Monsieur Hulot is always exploring how simple objects can be intriguing and beautiful, and so perhaps this is why he seems so befuddled by the unnecessary difficulty of the modern world. It is not surprising that Mon oncle is burdened with so strong a spirit of ambivalence towards modernity and progress. David Bellos, Jacques Tati, London, The Harvill Press, 1999. The film illustrates a relationship between two worlds that, their differences notwithstanding, can easily coexist. In Jacques Tati’s 1958 film Mon oncle, Hulot is the viewer’s entry point into two worlds that are investigated and contrasted: one world is obsessed with contemporary gadgetry and industry, the other is rooted in ways of the past. Set in a small Québec mining community on Christmas Eve “not so long ago” — as a caption at the beginning of the film explains — the action of Mon oncle Antoine revolves around a family store owned by Antoine (Jean Duceppe), who also operates the local undertaking business. The film generally focuses on quiet humorous events rather than outrageous slapstick. Tati began filming Mon oncle in autumn 1956 and completed principal photography in early 1957. Tati watched them engorge themselves for upwards of an hour without a word until they finally wanted to talk business. Each gag is designed to materialize from a watching and understanding of basic actions; very often we laugh, but more often we smile at these sly morsels, so richly constructed for the patient and attentive viewer. Nevertheless, when Mon oncle was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in its original French, it won a Special Jury Prize (Prix Spécial du jury), having not competed for the Palme d’Or. Screenwriters: Jacques Tati and Jacques Lagrange. 37–40. A famous anecdote told by Tati recounts how, after participating in interviews with the U.S. press for the release of his first Hulot picture, he was approached by a group of American film financiers. Hulot was not a comedian in the sense of being the source and focus of the humour; rather, he was ‘an attitude, a signpost, a perspective that reveals the humour in the world around him’. “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” is one of the longer poems in Wallace Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium. His absentmindedness seemed the counterbalance the vacuousness of the new glass and steel constructions; Hulot is a ‘distracted spectator’, not so much cynical of modern urban life as totally bemused by its encroaching workings and practices. To get Hulot’s attention, Mr. Arpel whistles. Though all of Tati’s films contain little dialogue, Mon oncle has more than any of them. The Arpel home, all white walls and sleek furnishing, looks deliberately ridiculous, bereft of function and domesticity. He walks as if bouncing on his tip-toes, his arms stretched out by his sides. With each step, he leaves a footprint behind him. Their garden houses an absurd fish fountain, which Mrs. Arpel is careful to turn on for her guests (all except Hulot), although visitors can see it suddenly begin to spout after they buzz at the Arpel gate, thus defeating its desired splendor with a stink of self-consciousness. ''My Uncle Jules'' is a frame narrative, or a story within a story. We see Hulot’s connection to his young nephew Gerard, how endearing that relationship is, and how strangely at peace he is with the child. Editor: Suzanne Baron. His body tilts forward, since he towers over the world and must look downward to greet it. An upsurge of young architects filled needs by designing gaudy, needlessly geometric abodes similar to ones constructed a generation earlier after the First World War, with a pointed gracelessness that Mon oncle co-writer Jacques Lagrange introduced into his designs for the Arpel’s avant-garde home. His mother fills her days by maintaining their elaborately designed home of convenience, and his wealthy father runs an industrial factory downtown. See Cauliez, pp. Pp. Nov 18. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. Alain Resnais (French: [alɛ̃ ʁɛnɛ]; 3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades.After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Night and Fog (1956), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. 6. Directed by: Alain Resnais. None of the workers in Arpel’s factory actually ‘work’; instead, they sit quietly, disengaged, and only rouse themselves when Arpel passes by. In keeping with Tati’s own background as a mime artist, his films are ‘silent’ – dialogue is muffled or incomprehensible, train station announcements are garbled, and doors open and close to the sound of twanging elastic bands. [Country: France and Italy. We should all be so free, Tati implies. 5 These forces might be expressed as the effects of technology, mechanisation, urban planning and design, and modernity at the level of human behaviour – a period, in the words of Kristin Ross – of ‘fast cars and clean bodies’. Like Clair and Chaplin before him, Tati’s representation of the modern workforce in Mon oncle is defined by a series of obligatory rituals. He shows how Taylorism has moved beyond the modes of production, and now obliges its inhabitants to work and live in particular ways, ‘with all their movements synchronized with their intended desires or objectives’. The France of the 1960s was changing, and the uncertainties that Hulot may once have overcome through sheer bumbling endeavour transformed exponentially in Playtime into dilemmas that would leave him ‘shaken and discomfited by the shifting sands of a Paris in the throes of metamorphosis’. For Mon oncle, Tati’s social remarks are maintained in the contrast between the Arpel’s “suburban villa” and Hulot’s “old quarter” of Paris, and how ultimately modernism makes day-to-day life more complicated, despite its intentions to make life simpler. Likewise, Mrs. Arpel attempts to play matchmaker for her hapless brother and their garish neighbor, but her efforts are also in vain. We'll send you an email to notify when done. Hulot first appeared in Tati’s 1953 film M. Hulot’s Holiday, where, unintentionally, of course, Hulot enlivened a boring French resort through his bumbling; his accidental ignition of fireworks and love of jazz rumble the sleepy beachside getaway. The fashionable notion – forwarded by Le Corbusier – that modern architecture could provide an ideal form of utopian self-improvement is contested throughout Tati’s work and reaches a critical juncture in Mon oncle. Even the aforementioned street sweeper cannot be bothered to sweep when a good conversation is to be had. Tati’s two previous films, Jour de fête/The Big Day(1949) and Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, as well as the later Playtime all, to a greater or lesser degree, problematise the notion that technological progress is to be embraced and automatically succumbed to. Consider a shot early in "Mon Oncle," where the camera regards the outside of the building where Tati's character, Hulot, lives in a … Delighted, Hulot adjusts his window back and forth, and upon finding the correct angle, listens to the bird’s song, pleased by his discovery. Of all of Jacques Tati’s films, Mon Oncle (1958) is probably the most disarming in its satirical attack on efficiency and modernity. Music: Franck Barcellini and Alain Romans. Their presence may not have bearing on the plot, however they represent the film’s theme that a place is what you make of it. Nezar AlSayyad, ‘Cynical Modernity, or the Modernity of Cynicism’, in Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real, London and New York, Routledge, 2006, p. 101. This poem explores the relationship of sexuality to art. This week we want to introduce a film by one of the filmmakers that cannot be out of this list. In fact, it does the opposite – Gerard is an unhappy child, unloved and isolated. 37–40. Film Analysis 2: Mon Oncle From the very opening of the film it is apparent that Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle is not going to follow the standards of comedic filmmaking. ISBN 209-190987-4. By continuing to use the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. The next year, Tati’s film took home the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Film of 1958. This is the most conventional plot of all his films.. Tati is not against modern archictecture, but the way people use it to show off. In 1955, writing for Cahiers du cinema, François Truffaut (The 400 Blows) published a long list of filmmakers whom he believed were contributing to the downturn of the French film industry; with it, he also published a much shorter list that included nine exceptions whom he believed supplied French cinemas with great artistry. Surrounded by rock gardens and twisting stone pathways, the impeccably clean and expressionless Villa Arpel is equipped with no end of electronic gizmos, buttons, and gadgets, none of which actually worked—they were operated manually offscreen by crewmembers to complete the illusion that such would-be labor-saving mechanisms actually functioned. About This Quiz & Worksheet. Mon Oncle is often regarded as a paean to a bygone France that has gradually been usurped by the grand architectural renovations taking place in French urban areas throughout the 1950s and casts a satirical eye on the so-called benefits of modern design and technology. This new model for living entrenches gender roles and places conspicuous consumption and the acquisition of possessions as the sine qua non for happiness. He fails to catch Hulot’s notice, but a man heading into the airport turns to look for the whistler and instead walks into a lamppost—an unintentional goof intentionally played by Gerard many times on his adventures with uncle Hulot. 4. For Tati, this type of city living is destined to rapidly disappear. Tati’s distance from his own estranged father, who died before the film was completed, inspired the story.