American juggler-turned-film-comedian W.C. Fields once remarked, "Anyone who hates animals and children can’t be all bad." He probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the work of French actor-director Jacques Tati, whose comic films are not only populated with animals and children, but who shows that they retain a simplicity and innocence which he believes modern society has all but lost.

All Jacques Tati’s films deal with the struggle between people and technology. All look at how technology stops people from living their lives. Four Tati films are currently playing at the Chauvel and Valhalla cinemas: Jour de Fête (1949), M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967). In all these films Tati shows that the labour-saving devices which ostensibly make modern life so effective, not only separate us from a close direct contact with simple pleasures and joys, but also rob us of our individuality, and of the unique imprint that this individuality leaves on our lives and existence. From Jour de Fête in which François, the postman of a small rural village watches a film about America’s modern mechanized postal system and decides to imitate it despite only having a bicycle at his disposal, to Playtime, in which Monsieur Hulot wanders through a large depersonalized Paris in a vain attempt to keep an important appointment, Tati shows how technical inventions deprive life rather than enhance it. In Mon Oncle Tati contrasts the unassuming existence of M. Hulot, (the onscreen persona that has become synonymous with Tati’s name) with that of Hulot’s sister and her husband who live in a high-tech robotocized house. In love with technological gadgetry, they are presented as frivolous, gullible, ignorant, petty, and obsessed with the various luxuries that technology generates, yet they are also shown to lack any awareness of what true pleasure is. They fail to understand Hulot, and view his life as lacking precisely because he doesn’t posses the commodities they do. Nevertheless, they try to help him, and his brother-in-law even gives him a job in his hose-making factory, realizing too late that Hulot is possessed of a rare talent: a complete inability to understand machinery of any sort.

Links between Tati and Chaplin can be made, and a film like Mon Oncle instantly recalls Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), but Tati’s directorial style lacks the streamlined simplicity of Chaplin’s best work. Tati crowds and clutters his frame, fragments the soundtrack, and constructs M. Hulot as just one piece of chaos amongst many. And it is this chaos, this clutter of life, that Tati uses to generate comedy, building his humour from the sight of the multitudes going about their daily lives. Tati heightens and exaggerates every sound of a modern existence, giving these sounds an importance that outweighs the dialogue. We hear the sound of a teacup being placed on a plate. The lighting of a cigarette. The squeak a suit makes as it is adjusted and straightened. The sound of a car door opening, the wheels rolling on gravel. This emphasis on the sound of objects doesn’t only serve to establish the physicality of the environment, (something important for Tati, who treats objects as if they were imbued with a life of their own), but also serves to show that otherwise insignificant sounds can accumulate into a comic soundscape.

Tati’s characteristic crowding of the frame and the soundtrack reflects not only his stylistic fingerprint, but also a major shift that seems to have occurred over the course of his career. The more that Tati crowds his films with the trivialities of modern existence, the less space there seems to be for Tati the person, Tati the actor, and for the characters that he inhabits. Over the course of Tati’s films, his human presence not only becomes increasingly displaced, but the characters he constructs become increasingly dysfunctional. Thus, he moves from playing someone who has an ordinary job as a postman in Jour de Fête, to playing someone who seems to have no job and no purpose other than to wander through the streets and buildings of Paris in Playtime. Further, in Jour de Fête his comedy is generated almost entirely by performance, with almost every scene dominated by his presence, whereas in Playtime, although Tati is the central character, we rarely see him, and when we do he may only be in the background or corner of the frame. This shift in Tati’s work reflects a deeper shift in his relationship to film: as we notice Tati the actor less, we notice Tati the director more. Whereas Tati’s antics formed the comic focus of his earlier films, in his later work it is not his character, but the objects themselves and their willful, often bizarre behaviour, that claim the viewers’ attention. Even though Playtime is a complex multi-layered film with an abundance of visual and aural gags, many of which occur simultaneously, it lacks Tati’s genius as a comic performer which was so well realized in his early films such as Jour de Fête and M. Hulot’s Holiday. My own feeling is that Tati’s funniest moments are still his simplest: trying to ride his bicycle home one night while too drunk to even mount it in Jour de Fête, or attempting to get his car started by pushing it down a hill in M. Hulot’s Holiday.

If Jacques Tati’s films look at the aimlessness of an increasingly mechanized modern society, they also show its inherent fragility, as the final restaurant segment of Playtime reveals. Here, a restaurant still under construction opens for business and the staff do their best to stop it, quite literally, from falling apart as customers crowd in. The segment ends with a complete breakdown of logic, technology and the existing social order. In Jour de Fête, M. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle and Playtime Tati shows us what he himself sees: modern society, with its inventive gadgetry and automation, is ready to collapse under the weight of its own cleverness and uselessness. But he also shows us a possibility: that from these ruins a different society could emerge in which joy and innocence will take, what he believes, to be their rightful places at the foundations of human life.