Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/06/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, September 6, 2019

Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)

Cast: Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Zola, Adrienne Servantie, Lucien Frégis, Betty Schneider, Jean-François Martial, Dominique Marie, Yvonne Arnaud, Adelaide Danieli, Alain Bécourt. Screenplay: Jacques Tati, Jacques Lagrange, Jean L'Hôte. Cinematography: Jean Bourgoin. Production design: Henri Schmitt. Film editing: Suzanne Baron. Music: Franck Barcellini, Alain Romans, Norbert Glanzberg.

Jacques Tati's M. Hulot confronts the modern world and almost leaves it in ruins. I think this is probably the funniest of Tati's films, with superb slapstick setups in the hideous modern house owned by his sister and brother-in-law and in the plastics factory where Hulot gets a job. It's filled with Tati's nostalgia for the antique and shabby as it fades into the future.