, tended to avoid close ups and preferred that the viewer seek out the joke. He created an active experience where the viewer is largely dependent upon his or her own participation in order to get the fullest experience of the movie. If the viewer was not actively looking all throughout the scene, she would miss the joke altogether.
Why did Tati work so hard to layer his comedy and get the viewer involved? Tati wanted to “transform life in some way,” Turvey explains. “He hoped, I think, that once he’d shown you while watching a film how funny ordinary things can be, you would then go out into the world, and notice ordinary things as funny.” Tati hoped to teach the viewer to look for humor in everyday life. Perhaps this is one reason his films are so appealing. They teach us to look for humor, rather than wait for it.
Turvey also has another suggestion. Much of Tati’s comedy surrounds the failures of his character, Monsieur Hulot, has at fitting in to modern society. “The modern world is difficult for many people to live in,” Turvey explains. Tati’s films strive to show comedy in everyday life. They relate to a common struggle most people face. By showing us in films how to look for the funny parts of modern life, people can better cope with the struggles of living in a modern world.
