Comparing the work of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. (02/12/2020)

 

 Comparing the work of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati

In 1959, French filmmaker Jacques Tati won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for “Mon Oncle” (My Uncle). In his acceptance speech he paid tribute to the great silent comedians and said, “Tonight, I am not the uncle, I am the nephew.” After the award was asked if he could meet Harold Lloyd, Stan Laurel, Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton. What linked Tati to Keaton?

Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton was born in 1895 and gained worldwide fame as a silent film star and director. After disruption to his career, due to personal and professional problems, he came back to perform in talking movies, TV and advertisements until his death in 1966. Jacques Tati was born later, in 1907. His birth name, Tatischeff, was Russian, and he himself was part Russian, part Dutch, part Italian, but brought up entirely in France. He became a mime artist, filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter. He is most famous for his Monsieur Hulot character.

The two performers came to live performing before film, but at different stages of their lives. Keaton was born into slapstick and Vaudeville. His family were circus performers travelling with the Keaton Houdini Medicine Show Company across America. Keaton claimed it was Harry Houdini who gave him his stage name after he saw him falling down a flight of stairs without injury, saying, “He’s a regular Buster!” The label stuck, and by the age of four, Buster was performing with his parents. Along with Harry Houdini’s escapology act and selling fake medicines, the Keatons had a knockabout comedy act in which the young Buster was the recipient of rough handling that would have injured most other children, but he somehow seemed to take falls unharmed. To make the stunts seem even more extreme, his father, Joseph senior, had a suitcase handle sewn into the back of Buster’s costume and used this to throw him around the stage. On one occasion he threw his son at hecklers in the audience. Tati, on the other hand, came to performing as an adult. His first employment was in his family’s picture framing business, but he had a great gift for comic mime. He performed first to amuse fellow rugby players after games, but by 1931 was on the bill for the Racing Club de France annual revue. In 1935 he took to the professional stage as a mime, but earlier on in 1932 he had already performed his mime act as a tennis player in “Oscar champion de tennis”, a film that is sadly now completely lost. 

Both Keaton and Tati were both physical comedians with similarities and contrasts.  Keaton’s style depended for his whole life on slapstick, but Jacques Tati, on the other hand, grew his style from mime, a very French art form. Keaton began his cinema career in the silents and so had to rely on physical comedy, but Tati began his film career at the beginning of the sound era, but chose for his characters to speak very little or not at all. He shunned verbal jokes, but played with sound effects to emphasise the visual. Even when there was talking in a Tati film, the sound of the speech is more important than the words. It was a form of sound effect. Both men used their bodies as the main source of expression, even though they were very different shapes. Keaton was fairly short (5 feet 5 inches) but acted with taller antagonists. Tati was 6 feet 3 inches and usually towered over the other cast members, and looked clumsy in his movements, but his gags relied on precise control of his immense body. Neither actor used facial expression much, but Buster used enough close ups for people to see that he rarely moved his face, hence he acquired the title, “The Great Stone Face”. Tati had virtually no close ups, often using the long shot to put his character in a larger situation. Perhaps, this longer shot technique arose from his experiences as an apprentice picture framer.

Both Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton had influences. Tati was influenced by old Hollywood slapstick, but Keaton, coming before Tati, ironically was inspired by early French slapstick and in particular Max Linder. Both Tati and Keaton used recurring themes in their films. Keaton, given his small size, Is presented as an individual alone in the world and sometimes a victim. Tati, who is also a bit of a loner, on the other hand uses satire and parodies western obsessions for material goods as well as ideas of consumerism and modern society in general. In Tati’s worlds you have chairs you cannot sit on, kitchens full off useless devices, glass doors that shatter because no-one can see them and cars that no-one wants to buy. Both comedians use themes about little men against the world, even though Tati was not physically little.

Keaton and Tati’s creation and telling of stories differed. Keaton shot the beginning and end of his films first, improvising the middle, but in the process creating a linear story, whereas for Tati, the beginning and end provided a story but the middle did not have a specific story to tell; it was mainly about the minutiae of the everyday life of characters in the films. A Tati film can seem disjointed, and we only begin to get a sense of a storyline when things start to change, for example, with “Playtime”, we see a gradual change from dull monochrome to splashes of bright colour. The amount of colour increases through the film when mishaps occur, when adults unwind and start to play, or when children are in shot. It is as if Tati is saying that it is these things that matter.

Another example of Tati’s disregard for plot is his 1953 film “Mr. Hulot’s holiday“, which consists of a series of humorous situations sandwiched between a beginning and an end. Each gag was carefully scripted and choreographed but did not need to fit into a plot to make it work. This can be contrasted with the dream sequence in Keaton’s “Sherlock Junior” in which gags are used as important story-telling devices and follow on from things we have seen before Buster fell asleep. Keaton’s gags advanced the plot.

Although they were both immensely creative, one area they differed in was in the speed of their creation. At the peak of his career in the 1920s, Keaton was producing two feature movies a year, but Tati was always a slow worker, taking years to make a feature film – “Jours de fête” in 1949, “Les Vacances de M. Hulot” in 1953, “Mon Oncle” in 1958, and then nine years passed before “Playtime” came in 1967.  Tati had more to do than Keaton; Keaton would not do everything himself. Until he came to “The General” he was mainly an actor and director, co-directing his films with others, whereas Tati wanted to do it all by himself: writing, directing and acting in his productions. This desire to have entire artistic control affected his speed of production.

From 1920, Keaton owned his own production company which gave him considerable control, but he lost much of this after his first flop, ‘The General.’ Made in 1926, with Keaton co-writing and co-producing, directing, acting, it cost a massive $750,000, making it the most expensive film made up to that time, and featured the most expensive effect of the silent era, when a real locomotive crashed from a real burning bridge. Time overruns and extra costs, including compensating locals for fire damage caused by sparks from speeding locomotives, as well as the cost of hundreds of extras for realistic battle scenes, all left Keaton’s other producers and backers worried, believing he needed to be controlled more. The film made a small profit but not enough to reassure his fellow producers, including Joseph Schenck, who was also Buster’s brother-in-law. After Keaton made two more films for United Artists, with production managers keeping an eye on his budgets, Schenck forced him to sign a contract with MGM in 1928. He was warned not to do it by Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, but he had lost his bargaining power with the relative failure of “The General”. But despite the problems that followed it and its poor reception at the time, “The General” is now widely regarded as Keaton’s greatest masterpiece.

Although MGM let Keaton have great freedom in his first film with them, ‘The Cameraman’, their studio system then put increasing restrictions on his creative control. Keaton had to stick to both the budget and script more tightly and was only able to do a small selection of stunts himself due to insurance companies not allowing any of the risks involved. But, as he said, “Stuntmen aren't funny”. He was made to do talkies where his physical comedy was replaced by poorly written dialogue. His name and not his talent was being used to sell films. The reduction in movie quality led to a downward spiral in his career, heavy drinking and a marriage break up, with divorce from Natalie Talmadge in 1932. She took all the money and refused him contact with his sons. His drinking became heavier, and there are reports that he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital because of alcoholism in 1933.

Through the thirties, Keaton scraped a living writing gags for MGM, including for the Marx Brothers. There were a few minor parts in films through the 1940s, but it was not until the arrival of television in the 1950s that his career began to get back on track as he gained a new audience.

Tati was also committed to artistic control. Although he began appearing in short films made by others in the 1930s, by 1947 he was writing, directing and starring in his first full-length feature film, “Jour de fête”. It was also his attempt to make France’s first colour feature film, using an experimental colour system, but a backup black-and-white version was released because of technical issues. The colour version was not released until 1994, 12 years after his death. In 1967, Tati used his artistic freedom to make the film he had always wanted to make, “Playtime”. He had already been working on this film for about a decade, building a huge set of an ultra-modern suburb of Paris. He also used advanced widescreen cinematography. All of this cost a huge amount of money, and Tati was using his own as well as expensive bank loans. Problems with set construction and storm damage led to severe delays in production with ever increasing debt to the bank. At one time he remortgaged the Tatischeff family home. He still hoped that after the film was made the government would go on to fund his set and studio. But the culture minister said, “Non,” and the set was demolished soon after. The movie was critically acclaimed but flopped commercially. His production company, Specta Films, went bankrupt in late 1969. Despite failing financially, “Playtime” is now regarded by many as Tati’s greatest masterpiece.

Just as he received no support from the French government, the French public had also lost their taste for his films, leaving him no choice other than to look abroad for support. His next film, “Trafic” (1971) was a smaller affair jointly funded by Italian and French production companies. By 1974, he was directing and appearing in a made for Swedish television production, “Parade”, which was a revival of his pre-war stage acts mixed in with other Circus performers. It was his last film.

Perhaps the greatest difference between Keaton and Tati is that Keaton’s career peaked early on his life. Many of his greatest films were made in his twenties and he was only 31 when he made his great masterpiece, “The General”.  Tati’s greatest creation was his character, Monsieur Hulot, who is seen as a middle-aged man from the very beginning. Although Tati still made films after “Playtime”, he never regained his creative freedom nor creativity. Keaton had longer to recover, and his later life transition to television ensured that modern audiences could again see an original silent great and kept silent slapstick alive. It is revealing about Tati’s relationship with and affection for his silent predecessors that he bought 160 kilometers of early comic shorts including Keaton’s when he was at the height of his fame. But the admiration was not only way. After meeting him, Keaton was to say that Tati’s work with sound was carrying on the true tradition of the silent cinema.