STUDIES

Music and Sound in Jacques Tati Films

Jacques Tati, an actor and a film director, developed a special kind of »silent« comic elements and the author explains his principles for the use of sounds. In the film Jour de Fête (1949) the composer Jean Yatove depicted heroes’ adventures richly and laid the basis of Tati’s future music speech by using the instrumentation considered typically French (the accordion, the trumpet, the flute, the xylophone, the strings and the street organ). But just like other Tati films this one is full of noise and animal sounds, dialogues are scarce, unimportant and often unclear; even music is more intelligible than dialogues.

The author explains the role of jazz in Tati films. For example, in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Les vacances de M. Hulot, 1953) precisely this form is the main means of expression, and dialogues are almost completely deprived of sense and intelligibility. Describing the development of the use of music and sounds in Tati’s film opus, the author of this study emphasizes that the film Playtime (1968) particularly clearly shows how the »obsolete« poetics of silent film serves the purpose of disclosing contemporary dehumanizing tendencies of the modern technological civilization.

Irena Paulus