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’
▪ • ▪
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.
• • •
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
▪ • ▪
▪ • ▪ ‘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)
• • •
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.
• • •
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)
• • •
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
The expression of poetry in shorthand form has always managed to garner a measure of popularity with the general reading public – especially in comic vein and done well. The shortness of the poetic form makes its more accessible when you line it up against the more self-consciously serious stuff…formal, academic poetry with its proclivity towards the denser, often seemingly impenetrable forms of expression. Variety is the watch-word with informal poetic forms, be it the contemporary verse of ‘Shrink Lit’ and modern haiku poems, or the older verse genres such as the epigram, the limerick, nonsense verse and the clerihew.
The essence of the poetic epigram was aptly captured by (Samuel Taylor) Coleridge, “a dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul”.
Example:
“Little strokes / Fell great oaks”
(Benjamin Franklin)
The limerick’s Irish genesis can be traced back to the 18th century and the Maigue Poets of County Limerick. Structurally, the limerick uses a stanza of five lines with a strict rhyme scheme of AA-BB-A. It embodies the spirit of nonsense verse and the modern variant sometimes tends to use obscene themes for humorous intent. Limericks have also been a vehicle for popular children’s nursery rhymes – eg, Old Mother Hubbard, Little Miss Muffet, Hickory Dickory Dock, Jack-and-Jill, etc. etc.
The best-known serial exponent of the limerick was Edward Lear who popularised it in A Book of Nonsense in the mid 19th century (although he himself did not use the term ‘limerick’). Lear’s limericks contain an inherently circular logic to them….a typical, absurdly inane example of his limericks is:
There was a Young Person of Smyrna
Whose grandmother threatened to burn her.
But she seized on the cat,
And said “Granny, burn that!
You incongruous old woman of Smyrna.”
The clerihew has also been a popular verse-style with its emphasis on simplicity of form and use of whimsical themes. It’s inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, began penning verses using the eponymous device as a schoolboy. One of Bentley’s most celebrated clerihews goes:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I’m going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I’m designing St. Paul’s.”
As demonstrated, a clerihew is a form of light verse usually consisting of two couplets (four lines), with lines of uneven length and irregular metre, the first line usually containing the name of a famous or well-known person [www.dictionary.com]. It employs a specific rhyme scheme, AA-BB, and it’s intent is humorous or possibly gently chiding. Less charitably the clerihew has elsewhere been described as “rhyming doggerel”.
Alice in Wonderland
Another of Bentley’s playful clerihews has fun with the author of the brace of universally popular Victorian classic books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass:
Lewis Carroll
Bought sumptuous apparel
And built an enormous palace
Out of the profits of Alice.
Of Ivanhoe author Sir Walter Scott, Bentley wrote:
I believe it was admitted by Scott That some of his novels were rot.
How different was he from Lytton
Who admired everything he had written!
And of colonial novelist H Rider Haggard:
Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Was completely staggered
When his bride-to-be
Announced, “I AM SHE!”
Later, Bentley’s own son, Nicholas, had a go at the clerihew:
Cecil B. de Mille,
Rather against his will,
Was persuaded to leave Moses
Out of “The War of the Roses.”
Over the decades a number of famous writers have turned their hand to composing clerihews including GK Chesterton and WH Auden. Auden’s interest was engaged sufficiently to publish a collection of clerihews in a book called Academic Graffiti – a couple of his best efforts are:
Henry Adams
Was mortally afraid of Madams:
In a disorderly house
He sat quiet as a mouse.
⌖⌖⌖
Louis Pasteur,
So his colleagues aver,
Lived on excellent terms
With most of his germs.
Footnote: the clerihew, despite (or very possibly because of) its juvenile shallowness and nonsensical nature, has had an ongoing relevance as a teaching tool in engaging primary schoolchildren in the art of poetry-writing.
The Haiku Society of America defines the haiku as “a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition”. In English it’s structure consists of three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively (17 syllables in all).
The modern haiku has struck a cord in America more than anywhere else, though a great many of the experimenters in this form have tended to not adhere to the established 17 syllable/three line criteria. Outstanding US poets and writers who have dabbled in the haiku include illuminati like Robert Frost, ee cumings, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright and Wallace Stevens, and a swag of the leading 50s and 60s beat poets including those Beat Generation icons Kerouac and Ginsburg.
In its modern, western incarnation, the haiku has had no greater recent proponent of the genre than David M Bader. The NYC attorney turned haiku humorist, had the Western Canon of literature firmly in his sights in a book first published in the mid-2000s as Haiku U: From Aristotle to Zola, 100 Great Books in 17 Syllables.
Bader’s slim, little volume churns out one condensed gem after another as he scythes through the literacy classics of the ages with irreverent fun. Moby Dick, American fiction’s time-honoured allegorical classic of the ultimate fight to the death between man and cetacean, is given a topical environmental twist by Bader:
Vengeance! Black blood! Aye!
Doubloons to him that harpoons
the Greenpeace dinghy.
Homer’s ancient classic poem equivalent of the modern “road movie”, the Odyssey (all 24 books of it) is hilariously condensed into the form of an unfavourable weather bureau forecast:
Aegean forecast –
storms, chance of one-eyed giants,
delays expected.
In similar style, Bader takes the reductive handle to Jane Austen’s seminal novel of early 19th century English manners Pride and Prejudice, stripping the stellar text back to reinvent it in the form of a newspaper classified ad:
Single white lass seeks
landed gent for marriage, whist.
No parsons, thank you.
Bader’s take on Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is a triumph of ubër-alliteration. With a clever play-on-words he economically ‘nails’ the odious persona of Humbert Humbert in 17 syllables:
Lecherous linguist –
he lays low and is laid low
after laying Lo.
Bader also produced an earlier book [Haikus for Jews: For You, a Little Wisdom] in which he set down examples of distinctively Jewish Haiku – characterised in the main by recourse to a self-deprecating and at times a downbeat, cynical brand of humour.
Five thousand years a
wandering people – then we
found the cabanas.
“Through the Red Sea
costs extra.” Israeli movers
overcharge Moses.
Jewish triathlon — gin rummy, then contract bridge,
followed by a nap.
NOW that Scotland have expressed an inclination, but not a preference, to secede from the Union with England (the UK), it would be interesting to take a gander at other secession attempts both closer to home and around the world. The impulse for or advocacy of secession by a section or part of an established, multi-ethnic nation state is a recurring feature in contemporary international relations.
The enthusiasm with which so many Scots embraced the notion of “going it alone” and their, so it seemed up to polling day, excellent prospect of pulling it off, is a fillip for long-lingering secessionist movements around the world – Catalonia, the Basque Country, Québec, Flemish Belgium, Kurdistan (although some of the several Kurdish groups seek only autonomy, not outright independence) [“The Kurdish Conflict: Aspirations for Statehood within the Spirals of International Relations in the 21st Century”, www.kurdishaspect.com]
In the Southern Hemisphere, on this very continent indeed, in the state of Western Australia, an air of secessionism has tended to linger, much like the relieving breeze visited upon Perth in the afternoon from the Indian Ocean’s “Fremantle Doctor”. The Western Australians, from the very outset in 1900, were reluctant to join the Commonwealth of Australia…in fact the state’s name was conspicuously omitted from the original Federation document of 1 January 1901! A special provision (Section 95) guaranteeing that a planned inter-colonial tariff would only be gradually phased in, had to be added to the Constitution before the West would sign up. A further inducement that clinched it was the prospect of a transcontinental railway to be built linking WA with the eastern states.
The proposed colony of ‘Auralia’ – an irredentist goldfields colony
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
In the end, what swayed WA in joining (as argued by Tom Musgrove) was the affinity with the East held by recent settlers lured to WA by the goldfield discoveries. The huge population surge in the 1890s in WA, due to the influx of these Eastern fortune-seekers made them more numerous than the established residents on the coast who were, conversely, distinctly isolationist in their outlook. The miners formed a pressure group advocating that the eastern goldfields area (calling itself the colony of ‘Auralia’) break away from the rest of WA and unilaterally federate with the Commonwealth. The WA Parliament eventually succumbed to the threat of being splintered and losing the goldfields, and committed to the Federation [T Musgrove, ‘Western Australian Secessionist Movement’, The Macquarie Law Journal, www.austlil.edu.au; ‘Separation Movement on the Eastern Goldfields, 1894-1904’, West Australian Historical Society 1949, 4(5) 1953]. So, even prior to Federation, a bent for Western secession was evident.
Black Swan State
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
The secessionists succeed…or do they?
The threat of ‘Westralian’ succession has been a recurring theme in the state’s history since the early days of colony… lying dormant for years before being triggered into prominence by the emergence of some economic upheaval or issue (more recently over the distribution of mining revenues by the Commonwealth). In 1933 the issue of secession was actually put to the electorate of WA in a referendum held concurrently with the state election. The pre-conditions leading up to such a momentous development were brought about by the Great Depression. Wheat, WA’s top primary product export-earner was decimated (the price per bushel declined by less than half in three years) and unemployment in Perth reached 30 per cent. The WA Dominion League spearheaded by H Keith Watson agitated from 1930 for secession in the West. As a result of the League’s vigorous campaign (contrasting with the lacklustre campaign of the Federal League’s ‘No secession’ campaign), the referendum resulted in a greater than two-thirds vote (68 per cent) in favour of secession. Interestingly, the only region of the state to oppose the secession motion was again the goldfields!
“Westralia Shall Be Free”
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
The Electorate’s each-way bet!
Paradoxically at the same time, the WA electors dumped the incumbent Nationalist/Country Party Coalition from power (even though the NCPC had backed the ‘Yes’ camp), and elevated the Labor Party opposition, who had opposed secession, into office in the state. The apparent contradictory behaviour of the electors has been explained thus: support was given to the ‘Yes’ case because there was widespread dissatisfaction with WA’s situation vis-à-vis the eastern states (WA had long identified itself as the “Cinderella State” of the Commonwealth, it’s perception being one of it contributing more to federal funds than it receives back). At the same time, the unacceptable state unemployment situation in 1933 resulted in voters seeking to punish the incumbent conservative government by turfing them out (as was done federally to the Scullin Labor Government in 1932) [‘Secession 1929-39: Western Australia & Federation’ www.slwa.wa.gov.au].
The WA delegation bringing the petition to secede to London
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
Westminster or “Yes Minister”!
The new WA premier, Philip Collier, after some prevarication, appointed a delegation which took a petition for WA secession to the UK. Westminster, in a farcical turn of events which the writers of the popular 1980s TV series Yes, Minister would be proud to put their name to, simply sat on the issue, doing nothing! The British Government after a lengthy delay informed the WA Government that it could not act on the petition without the assent of Canberra. By 1935 the economy had recovered somewhat, the secessionist movement and the Dominion League lost momentum and the issue petered way for ordinary West Australians as they got on with the day-to-day task of making the best of what they could with the status quo [ibid.].
Western successionism, a simmering pot!
The media in WA helps to keep the issue alive with periodical appeals to the spectre of “secessionist redux” (with regular articles appearing with titles like “Why the West should secede” and “Secession still on our mind”). Secessionism has remained a rallying cry for disgruntled Western Australians whenever they feel aggrieved about what they see as the excesses and encroaching powers of Canberra. In the 1970s maverick millionaire/WA mining magnate Lang Hancock tried to revive the state’s secessionist trajectory with his short-lived “Westralian Secessionist Movement”, in effect a political campaign against the allegedly ‘socialist’ policies of the Whitlam Labor Government.Most recently this reared its head again in the concerted opposition to the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments’ mining taxes.
‘Prince’ Leonard & his consort – in the ‘Principality’
PostScript: Fringe micro-secessionists – seceding from the secessionist state!
In 1970 West Australian wheat farmer Leonard Casley declared his 18,500-acre agricultural property near Northampton (south of Geraldton) to be ‘independent’ of the Commonwealth and the state of Western Australia when Canberra and the WA government tried to limit the size of his wheat crop. In true “comic-opera” style, the eccentric Casley turned his farm into the Hutt River Province Principality, adopting the title of “His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt”, and in so doing spawned a whole new wellspring of tourism for the locality. Enthused with the spirit of commercial opportunity Leonard and his Hutt River ‘micro-nation’ has gone the whole hog…flag, coat-of-arms, royal seal, coins, stamps, medallions, passports, souvenirs, etc. The response from the Australian authorities to such a “bold act” of “unilateral independence” has been a “softly-softly” approach, not seeking to unduly push the matter, a bit surprising as the Hutt River ‘Principality’ purportedly owes the Commonwealth many years of unpaid taxes (although it does make rate payments to the local government authority, the Shire of Northampton)…the state and the federal governments seem to gravitate between being nonplussed and amused by the eccentric entity❈ and generally try to ignore it! [M Siegel, “Micronation Master: Prince Leonard of Hutt River”, 17 May 2012, www.businessweek.com]; ‘Principality of Hutt River’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org
﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋
❈ the Prince’s pattern of bizarre and idiosyncratic behaviour includes trying to seize government land surrounding his farm to increase his wheat quota; invoking the 1495 British Treason Act as proof of Hutt River Province’s status as a de facto monarchy; and declaring war on Australia (for four days in 1977!)
▪ • ▪ ‘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.
▪ • ▪
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)
