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19 The Color of Paradise Jour de fête Every Tati film marks simultaneously (a) a moment in the work of Jacques Tati; (b) a moment in the history of French society and French cinema; (c) a moment in film history. Since ∞Ω∂∫, the six films that he has realized are those that have scanned our history the best. Tati isn’t just a rare filmmaker, the author of few films (all of them good), he’s a living point of reference. We all belong to a period of Tati’s cinema: the author of these lines belongs to the one that stretches from Mon oncle (∞Ω∑∫: the year before the New Wave) to Playtime (∞Ω∏π: the year before the events of May ’∏∫). There is hardly anyone else but Chaplin who, since the sound period, has had this privilege, this supreme authority: to be present even when he isn’t filming, and, when he’s filming, to be precisely up to the moment—that is, just a little bit in advance. Tati: a witness first and last. —Serge Daney, La rampe (my translation) The justification for [a] pretense to disengagement derives from our Victorian habit of marginalizing the experience of art, of treating it as if it were somehow ‘‘special’’—and, lately, as if it were somehow curable. This is a preposterous assumption to make in a culture that is irrevocably saturated with pictures and music, in which every elevator serves as a combination picture gallery and concert hall. The question of whether we can enjoy, or even decipher, the world we see without the experience of images, or the world we hear without the experience of music, seems to me pretty much a no-brainer. In fact, I cannot imagine a reason for categorizing any part of our involuntary, ordinary experience as ‘‘unaesthetic,’’ or for imagining that this quotidian aesthetic experience occludes any ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘natural’’ relationship between ourselves and the world that surrounds us. All we do by ignoring the live effects of art is suppress the fact that these experiences , in one way or another, inform our every waking hour. —Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy The cinema does not show, it previsions . . . when it is artisanal, it is ten or twenty years in advance; when it is factory-made, it is two or three years. —Jean-Luc Godard In 1942 Jacques Tati was living in occupied France. The grandson of a Dutch picture framer whose clients included Toulouse-Lautrec and van Gogh, the thirty-four-year-old Tati had played rugby, performed in music halls, and acted in 20 ESSENTIAL CINEMA a few short comic films. That year he left Paris with a screenwriter friend named Henri Marquet in search of the remotest part of the country they could find, hoping to escape recruitment as workers in Germany. They finally settled on a farm near Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, located in the dead center of France—not far from where George Sand had entertained such houseguests as Chopin, Liszt, Flaubert, and Turgenev—and spent a year or so getting acquainted with the village and its inhabitants. Three years after Germany’s surrender, Tati and Marquet returned to the village to make a short film, L’école des facteurs (‘‘The School for Postmen’’), in which Tati played François, the village postman, who delivers the mail on a bicycle. (François was based loosely on a bit character played by someone else in a comic short Tati had acted in ten years earlier.) L’école des facteurs was Tati’s first directing project, and the following year he and Marquet returned with different cinematographers but the same basic crew to rework and expand the short into a feature, Jour de fête, whose brand-new color process, Thomson-Color, would make it the first French feature in color. Thomson-Color was a complex experimental process, conceived as an artisanal invention, a homemade alternative to big-studio technology, that could become France’s answer to Technicolor. Aware that he was taking a calculated risk, Tati employed two cameras—one using color and the other, for safety, using black and white—but meanwhile he designed the film’s settings with color in mind, painting many of the house doors in the village a dark gray and dressing most of the villagers in dark coats. The basic idea—part of which he carried over to Playtime almost twenty years later—was to show a colorless village springing to...

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