Celebrating French mime, film-maker, actor and screenwriter Jacques Tati!
The French maestro Jacques Tati is an amalgam borne of the tradition of silent film comics like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel & Hardy.
Though he made only a handful of films Jacques Tati ranks among the most beloved of all cinematic geniuses. With a background in music hall and mime performance, Tati steadily built an ever-more-ambitious movie career that ultimately raised sight-gag comedy to the level of high art.
Tati only made six feature-length features in his career, but it’s a testament to his singular vision that he is ranked among the greatest auteurs with only a handful of pictures to his credit.
The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective features his six feature films—Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Playtime, Mon Oncle, his long-dreamed-of colorized version of Jour de fête, the revelatory Traffic, and the little-seen Parade.
One of cinema’s greatest comedians, Tati was also one of its most radical modernists. His experiments with sound, colour, and image, and with language, design and technology, are a fundamental, if often overlooked, bridge between the innovations of the silent era, those of his contemporaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, and filmmakers today such as Wes Anderson who owe much to his style and humour.
Jacques Tati Retrospective
Dendy Coorparoo, Brisbane
11-22 May 2022
www.dendy.com.au
