JACQUES TATI

 

Films seen on 13-14 October 2026

 

In my preferential order

 

1. PLAYTIME (1967, Jacques Tati, France, 124min, A+30)

 

2. ALWAYS LALISA (2026, Sue Kim, USA, documentary, 100min, IMAX, A+30)

 

3. FORGOTTEN ISLAND (2026, Joel Crawford, Januel P. Mercado, USA/Japan, about Philippines, animation, 109min, A+30)

 

สรุปว่าตอนนี้เราได้ดูหนังของ Jacques Tati ไปเพียงแค่ 5 เรื่อง เรียงตามลำดับความชอบได้ดังนี้

 

1. PLAYTIME (1967, Jacques Tati, France, 124min, A+30)

 

2. MY UNCLE (1958)

 

3. TRAFFIC (1971)

 

4. MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY (1954)

 

5. PARADE (1974)

 

ตอนนี้เราอยากดู JOUR DE FÊTE (1949, Jacques Tati, 70min) มาก ๆ

 

แล้วเราก็เคยดูหนังสารคดีเรื่อง TATI VS. BRESSON: THE GAG (2016, Mark Rappaport, documentary, A+30) โดยหนังเรื่องนี้จับสังเกตการใช้ sound และ image ในหนังหลายๆเรื่อง โดยเฉพาะในหนังของ Jacques Tati และ Robert Bresson และข้ามไปวิเคราะห์บางฉากใน M (Fritz Lang), THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940, Ernst Lubitsch) และ THE BIG COMBO (1955, Joseph H. Lewis) ด้วย

 

JACQUES RIVETTE ON JACQUES TATI

 

เนื่องในโอกาสที่เราได้ดู PLAYTIME (1967, Jacques Tati, France, 124min, A+30) เมื่อวานนี้ เราก็เลยขอถือโอกาสรีโพสท์สิ่งนี้อีกครั้ง มันเป็นความเห็นของ Jacques Rivette ที่มีต่อ Jacques Tati และผู้กำกับคนอื่น ๆ มันมาจากบทสัมภาษณ์ในเดือนเม.ย. 1973, conducted by Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-Andre Fieschi and Eduardo de Gregorio, translated by Tom Milne

 

ตัวบทสัมภาษณ์เน้นไปยังประเด็นที่ว่า หนังบางเรื่องของ Jacques Tati, Federico Fellini และ Miklos Jancso เป็นหนังที่ “ไม่มีตัวละครหลัก” หรือตัวละครหลักไม่ได้เป็นคนดำเนินเรื่องหรือดำรงความสำคัญตลอดทั้งเรื่องแบบหนัง narrative ทั่ว ๆ ไป และหนังบางเรื่องในยุคนั้นซึ่งรวมถึงหนังของ Tati เป็นหนังที่แทบไม่ได้ใช้ “บทสนทนา”

 

Tati, Fellini, Jancso ...

ผู้สัมภาษณ์--Is there a connection between these elements and the fact that these films lack a central character, a protagonist?

Jacques Rivette --Yes, it is almost always groups that are involved, and this is a further link to the idea of ritual, of ceremony. If, at a pinch, there is an individual at the ceremony, it can only be the priest, someone who is never anything but the delegate, the representative of some community. But I don't think this tendency in the cinema entirely obviates the possibility of a central protagonist. For example, I put Straub's Othon in the same category (yet it's a play which plays more than other Corneille dramas on the impossibility of saying who is 'the' hero; there is no one interlocutor, one purveyor of truth in Othon, which isn't Le Cid or Polyeucte - the role circulates freely). Another example I include in the cinema of monumentality is Le moindre geste by Deligny and Daniel. On screen there is a protagonist who is present for nine-tenths of the film, but this protagonist is someone with whom identification is strictly precluded, because he is by clinical definition a mental defective, and "he is there on the screen purely as a physical presence, or on the soundtrack purely as an utterance detached from the physical presence, disconnected, first of all because these are fragments of tapes recorded independently of the visuals (and therefore not synchronous), but also because this utterance is itself aberrant in the literal sense of the word. Another film I'd place in the same category, perhaps mistakenly, is Tati's Traffic. Now there is a protagonist in Traffic, and it's Hulot; but at the same time it's quite obvious that the process which had already started in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is accentuated here, whereby Hulot no longer runs the conveyor belt, he is swept along by the fiction in almost precisely the same way as Fellini is swept along by Roma. You see Hulot wandering by from time to time in the background of his film, just as Fellini passes by suddenly wandering around in his Roma. Well, is one thing a consequence of the other? I have no idea. And one of the things I'm interested in now is to remake a film which has a strong, totally present central character - therefore one who is proposed as a vehicle, as operating the conveyor belt - and see what this contradiction would do to him.

I think it might be a pity, within a cinema of 'signification' - to employ this neologism - to abandon completely something that was so exciting in that traditional cinema: this play with the protagonist, the so-called central character, the Hitchcockian-Langian play on the phony central consciousness and all that this allows. But perhaps they are incompatible: it remains to be seen.

Another common factor in all these films - to my mind the only ones of any importance for several years - is the categorical refusal in practically all of them to use written dialogue. A refusal which doesn't always happen in the same way, however, and doesn't produce the same results. Broadly speaking, what I see in common is their refusal to write a text themselves which the actors will then interpret, the refusal to have the actors become interpreters of dialogue written beforehand which one has either written oneself or at any rate is responsible for. As to how to proceed from here, there are different solutions...

I won't say they're equivalent, some are undoubtedly more powerful than others. These consist either of asking the actors to find their own words, or of giving the actors pre-existing texts for which one isn't oneself responsible: the author of the text is antecedent, the author of the text is challenged in a sense, because either it's Corneille (though as 'matter') in the case of Straub, or, in the technique that Godard has used more and more systematically, the author of the text is multiple, this being what has been called the technique of quotations. But these aren't quotations, because the important point in the sequence of Jean-Luc's films came when he began removing the quotation marks and the names of the authors, thus not wanting to be the author of his scripts and wanting these texts coming from all over the place to lose their authorship. This method has I think been taken up again in part by Jancso, in so far as Jancso uses songs a good deal- pre-existing material, of course - and I think that in the moments with dialogue, or so I felt while watching Red Psalm, he draws extensively and very systematically on real militant texts, historical or contemporary. And I believe that Hernady's (14) job is increasingly becoming a matter of collages, on the same principle as Godard though perhaps not quite so extreme.

Other solutions to this rejection of scripted dialogue: it can be Tati, unintelligible dialogue where all one hears is snatches of speech; it can be the Taviani Brothers (15); it can be Daniel, who takes previously recorded tapes, which moreover carry speech having no fixed reference in the fiction and being completely erratic as speech. The only great exception I can see is Bergman. All the same I feel very inclined to put The Rite with the cinema of monumentality and signification, and nothing could be more scripted than that.

 

อ่านตัวบทสัมภาษณ์เต็ม ๆ ได้ที่นี่

https://celinejulie.blogspot.com/2011/06/out-1-noli-me-tangere-1971-jacques.html