dno dances

This past sunday I attended a screening of Jacques Tati’s first film, “Jour de Fete“. It was one of the more heartwarming artistic experiences I’ve had in a while. The content of the film is pure lighthearted slapstick: a bumbling, drunken mail carrier in a small town sees a hilariously exaggerated filmstrip about the American Post and attempts to inject his own route with similar speed and “heroics.”

What made this film so extraordinary was the absolute precision of its execution. Visual jokes were interwoven with a wonderfully delicate sense of composition. All the classic choreographic tools of theme, variation, motif, spacial transposition… were used masterfully. It was no wonder the screening was part of the Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center….

Tati also used sound in really interesting ways. There is very little dialogue of note in the film, but background noise (including dialogue overheard from an offscreen movie) makes a number of surprising appearances.

One other interesting note about the film: It was intended to be the first french color feature. Color processing was so new, however, that Tati shot with two cameras, one color, one black and white, just to be safe. Smart guy, because it turned out the color film couldn’t be processed, and Tati ended up releasing the black and white version. It wasn’t until after his death that his daughter was able to find a lab able to process the color film. This new color version is the one which I saw screened… and it is the one Tati had originally envisioned.

Unfortunately “Jour de Fete” isn’t available on DVD in the US. Three of his other movies including “Play Time” (the one I plan to see next) are available on Net Flix. Definitely check him out.

In the mean time, here are two clips of “Jour de Fete” that I found on youtube: