Tatis shooting festival

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Movie
German title Tatis shooting festival
Original title Jour de fete
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1949
length 76 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Jacques Tati
script Jacques Tati
Henri Marquet
René Wheeler
production Fred Orain
music Jean Yatove
camera Jacques Marcanton
Jacques Sauvageot
cut Marcel Morreau
occupation

Tatis Schützenfest (original title Jour de fête) is a feature film by the French director Jacques Tati . The film was shot from May to November 1947.

action

The annual festival in a small French village is coming up. Several people try to erect a flagpole on the village square , which they do not really succeed. Just as the wooden mast is about to fall over, the postman François rides his bike through an archway onto the square and can only escape the falling mast by quickly turning into the restaurant on the square. Then he organizes the setting up and gives the people commands, whereby he also succeeds in getting a severely cross-eyed worker by offering two stakes and pointing to one of them to hit the other.

During the festival there is also a mobile cinema in a tent in the fictional village of Folainville (shot in Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre ). François becomes a mockery of the villagers when a film about modern methods of mail delivery in the USA is shown in the tent cinema. Postmen would deliver their mail there by airplanes and helicopters. After a night of partying in the inn, where the drunk postman is constantly teased by the guests because of his slow delivery method, he makes the decision to show the people. From now on his motto is "Rapidité - speed!".

But the acceleration of his work has some serious disadvantages and ends in a fiasco. So the butcher chops off the tips of the shoes in a package with his ax when it is thrown through the window onto the table during the movement. He knocks over several people and falls off his bike himself. His rationalization efforts lead to the fact that he once overtook a group of racing cyclists with his postal bike and stamped the letters on the horizontally folded flap of a pickup truck under which his bicycle handlebars fit exactly. He also confuses a military police patrol by apparently telephoning on the bike with a retracted phone so that it drives over it into the ditch. Progress and rationalization do not last in the idyllic village, because personal relationships fall by the wayside. After the postman falls into the village stream, he decides to distribute his mail the French way again. Meanwhile, the showmen leave the village.

background

In this film, Tati already shows the tension between the “good old days” and the achievements of modernity, which he satirized in his later films Mein Unkel (1958) and Tati's glorious times (1967).

The filming location for the film was the village of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre , with many of the residents in small supporting roles. Tati got to know the village in 1943 when he and his friend, screenwriter Henri Marquet , wanted to avoid the German occupying forces and they ran a farm in the remote Sainte-Sévère for around a year. Two years after the war ended, he returned there to shoot the short film School of the Postman . The big letter distribution tour of François in Tati's Schützenfest is, except for the end, a 1: 1 remake of the school of mail carriers that was created a year earlier .

Tati's film was the first French color film ("Thomson Color") and was shot in a rather complicated 3-color process: a separate film was used for each color (red, yellow and blue). During the projection, these films had to be projected one above the other with three film projectors, because a technology for merging the three colors on a film strip was not yet available. The Technicolor 4 process , introduced in 1932, was still secret and not known in France. Tati had his doubts about the technology of the color process and, as a precaution, had the film shot in black and white with a separate camera. Since hardly any cinema could perform the color process, the film was only shown in black and white. It was not until 1995 that the version of the color version, which was co-financed by ZDF among others, was shown on film. Before that, there was also a curiosity, a black-and-white version partially colored by Tati in 1964, in which various objects were artificially re-colored, for example the French flag or balloons. Tati also provided this version with a re-shot frame story in which a young artist visits the village, explains what is happening and carries out the re-coloring with his brush.

The German translation of the film title is misleading. A shooting festival in the literal sense (festival of members of a shooting club ) does not appear in the film.

Reviews

"With this infinitely loving village chronicle full of funny observations, Tati has created a tender masterpiece."

- Lexicon of International Films

“In 'Tatis Schützenfest', Tati, who plays the postman François, celebrates the French village community - with critical sympathy, with passion, love, but without falling into idyllic waters. Even here Tati's distance to the city, to modern technologies, to firmly established systems, to supposedly plannable processes is evident. "

- Filmzentrale.com

"[...] a comedy full of poetic fantasy, a successful reinterpretation of burlesque in the style of Mack Sennett or Buster Keaton [...]"

- Arte

Awards

Soundtrack

  • Jean Yatove: Jour de Fete. Extraits de la Bande Originale du Film , on: Extraits of the Bande Originales des Films de Jacques Tati . Philips / Polygram slsn sound carrier no. 836 983-2 - Excerpts (suite) from the original recordings of the film music, recorded under the direction of the composer

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ JOUR DE FETE | Jonathan Rosenbaum. Retrieved November 21, 2019 .