Jacques Tati was briefly a professional rugby player, music-hall mime, and actor in short films before he began to direct his own. He translated his athleticism and miming into the physical comedy of the alter ego he would play in most of his feature films, Monsieur Hulot. With his too-short trousers, striped socks, pipe, and umbrella, Hulot was a French counterpart to silent comedy personae like Chaplin and Keaton. Despite his everyman countenance, Hulot managed to inadvertently leave disaster in his wake. Indeed his epic struggles to navigate the latest technology will resonate with Luddites everywhere.
Though Tati produced only a handful of feature films, his iconoclastic aesthetics, exploration of class politics, refusal to work with professional actors, and view of a newly modern and consumerist postwar France gained him international acclaim as an auteur. Tati achieved notoriety for his revolutionary approach to sound design. He typically set dialogue at the same pitch as environmental noise, boosted sound effects meant to enhance sight gags, and recorded complex layers of interrelated effects, music, and ambient sound to correspond perfectly with visual cues, producing cinematic synaesthesia.
Oddly, his films were not as popular in France as they were abroad. Nevertheless, they inspired fellow French film giants like Robert Bresson and François Truffaut. The New York Times contends that Tati was “an unlikely and aloof member of the French New Wave” and suggests that his slapstick humor functions as a socio-cultural commentary in much the same fashion as Jean Luc Godard’s Marxist mantras. Tati, who explains his comedic skill as the product of keen observational skills, applied the same logic to his films.
In March, the Dryden Theatre will present the complete features (and one program of short films screening on March 3) of this filmmaker many consider to be the foremost chronicler of urban postwar France.
Tati’s first feature, Jour de fête (March 10), revolves around the trials and travails of a bumbling village postman who, inspired by drink and a documentary about the modernist efficiency of the American postal service, hatches a series of experiments to speed up his own delivery by bicycle. Tati introduced Hulot in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (screening in a newly restored print on March 12 and 14), in which the hero has disastrous interactions with bourgeois sun worshippers at a seaside resort.
In the Oscar®-winning Mon Oncle (March 17), Tati’s best-known work, Hulot is uncle to a nephew being raised in a modernist house outfitted with the latest devices designed to economize time and labor. Tati’s third feature, Playtime (March 21), finds Hulot challenged by modernity in the city of Paris, which Tati completely fabricated on a massive set built on the outskirts of the actual city. Both films concern the alienating effects of postwar France’s obsession with modernist architecture and urban design, the proliferation of technology, and American-style conspicuous consumerism. In Trafic (March 24), Hulot is an automobile inventor and the focal point of “a satire on mankind’s ill-fated love-affair with the motor car.”
Tati’s final film, Parade (March 31), appropriately enough, brings his career full circle in that it is a document of a circus/music-hall performance featuring the director’s own mime acts.
—Dinah Holtzman, Assistant Film Programmer, Motion Picture Department
Special Thanks to Delphine Selles-Alvarez, Program Officer, Cinema, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and Brian Belovarac and Sarah Finklea of Janus Films.
Melancholy is not an emotion that we usually associate with comedies, at least not in the laugh-a-minute, chortle-every-10-seconds type of movies that most audiences have come to expect from the genre. It takes a rare type of film artist to discover the almost inexpressible wistful sadness and small sense of loss behind the laughter and triumphs of comedic characters. Such an artist is the Scottish writer and director Bill Forsyth, whose sublime brand of filmmaking will be on display in the Dryden during March and April, when we present the first complete North American retrospective of his features. Forsyth will join us in person for screenings of his lovely movies, Local Hero and Housekeeping.
Beginning his career in documentaries, Forsyth made his feature debut in 1980 with a low-budget comedy about a group of Glaswegian teenagers (played by members of Glasgow Youth Theatre) who relieve their boredom by stealing sinks and plumbing supplies. The four main actors in That Sinking Feeling (which wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1984) were all cast in Forsyth’s sophomore effort, Gregory’s Girl, the story of a teenage boy’s fixation on the first female member of his school’s soccer team. These decidedly quirky first two features are youth comedies populated by unusually wise, even philosophical, youngsters, who make the bittersweet discovery that you can’t always get what you want.
The international success of Gregory’s Girl paved the way for Forsyth’s next—and best-loved—movie, Local Hero. Though produced with support from Warner Bros. and starring two American actors (Peter Riegert and Burt Lancaster), Local Hero is remembered today for its unique Scottish-ness and a subtle but ahead-of-its-time message on protecting our natural environment (it’s Al Gore’s favorite movie). Like Mac, the humbled oil executive hero of Local Hero, radio d.j. Dicky Bird in Comfort and Joy is another foiled romantic who finds himself embroiled in a misadventure; specifically, a war between Glasgow ice cream vendors.
When the producer of Local Hero, David Putnam, was briefly named head of Columbia Pictures, he provided Forsyth the opportunity to make his first American movie. The result was the haunting and criminally neglected masterpiece Housekeeping, starring Christine Lahti as the eccentric guardian of two orphaned girls. Forsyth completed two more wonderful and underseen comedies in the U.S., Breaking In, starring Burt Reynolds and Casey Siemaszko as a professional burglar and his inexperienced protégé, and Being Human, featuring Robin Williams as five characters (or is it just one?) who learn through 10,000 years of history and heartbreak what it means to be alive.
It’s been more than a decade since Forsyth completed his last feature, Gregory’s 2Girls, a sequel to one of his earlier successes that returned him to filming in Scotland. His body of work reminds us that there’s a lot of comfort and joy and beautiful melancholy to be derived from life’s ordinariness. Some might say there’s no room for his subtle, quiet style of storytelling in a world dominated by increasingly bombastic popular culture, but seeing these films just might remind you that we need Bill Forsyth now more than ever.
—Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
Featured series screenings
All films are at 8 p.m. unless otherwise indicated
Thursday, March 11
THAT SINKING FEELING (Bill Forsyth, UK/Scotland 1979, 92 min.)
Sunday, March 14
Two films for one admission price
7 p.m. GREGORY’S GIRL (Bill Forsyth, UK 1981, 91 min.)
8:45 p.m. GREGORY’S 2GIRLS (Bill Forsyth, UK 1999, 111 min., Digital Projection)
Thursday, March 18
COMFORT AND JOY (Bill Forsyth, UK 1984, 105 min.)
Thursday, March 25
BREAKING IN (Bill Forsyth, US 1989, 91 min.)
Thursday, April 1
BEING HUMAN (Bill Forsyth, UK/US 1994, 122 min.)
Bill Forsyth in person for two screenings:
Saturday, April 10
7 p.m. LOCAL HERO (Bill Forsyth, UK 1983, 111 min.)
Sunday, April 11
HOUSEKEEPING (Bill Forsyth, US 1987, 116 min.)
Shutter Island, due for wide release in February, brings the number of director Martin Scorsese’s features starring actor Leonardo DiCaprio up to four. That’s only half the number made with the performer many fans would consider Scorsese’s most important collaborator, the dynamic powerhouse Robert DeNiro. Like the quartet of DiCaprio films, the eight DeNiro/Scorsese movies focus attention on obsessed characters who vainly try to adjust the world according to their vision of how it should be, no matter what destruction it brings.
In DeNiro and Scorsese’s first collaboration, the semi-autobiographical Mean Streets, the film’s principal obsessive, Charlie, is played by Harvey Keitel. The religious and sensitive Charlie is a small-time hood who desperately tries to rein in his best friend (and id) Johnny Boy (DeNiro), an irrepressible and irresponsible prankster who could not care less about his debts to the mob. DeNiro was promoted to leading man for Taxi Driver, and his Travis Bickle, driven to violence he thinks will help purify a trash-filled New York City, is one of the most disturbing characters ever depicted on film.
Though prone to volatile moments, Jimmy Doyle, the jazz saxophonist in New York, New York, might be the most likeable character DeNiro ever assayed for Scorsese, but Jimmy’s search for a “major chord” keeps him from being happy in his marriage to singer Francine (Liza Minnelli). Likewise, it’s an all-consuming but groundless jealousy that destroys the marriage of boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, still the director and star’s most celebrated film together.
Perhaps the most underrated of their combined efforts, The King of Comedy remains the most relevant for today’s audiences in its depiction of marginally talented comedian Rupert Pupkin’s unstoppable quest for fame through television.
After a seven-year hiatus from Scorsese, DeNiro took a secondary role in the now-classic mob epic Goodfellas. Though Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill provides the film with its comically uninhibited and amoral spirit, it’s DeNiro’s greedy and paranoid thug Jimmy Conway who raises the specter of death.
Cape Fear’s revenge-obsessed and Bible-quoting ex-con Max Cady just might literally be the Angel of Death, and DeNiro put himself through a punishing physical regimen that makes the sinewy and tattoo-covered Max all the more frighteningly real. Casino brought Scorsese back into gangster territory for his eighth and (to date) final pairing with DeNiro, whose Ace Rothstein is the classic control freak brought down by loyalty to his less-than-reputable friends and wife.
These stories of obsession can also be viewed as allegories for the filmmaking process and the director’s difficult task of keeping everything under control. Scorsese’s reliance on the spontaneous, unpredictable, and often improvisatory behavior of DeNiro offers an example to any single-minded director who might resist creative input from his cast. Scorsese, with his powerful editing, pulsating soundtracks, and constantly roving cameras, will always be a technically dazzling auteur, but he understands that it’s the actors’ performances that really bring his films to life.—Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
Screenings: All films are at 8 p.m. unless otherwise listed.
Wednesday, January 6
MEAN STREETS (Martin Scorsese, US 1973, 110 min.)
Wednesday, January 13
TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, US 1976, 113 min.)
Wednesday, January 20
NEW YORK, NEW YORK (Martin Scorsese, US 1977, 164 min.)
Wednesday, January 27
RAGING BULL (Martin Scorsese, US 1982, 129 min.)
Wednesday, February 3
THE KING OF COMEDY (Martin Scorsese, US 1983, 109 min.)
Wednesday, February 10 20th Anniversary!
GOODFELLAS (Martin Scorsese, US 1990, 146 min.)
Wednesday, February 17
CAPE FEAR (Martin Scorsese, US 1991, 128 min.)
Wednesday, February 24
CASINO (Martin Scorsese, US 1995, 182 min.)
Perhaps the best-reviewed film released in 2009, The Hurt Locker is the story of an addicted-to-danger bomb-defusing expert (a star-making performance by Jeremy Renner) in the current Iraq war. By bringing an unusual amount of suspense to this well-acted story of men in action, the award-winning film not only revitalizes the war movie genre, it also serves to re-introduce audiences to the considerable storytelling skills of critically acclaimed director Kathryn Bigelow. The Hurt Locker will screen twice on January 1 and 3, and on the last three consecutive Sundays in January, we’ll present three more of Bigelow’s features in excellent archival prints that were personally deposited in George Eastman House’s vaults by the filmmaker after her visit in 2003. The Weight of Water (January 17) is Bigelow’s dramatic tale of murder and deception, told on two temporal planes, starring Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley; K-19: The Widowmaker (January 24) is a Cold War tale of men (including Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson) under pressure during a crisis in a nuclear-powered submarine; and Bigelow’s cult classic, Point Break (January 31), is another study of adrenaline junkies, this time personified by a group of surfers/bank robbers led by the late Patrick Swayze, in one of his quintessential performances.
Our annual season of pre-talkie cinema with live musical accompaniment has moved from the fall to winter/spring, and a new series commences on January 19 with Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro. The series continues over the next five Tuesdays with Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet classic The Battleship Potemkin (January 26); a classic from sophisticated comedy specialist Ernst Lubitsch, Three Women (February 2); American physical comedy genius Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality and The Play House (February 9); a delicately beautiful Italian adaptation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (February 16); and a pair of academically related films from Japanese master Yasujuro Ozu, I Graduated, But… and I Flunked, But… (February 23). Each film features live piano by Philip C. Carli. The series continues on Tuesdays in March and April.
