I came upon the blog The Movie Projector and was immediately caught up in it. Two of the most intriguing posts, for me, were actually one post broken into two parts. It was an assessment of Jacques Tati (1907 – 1982), the French director renowned for his comedies and is famous comic character, Monsieur Hulot. The posts are:
- Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 1
- Jacques Tati: The Master of French Film Comedy, Part 2
To quote the author/blogger R. D. Finch from Part 1:
For a man who directed only five full-length films released between 1949 and 1972, the French director Jacques Tati (1907-1982) has a huge reputation among cinephiles. Two of his movies, Play Time (1967) and Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), were in 2008 named by the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma among the 100 greatest films of all time. Predictably, only a handful of movies on the list were comedies, including the two by Tati. He was recognized along with other comic masters like Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Woody Allen, a pretty impressive group of people to be included among. While most Americans who know anything at all about movies and popular culture are familiar with those names, I wonder how many know of Tati, much less recognize that among aficionados of film comedy his reputation is the equal of those other well-known geniuses.
The posts are well worth reading and they’ve reminded me I need to watch Tati’s films again.
