In the 1953 film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr Hulot’s Holiday), Jacques Tati introduced the character of Monsieur Hulot to the world of cinema-goers. Over the next 18 years in a sequence of four widely spread out movies, Tati reprised Hulot who became the emblematic face and profile, if not the (audible) voice, of the idiosyncratic Parisian’s cinema. In the features made by Tati between 1953 and 1971 Hulot was the central figure and yet at the same time he was peripheral to the ‘action’ of the story, “the man nobody quite sees” as Roger Ebert described him [R Ebert, ‘Mr. Hulot’s Holiday’, www.rogerebert.com]. No one notices that is, until something goes “pear-shaped” as a consequence of Hulot’s habitual clumsiness (mime-clown Tati’s characteristic slapstick shtick).
▪ • ▪ ‘Mr Hulot’s Holiday’
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Physically M Hulot cuts a tall, distinctive figure, a sort of “prancing, myopic giraffe” (a reference to his characteristic springy, long-striding gait) as one collaborator notes [Peter Lennon, ‘My holiday with Monsieur Hulot’, The Guardian (23-Jul-2003, www.theguardian.com/]. Another critic calls him “a gangling, spider-limbed gent”. Stanley Kaufmann describes Hulot as “a creature of silhouettes” [S Kaufmann, ‘The Second Mr.Hulot’, New Republic 139(23),1958]. The elongated Hulot silhouette was put to good use in the various film posters for the Hulot movies. Hulot’s standard beige/grey garb, the fedora hat and long-stem pipe, tired-looking long trenchcoat, long pants (not quite long enough to reach his ankles) and umbrella, were all well suited to the dark outline of Tati’s characteristic form. The personality of Hulot is avuncular, benign, friendly, forever curious, but he is also uber-gauche and prone to misadventures.
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Perpetually observing humankind
The storyline of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot is, as always with Tati, a simple one. M Hulot visits a resort in the north-west coast to get a taste for himself of the new, post-war passion for spending summer at the seaside. He wanders round with no particular object in mind, just checking out the cavalcade of human ‘wildlife’ that is drawn to the beach resort. There is no plot to speak of, just a series of amusing, whimsical escapades, eg, a ping-pong game in which we see only the figure of Hulot running flat-chat from one side to the other frantically trying to return the ball. The location for Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was the French seaside town of Saint-Marc-sur-Mer which today has a bronze statue of the man who put it on the tourist map (depicting Hulot in typical stance, tilting forward, observing the human interactions on the beach).
▪ • ▪ ‘Mon Oncle’: Hulot’s ‘penthouse’ loft
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▪ • ▪ ‘Min Onkel’ (Danish poster)▪ • ▪
Mon Oncle Mon Oncle (My Uncle) (1958) was the second in the M Hulot series, this time Tati’s disapproving and eagle-eyed attention was directed towards the modern suburban home and mania for consumerism of the Parisian middle classes, willing participants in a Conga line of sheer mindless acquisitiveness. The story has Hulot, living in the city and unemployed, visiting his sister and her family (the Arpels) in the new suburbs on the outskirts of Paris. Hulot spends his days looking after his young nephew Gèrard. Villa Arpel, their ultra-mod house and garden is a geometric monstrosity, designed with an obsessiveness bordering on the pathological! All aspects of the villa are fully automated, everything is push button remote controlled—gates, doors, “weird fish” water fountain, everything precisely mechanised.
Hulot’s sister wants him to adopt their chic lifestyle so she gets him a job at her husband’s company (called Plastak). The venture proves comically disastrous with Hulot falling foul of a ubiquitous and seemingly endless red hose and entangles himself in a caper to try to dispose of it. The plastics factory, like the Arpels’ antiseptic home, is a soulless and sterile environment.
While he’s there, Hulot’s sister tries to match him up with her neighbour, a matrimonial project which is equally doomed to failure. The female neighbour is far too bourgeois in her tastes for Hulot, who is in any case a confirmed bachelor.
In Mon Oncle we are left in no doubt that Tati’s vision of the world sees modern technology as anathema to humanity! The Arpels live in an bland and ugly modernist style home with a pristine, sterile yard. The home’s arsenal of whiz-bang gadgets are not only coldly impersonal but Hulot discovers that their functional effectiveness is not up to scratch. The gate is practically entry-proof, the garage doors malfunction, the small parking space is totally inadequate for the Arpel’s very big, shiny American car, and so on.
▪ • ▪ A replica of ‘Villa Arpel’ in Paris ⟱ ▪ • ▪
Hulot brings his own brand of disorder to the house but this only serves to accentuate the original folly of the project. The Arpel house “designed to trumpet the ingenuity of engineering” succeeds merely at highlighting its lack of functionality and utter impracticality (witness the ridiculously serpentine front path) [Matt Zoller Seitz, ‘Mon Oncle’, 06-Jan-2004, Criterion,www.criterion.com].
Tati is a dab hand at noting all of the “modern inconveniences”(sic) of contemporary Western society. Mon Oncle is a sharp commentary on the way “modern life traps humanity within its contrivances” [James Quandt, ‘Scatterbrained Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com] Mon Oncle, Tati’s obra maestra , won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1959.
• • • Hulot and ‘Barbara’ (American tourist in Paris)
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Playtime
An idiosyncratic feature of Jacques Tati’s cinema is its unwavering critical focus on the unrelenting mania for all things modern. With Playtime, the focus turns again to the ultra-mod world—modernity in architecture, shop interiors, in everything—that has come to dominate modern cities like Paris. As always, the plot-line is coincidental, dialogue is incidental. The insouciant M Hulot wanders round the city visiting the airport and various buildings, in doing so he continually crosses paths with a group of gormless, wide-eyed American tourists. Hulot peers inside busy offices to expose dispiriting scenes of workers in their own depersonalised little boxes shut off from human interaction. Playtime is a flawed gem, like all of Tati’s films it has a slow, leisurely build-up but it suffers from being too long—originally around 155 minutes but cut to 124 minutes for commercial release in 1967—still too long and crying out for tighter editing. The film, by a long way the auteur’s most expensive, disappointed many upon its release, especially when viewed against the preceding Mon Oncle.
Although the persona of Hulot is the human thread that runs through Playtime, Tati deliberately does not allow the popular character to dominate proceedings (as tended to be the case in Mr Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle) [Kent Jones,’Playtime’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com] putting the focus back on ‘everybody’, ie, the observed cross-section of humanity. Tati eschews the use of close-up shots and the technique of the camera panning in for exactly the same reason. A sub-plot of Playtime follows American tourist ‘Barbara’ whose own meanderings always eventually lead her back to Hulot.
Trademark cute
There are many little gems in Playtime – the signature Tati sight gags like the blissfully unaware Hulot boarding a crowded bus grabbing on to what he thought was a handrail, immersing himself distractedly in his newspaper only to find himself again out on the footpath at the next stop because the mistaken handrail was actually the tall floor lamp of a fellow commuter who had alighted the bus with Hulot still holding on. Or the spiral neon arrow on the nightclub sign which guides the drunk straight back into the “Royal Garden” from which he has just departed … both of these sight gags are pure gold! Playtime represents the zenith, the highest expression, of Hulot’s distaste for the contemporary world of “mod cons” and gadgetry.
‘Playtime’: Hulot and those dehumanising work boxes! ⟱
So much of Tati’s film art is about messing with the impersonality of modernisation which he disapproves of, sabotaging it to bring the dehumanising folly of it into the spotlight, this is his narrative. As Ebert precisely describes it, Tati “discovers serendipity in a world of disappointment”, ‘Mon Oncle’, www.rogerebert.com]. In Play Time, “an obstreperous cityscape whose supposed modern conveniences conspire to trip, bewilder, and ensnare the hapless populace gets violently reshaped as a vast play area” [David Cairns, ‘Jacques Tati: Things Fall Together’, www.criterion.com]. The film, Tati’s first go at a big (wide-screen) movie, turned into something of an epic saga, being eight years in the making!§Play Time was the most expensive French film to that point ever made, in no small measure due to Tati’s insistence on constructing a horrendously expensive mini-city, a set of glass and steel, nicknamed Tativille. To finance the film Tati had to sell his own home and eventually the rights to all his films – a clear indication of Tati’s single-minded commitment to an artistic vision!
Tati’s fifth feature, Traffic (or Trafic in French) was the last to include M Hulot. Traffic’s plot and narrative is as threadbare as Playtime: Hulot is a car designer who invents a new automobile, a gadget-packed camper car, the film tracks Hulot’s attempts to transport it to Amsterdam for a motor show. The trip, as any trip would be involving M Hulot, is incident-laden. Hulot and his companions experience various vicissitudes including breakdowns, customs inspection hold-ups and a multiple car pile-up, in the end arriving at the destination too late for the auto show.
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Finding the funny in life’s absurd
In the laughs department Traffic is a bit light on compared to the earlier Hulot pictures. But that said, Tati films do not create “belly” laughs, no real LOL moments, the humour generated by him is more of a gentler, subtler style of comedy, giving rise to a wry reflection on an amusing situation. There is one scene in Trafic though where the director draws comical comparisons with the Apollo 11 moon mission (happening concurrently with the making of Trafic) with two of the characters mimicking the low-gravity motion of astronauts.
‘Trafic’ (1971)
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The Tatiesque film: a throwback to a lost cinema
The films of M Tati are not everybody’s cup of tea. They tend towards a polarising effect. Many decry the lack of pace and that it appears that ‘nothing’ is really happening. In Trafic, as in all of Tati’s features, he was criticised for the weakness of the dialogue. Tati would have been indifferent to this objection because it was inconsequential to what his (idiosyncratic) cinema was about – to him the visual had primacy, whether it be man versus road, man versus building, etc. [James Monaco, ‘Review of Trafic by Jacques Tati’, Cinéaste, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Summer 2009). As a child Jacques grew up on a diet of silent cinema, Keaton was his idol, but he devoured the work of Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, all the great silent comics. His strain of comedy harked back to that era. As Kaufmann noted, Tati in the postwar period was “the only performer attempting to recapture the immensely more imaginative and abstract comedy of silent days” [Kaufmann, op.cit].
▪ • ▪ Situational humour ▪ • ▪
Entering the cinema from a background as a mime in music-hall also grounded Tati in the art of the visual and the physical. Tati’s films are not strictly silent pictures in that there is (minimal) low-level dialogue. Sounds do play a role but as background, complimentary but subordinate to the visual, the situation humour that was the essence of silent comedies. Stylistically, dialogue in a Tati movie is a device for sound effect [Jonathan Romney, ‘Jacques Tati’s Playtime: Life-affirming comedy’, The Guardian (25-Oct-2014), www.theguardian.com/film]. It never distracts from the central preoccupation of his cinema, observation of the interaction of human nature with the environment.
Life in boxes: Absurdity of modernity (‘Playtime’j
At the time of Tati’s death (1982) he was working on a project for a new Monsieur Hulot film entitled ‘Confusion’ – with its theme to be the obsession of western society with television and visual images. As James Monaco observes, it would be fascinating to have seen what Tati would have made of today’s virtual world, the internet, social networking media and digital devices [Monaco, op.cit.]. ▪ • ▪ François (centre) in L’École des Facteurs (‘School for Postmen’), a 1947 short which prefigured Tati’s feature film debut ▪ • ▪
‘Jour de féte’ (1949)
Footnote: Proto-Hulot
Before there was Hulot, there was François. François was the eccentric comic creation in Tati’s first feature, Jour de Fête (The Big Day) (1949). The storyline has François, an over-zealous and maladroit postman (a kind of public servant precursor to M Hulot), who watches a US postal training film and tries to replicate its efficiency in his provincial post office operation. The results however go disastrously haywire. Introducing the theme Tati would return to again and again, the director satirises contemporary society’s slavish devotion to technological progress, especially it’s over-eagerness to adopt every new innovation from America [‘Jacques Tati Facts’, www.biography.yourdictionary.com].
↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝ § a consequence in part of Tati’s directorial style on set which might best be described as monumentally indecisive
Two of the more interesting suffixes borrowed by English and put to good neologistic use are -naut and -nik. The origins of the word ‘naut’ have connotations of travel and water, Naut derives from an Ancient Greek word, translated as ‘naútēs‘, meaning ‘sailor’, sometimes rendered as ‘to navigate’. From naut we get the word ‘nautical’, something nautical relate of course to water and ships, although the root word naut has been employed to form new words which relates more to the sky or to atmosphere rather than to water.
✒︎ The Argonauts
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The first use of this suffix in the above sense seems to emanate from Greek mythology and the story of Jason and his crew who sailed according to legend in search of the Golden Fleece – the Argonauts. The etymology is: Classical Latin Argonauta; from Classical Greek Argonautēs; from Argō, Jason’s ship + nautēs, sailor; from naus, ship [Webster’s New World College Dictionary]. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles dates it’s use in English from 1596, so it’s been in currency for a long time.
The post-war phenomenon that has given naut words their impetus and continued relevance was the Space Race from the late 1950s, initially involving only the USSR and the United States. The US space program brought astronaut into common use , a word formed by simply conjoining the prefix astro (= stars) with naut. Far from being newly coined, the word itself has a history that long pre-dates the 1950s and 60s “Race to the Moon”. In 1930 the term was used in a pioneering Sci-Fi short story, ‘The Death’s Head Meteor’ by Neil R Jones (and there are other instances of the word in fiction go back to the late 19th century). The explorations of space fired the popular imagination, propelling astronaut into common usage to describe those (especially American) who ventured into space on behalf of the “Free World”. Astronaut may have been influenced by the term aeronaut (aero meaning air or atmosphere, as in aeronautics, from Ancient Greek aēr = air) in use to describe balloonists dating from the 1780s [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut]. With the long-term goal of reaching the Moon accomplished by the US in 1969 and further Moon missions planned, it was of no surprise that the more precise lunarnaut soon crept into the vocabulary.
As the Soviet Union entered the bipartite race with the intention of ‘conquering’ space and establishing a technological superiority over the US, the Russian Cold Warriors wanted for ideological reasons naturally enough to differentiate their extra-planetary achievements from those of their capitalist foes. So when the first successful spaceman Yuri Gagarin went up in Vostok I in 1961, the word cosmonaut (from Cosmos, the Universe, from Ancient Greek Kosmos = order) came into the lexicon – the New York Times attributed its genesis to Premier Khrushchev “and Soviet publications” [‘Russians coin a word for him: “Cosmonaut”, NYT, 13 April 1961].
✒︎“astroboy” touches down
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Astronauts by other names
The expansion of the Space Race to other nations outside of the big two spawned a whole lot of other naut-based neologisms. The first Indian in space (1984) was initially depicted as a cosmonaut (because he flew under the Soviet space program), but Indian pride and patriotism and the advancement of their own, homegrown space program, soon led to the evolution of a distinctive term for Indian space-traveller, vyomanaut (from Sanskrit vyoman (= sky). Although among Hindi-speakers there has been some debate about the rival merits of other terms, eg, there is a measure of support for anthanaut (or antharnaut), derived from anthariksh, meaning ‘space’ in Hindi.
When China joined the “Man-in-Space Club” by launching their own pilot beyond the stratosphere in 2003, the Chinese inevitably found their own term to describe it – tàikōnaut (taikon the Chinese word for space or cosmos, derived from tàikōngrén = spaceman) [‘Taikonaut’, Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/]. Although it was apparently a Chinese-Malaysian who first used the term for Chinese astronaut and the Xinhua News Agency uses it in its English-language publications (but not the Shenzhou space program). NB: For a pure Chinese rendering of the concept, either hángtiānyuán or yūhángyuán (literally translated as sky navigator or sailor and Universe navigator or sailor respectively) more accurately capture the essence of the meaning [ibid.]
Another word invented to describe the profession of space explorer of a specific country or region is spationaut, meaning a French astronaut, from Fr: spationaute (= space navigator). Spationaut is also used more generally to delineate astronauts from other European states, although a more suitable, generic term for this might be Euronaut.
Along the lines of aeronaut we also have aquanaut which might be a grander way of describing an underwater diver (the prefix ‘Aqua’, from Ancient Greek for water), which is distinct from an oceanaut whose scientific marine exploration is done in a submarine. ✒︎A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)
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Other -naut-suffixed terms signifying navigation in either a precise or looser sense include:
• chrononaut (a time-traveller – inspired by Doctor Who or Back to the Future?) • cryonaut (one whose body is preserved by cryonics) • cybernaut (a voyager in cyberspace; user of the internet or virtual reality. Could also be called an infonaut) • gastronaut (person with a keen appreciation of food, ie, a more formal name for a ‘foodie’) • hallucinaut (a hallucinator) • neuronaut (one who studies the brain especially the effects of psychedelic drugs). cf.psychonaut who explores one’s own psyche under the effects of drugs. • oneironaut (one who explores dream worlds)
As can be gleaned from the above there is a high degree of artificiality in the construction of many of these naut words. Some involve the choice of a convenient word (eg, gastronaut) rather than involving an act of literal navigation. Another concocted naut word with an interesting medical-related origin is responaut. The term was first applied c.1964 to a group of people at a particular facility in England with severe breathing difficulties whose condition needed them to be attached virtually permanently to the newly invented iron lung (mechanical respirator) in order to preserve their lives. ‘Responaut’ (formed from combining respirator + naut) was chosen because these patients experience similar problems to astronauts and oceanauts in establishing and maintaining communications and vital air supplies [Sunday Times (Lon), 12 January 1964, cited in Word Finder (Oxford English Dictionary), http://findwords.info/term/responaut].
The word Juggernaut contains the form of the naut suffix only by coincidence. It it unconnected to the idea of navigation or sailing, having come into English currency from a difference language group. Juggernaut derives from Sanskrit via a Hindi word, jagannath, meaning literally, world lord or protector. In English it has come to signify anything to which persons blindly devote themselves to or are ruthlessly crushed by [Shorter OED on Historical Principles].
Yinglish and spacerace-speak
Turning to words with the suffix ‘nik’, these come to English from a different path being of Slavonic origin with some Yiddish influence. Nik suffixes are very common in Slavonic languages, we find for example polkovnik (meaning colonel) in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and so on. Just as the Space Race gave naut words a new impetus, nik also found its way into English from Russian after the Soviet Union’s successfully launched a space craft named Sputnik in 1957.
The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]
The Cold War tensions of the 1970s spawned another new word formed from the root nik – refusenik. Originally, refuseniks were individual citizens (many Jewish but not exclusively so) of the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries who were denied permission by the Communist authorities to emigrate. Over time the application of ‘Refusenik’ in colloquial English has broadened to take on the meaning of “a person who refuses to do something, especially by way of protest” [Oxford English Dictionary (online)].
Peacenik is a word which has often been used in a derogatory way to describe someone who is an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention [www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/peacenik] (cf. “woke”/”wokeism”).The term is thought to have originated in the 1960s [possibly 1962 according to www.wordorigins.org]. Its precise origin is not known but very likely the term arose out either out of the anti-nuclear weapons movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. Peacenik is a synonym for pacifist or dove.
Holics – taking it to the nth degree
An unrelated but similarly manufactured word to peacenik is peaceoholic (sometimes spelt peaceaholic). Peaceaholic and other words with an -aholic or -oholic postfix are back-formed by analogy with the word alcoholic (into English from Arabic via French or Middle Latin). So we have shopaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, sexoholic, etc. which convey the sense of an addiction to or obsession with an activity or object.
Other nik words with a Yiddish flavour to them include Nudnik and Kibbutznik. Nudnik means obtuse, boring, a bothersome person a pest (nudyen = to bore). The Jewish Chronicle reports (18 February 2009) that Nudnik has entered modern Hebrew … “a common and even respected modus operandi in Israeli society”. A nudnik is someone “who is constantly asking you for something or otherwise taking up your time” [www.thejc.com]. Kibbutznik is a name given to workers who are members of an Israeli collective farm (a Kibbutz).
▪ • ▪ ‘Mr Hulot’s Holiday’
While he’s there, Hulot’s sister tries to match him up with her neighbour, a matrimonial project which is equally doomed to failure. The female neighbour is far too bourgeois in her tastes for Hulot, who is in any case a confirmed bachelor.
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Tati is a dab hand at noting all of the “modern inconveniences”(sic) of contemporary Western society. Mon Oncle is a sharp commentary on the way “modern life traps humanity within its contrivances” [James Quandt, ‘Scatterbrained Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com] Mon Oncle, Tati’s obra maestra , won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1959.
Although the persona of Hulot is the human thread that runs through Playtime, Tati deliberately does not allow the popular character to dominate proceedings (as tended to be the case in Mr Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle) [Kent Jones,’Playtime’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com] putting the focus back on ‘everybody’, ie, the observed cross-section of humanity. Tati eschews the use of close-up shots and the technique of the camera panning in for exactly the same reason. A sub-plot of Playtime follows American tourist ‘Barbara’ whose own meanderings always eventually lead her back to Hulot.
‘Trafic’ (1971)
Situational humour ▪ • ▪
Life in boxes: Absurdity of modernity (‘Playtime’j
▪ • ▪ François (centre) in L’École des Facteurs (‘School for Postmen’), a 1947 short which prefigured Tati’s feature film debut ▪ • ▪‘Jour de féte’ (1949)
