Fous et Bouffons: un Etude Physiologique, Psychologique et Historique(Fools & Buffoons: A Physiological, Psychological, and Historical Study) by Dr. Paul Moreau
You have to hand it to the French. They have an appetite for historical research and writing, as well as a keen interest in circus and clowning. Put the two together and the happy result is a lot of good books on the variety arts. When I somehow ended up as a French major in my undergrad years at NYU, I had no real idea how or if I would ever use my meager language skills. Four years later I found myself writing a book about clowns, the research for which would have been impossible had I not been able to read French.
So as we near the end of my posting public domain books about fools and jesters, I throw in a book in French on the subject. I figure there are enough of you gringos who read French, and the blog is getting a lot of visitors from francophile countries, so it may be of use to someone out there. And as I may have mentioned, it is free.
Moreau was a member of the Paris Medical Psychology Association and his approach aspires to be scientific. He was in fact the author of over a dozen books that bridge the gap between medical and psychological issues, tackling such subjects as suicide, childhood madness, and jealous insanity. One contemporary review of the book I found questioned Moreau’s science and opined that “the historical section of the book contains many anecdotes which may amuse those who have nothing better to do than to read them.” Zing!
I doubt H.G. Wells knew of Moreau when he wrote Island of Dr. Moreau, but Wells’ mad scientist is none other than Dr. Paul Moreau, played by Charles Laughton in the 1933 film, Island of Lost Souls. But I digress.
In the beginning (1889) there was Charlie Chaplin. And then it came to pass that 54 years later Chaplin took as his fourth wife 18-year-old Oona O’Neill, against the wishes of her father, playwright Eugene O’Neill. Despite the age difference they lived happily ever after and gave birth to eight children, the fourth being Victoria (born 1951). Like mother, like daughter: Victoria Chaplin eloped at a tender age with French actor Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, and together they created their own lyrical blend of circus and visual theatre under such titles as Le Cirque Bonjour, Le Cirque Imaginaire, and Le Cirque Invisible. Victoria and Jean-Baptiste have two children, Aurélia Thiérrée (born 1971) and James Thiérrée (born 1974), both of whom performed in their parents’ productions and have gone on to star in their own. On January 8, 2010, I took the BART to Berkeley to see Aurélia Thiérrée star in Aurélia’s Oratorio, a theatre piece directed by her mother, Victoria Chaplin, thus completing the cycle started in 1889. (Huh?)
This is only the third piece staged by the Chaplin-Thiérrée clan that I’ve seen, but they have all amazed me with their visual inventiveness and sheer creativity. Most reviewers describe their work as, well, indescribable, but I’ll make a stab at it.
Their shows use both the name and the vocabulary of the circus, but are in many ways rooted in the theatre, making clever use of its proscenium, its sight lines, its stage lighting tricks, its magic illusions. Their world is that of everyday objects — especially furniture and clothing — which are transformed in their hands into actual performing partners. The finely tuned physical comedy imagination at play here often yields stunning results, aided in no small part by the lithe and well trained bodies of Thiérrée and her co-star, dancer Jaime Martinez. There are few applause cues. Instead you feel like you are floating through a Dali-esque dreamscape or the world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland .
While references to surrealism are obvious and probably apt, in a radio interview Thiérrée traced the show’s origins back to the middle ages: “It was a picture book called The World Upside Down, and there were drawings that were very popular in those days, they were sold on the street. These were sometimes political and sometimes purely comical drawings, where they would invert the situation so instead of a man being on a horse it would be a man carrying the horse. Instead of a man going to war it would be a woman going to war. So this was the starting point.”
Here are two of 29 images from that book, and you can download the whole book for free here. [NOTE: The English text hardly seems from the middle ages, though I suppose the plates could be. The printing date is given as 1820, though perhaps it’s a reprint edition with modernized verse.]
The 70-minute, no-intermission, dialogue-free show is comprised of dozens of set pieces accompanied by pre-recorded music. Thiérrée opens the evening by emerging from a chest of drawers (see video below), ignoring a phone caller who seems desperate to reach her. The curtain drapes come alive, as though windswept into assuming different shapes and transporting her into a sort of parallel universe, complete with a bunraku-style puppet theater. She and Martinez play with self and identity as they don and share a wide variety of garments with the dexterity of quick-change artists, but with a better eye for transformation and comic moments. The inanimate world is constantly coming alive before our eyes and merging with the live action, so it comes as no surprise when our heroine becomes part of the puppet show.
What can I say? You have to see it for yourself. And though I would definitely pay to go again, I do have some not-so-minor quibbles. The physical comedy brilliance is unfortunately not matched by any deeper sense of theatre. The characters, such as they are, have pretty much a neutral presence throughout, and the relationship between them is vague at best. I am not expecting narrative structure or naturalistic characters in a piece like this, but I still think the results would be far richer if we felt that the characters were more invested in the situation, no matter how absurdist that situation may be.
The show runs the risk of feeling like a series of bits with not enough holding them together, so that when they’re not being brilliant boredom can set in. It is as if they are on the verge of saying something, but can’t quite go there. I was reminded of the brilliant Garden of Earthly Delights (photo, right) choreographed by Martha Clarke (a Pilobolus founding member), another visual piece with roots in medieval iconography, but one held together with a stronger vision. Of course Ms. Clarke had Bosch to draw upon! (Hieronymus, not Home Appliances.)
All in all, this is still amazing work that should be seen, and seen live. There’s not much in the way of good video available, but even if there were, it would be no substitute.
Here’s the official 2-minute trailer for their show, which I include in the interests of being thorough, but which I’m afraid does a pretty poor job of representing the show’s strengths:
And here’s the opening chest-of-drawers sequence.
A promo for Au Revoir Parapluie, a show by Aurélia’s brother James;
Click here for an interesting enough radio interview with Aurélia Thiérrée
Click here for a 1986 New York Times review of Le Cirque Imaginaire.
Click here for a New Yorker profile of Aurélia’s brother James.
This one has recently surfaced on Facebook and YouTube, but probably most of you haven’t seen it yet, so let’s add it to my early film collection, complete with all the background info.
First just enjoy the video…
Hopefully you got the joke! What I like about it is how it progresses from the plausible to the implausible. Quite silly, quite funny. Here’s that background info, courtesy of the excellent web site, Europa Film Treasures:
Ki Ri Ki — Japanese Acrobats Production date: 1907
Irresistible film that inspired many artists (including choreographer Philippe Decouflé), this three-minute gem was shot by Segundo de Chomón (1871-1929), special effect specialist hired by Pathé to direct a series of films based on special effects and meant to compete with those of Georges Méliès. Chomón witnesses the birth of the cinematograph in 1896 during a stay in Paris. This Spanish man originating from Teruel quits his office job and starts working for Georges Méliès as a colorist. He moves on to Pathé Frères where he contributes to set up a system of industrial coloring: the Pathécolor.
In 1901, Chomón settles in Barcelona. He directs numerous documentaries, has a go at animation and effects. Called back by Pathé to Paris, Chomón works as a camera operator on Le Roi des Aulnes (The Erl-King) in particular. He directs all in all about forty films and makes an attempt at every genre. This film only existed in its black and white version. Thank to the collaboration of the Cinémathèque Française, depositary of the black and white original single-perf negative, we have been able to make three positive prints. Hélène Bromberg colored the film in the old fashion way, frame by frame, using as a color chart a 2-meter long fragment of the nitrate original, rediscovered in a private collection.
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Segundo de Chomón’s tumblers, human pyramid virtuosos, hobble along but their somersaults fall a little flat. And once the “trick” is disclosed, the capers reveal themselves to be bluff. But what skill! A buffoonery far from ridiculous. Chomón is an editor, and he masters effects and splicing marvelously. The film is back in its original splendor. It will turn you upside down.
Director: Segundo de Chomón Nationality: French Length: 2′ 41″ Genre: trick film Sound: silent with soundtrack Original elements: black & white Producer: Pathé Composer: Eric Le Guen Original language: French
I guess it’s a generational thing, but when I mention parkour to anyone over 40, I usually get a blank stare, which if nothing else makes me feel young and in the know. If you too are going “huh?” just think of those videos you’ve probably seen of ridiculously agile teenage daredevils — Spidermen without the web — jumping on, over and off walls, railings and other structures that get in their way. They are called traceurs presumably because they trace a path through space while leaving only a faint imprint.
The Wikipedia definition is pretty good: “a physical discipline of French origin in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles in the most efficient way possible, as if moving in an emergency situation, using skills such as jumping and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves. The object is to get from one place to another using only the human body and the objects in the environment around you. The obstacles can be anything in one’s environment, but parkour is often seen practiced in urban areas because of the many suitable public structures that are accessible to most people, such as buildings and rails.”
If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s one of those videos:
This summer in London I actually had the opportunity to participate in a parkour workshop and performance at the National Theatre, meet some of the original practitioners, and grow some thoughts about connections between parkour and physical comedy. I would have written this sooner, but there’s so much to cover!
Parkour is essentially a street art form like graffiti or skateboarding, but with its own unique philosophy and history. The word parkour comes from the original French term, parcours, meaning course, as in obstacle course. Parkour seems to have become the accepted international spelling because it’s phonetic and therefore less likely to confuse. Depending on who you’re listening to, free running and l’art du déplacement are either synonyms for or variations on parkour. (Wikipedia translates l’art du déplacement as the art of moving, though it also contains the more exact sense of displacement orshifting.)
Origins
If there is an inventor of parkour, it would have to be David Belle , the guy in the video above. Belle developed parkour with friends in Lisse (just south of Paris) in the 1990s, and has since become an international celebrity as an actor and stuntman in films and commercials. He was also the subject of a New Yorker profile piece, which you can read here.
The story of parkour, however, goes back way before Belle and, in fact, shares roots with modern movement theatre. Belle’s father Raymond — a French soldier, fitness enthusiast, and firefighter — was a legend in his own right. Raymond Belle’s training in the French military had brought him into contact with the teachings of Georges Hébert, which he passed onto his son, and which played a key role in formulating the basic tenets of parkour.
And who was Georges Hébert? He was a French military officer who traveled all over the world before World War I and later became a teacher of physical education. Hébert came to the conclusion that the weight training regimen used by the military was building muscle without promoting dexterity and speed. In its place he developed laméthode naturelle, which he based on the movement skills of indigenous peoples he had observed in his travels, especially in Africa. “Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skillful, enduring, resistant and yet they had no other tutor in Gymnastics but their lives in Nature.”
Hébert’s natural method, also known as hébertisme, promoted “the qualities of organic resistance, muscularity and speed, towards being able to walk, run, jump, move quadrupedally, to climb, to keep balance, to throw, lift, defend yourself and to swim.” One of Hébert’s top tools for achieving this was the obstacle course — le parcours du combattant — which was to become integral to French military training. So if you ever hated being forced to run an obstacle course back in high school or in army basic training, you have Hébert to blame. On the other hand, if you ever did an Outward Bound program and loved it or you’re into adventure racing, how about a tip of the hat to uncle Georges?
Although his teachings were already widely accepted by the ’40s, the publication of his multi-volume work, L’éducation physique et morale par la méthode naturelle (1941–43) no doubt cemented his reputation. Here are some scans from the book, courtesy of Hovey Burgess.
Hébert’s work was also a strong influence on French theatre, and specifically on movement training for actors. Jacques Copeau, whose work in the 1920s at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris was strong on improvisation and physical training, adopted Hébert’s natural approach to movement as an antidote to the artificial stylings of the staid establishment theatres. He created the Vieux-Colombier theatre school, whose instructors included the Fratellini clowns and one M. Moine, an Hébert-trained teacher.
Lecoq writes about his debt to Hébert in his book Le Théâtre du Geste and in The Moving Body, describing him as one of the significant influences on the transition from artificial mime styles to a more scientific study of the body in motion. Mark Evans, in Movement Training for the Actor, points out that “Lecoq’s Paris school was to find its final home in a disused gymnasium, a symbolic return he himself noted with approval… Lecoq’s meticulous approach to the analysis of movement owes much to the French tradition of scientific, anthropological, and philosophical movement analysis…”
Silent Film The film world offers more direct connections between parkour and physical comedy, the most obvious being the reverence parkour practitioners have for such silent film stars as Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton. When Fairbanks first went to work in Hollywood in 1915, his boss was the legendary director, D.W. Griffith, whose Birth of a Nation had just changed the course of film history, and who immediately locked horns with the acrobatic young actor. “D.W. didn’t like my athletic tendencies,” Fairbanks recalled. “Or my spontaneous habit of jumping a fence or scaling a church at unexpected moments which were not in the script. Griffith told me to go to Keystone comedies.” This parkour-like spontaneity was part of his creative process, prompting Alistair Cooke to comment that his collaborators needed “a willingness to let Fairbanks’ own restlessness set the pace of the shooting and his gymnastics be the true improvisations on a simple scenario.” The Mark of Zorro (1920) is just one of many examples of Fairbanks in parkour mode.
The following archival clip, which has appeared on some parkour sites, is from the movie Gizmo! (1977) and has also been identified on YouTubeas from 1930, but is actually German stuntman Arnim Dahl (1922–1998), and is probably from the 50s.
Monkeys!
Another movement source for parkour is even more ancient: the animal kingdom. Or as they say on the Mumbai parkour web site: Q: What do you get when you combine a monkey, a cat, and a frog together? A: A Traceur!
In that New Yorkerprofile, David Belle talks about a trip to India and an encounter with a tribe of monkeys: “I was at a waterfall one day, and there were huge trees all around, and in the trees were monkeys. There were fences and barriers around them, so they couldn’t get out, but I went around the barriers and played with the monkeys. After that, I watched them all the time, learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.” Belle then showed the New Yorker reporter segments from the BBC documentary, Monkey Warriors. Here’s a clip that shows exactly what he means:
Monkeys and physical comedy also have a shared heritage that can be traced back to popular animal impersonations by such 18th and 19th-century physical comedians as Grimaldi, Mazurier, Gouffé, Perrot, and Klischnigg , which you can read all about in chapter five of my book Clowns. You can get a good sense of what these performances might have been like from Buster Keaton’s 1921 turn as a monkey in his short The Playhouse, which you can watch in the supplemental material for chapter five.
Philosophy
While the origins of parkour go way back, its rapid dissemination throughout the world came in the form of videos that were uploaded to the internet and quickly went viral. In fact, it has been said that parkour is the first art form whose growth into a movement has been totally dependent upon the internet. In the process, however, parkour has become a case of different strokes for different folks. For some, it is trick-based, the idea being to pull off the most spectacular stunt, and YouTube videos certainly lend themselves to showcasing these feats of derring-do. The founders and many subsequent practitioners have, however, framed it in far broader terms. Here are some of the concepts that have been put forward:
• Civilization has made people lazy, but parkour trains one to get along in nature and with one’s physical environment. This hearkens back not only to Hébert, but also to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his writings on nature and the education of the whole person.
• Hébert’s maxim “be strong in order to be useful” is often cited in parkour writing. Both David Belle’s father and Hébert were “superheroes” who had won considerable acclaim for dramatic rescues made possible by their physical prowess.
• Parkour is a discipline, as much as any martial art. One must overcome mental obstacles to overcome physical obstacles. For example, the philosophy section of the American Parkour site reads: “Many people take the principles they learn through parkour and apply them to their lives. By challenging themselves in parkour both mentally and physically, it becomes easier to deal with problems and obstacles in everyday life. When a difficult situation comes up in daily life, a parkour practitioner can see this as any other obstacle which they’ve learned to overcome quickly, efficiently, and without disruption to their intended path.”
• Parkour is play, and play is essential to creativity.
• The essence of parkour is the attainment of efficiency, moving efficiently through a space rather than around it. “If you run through a pedestrian zone without losing speed and without touching any person, you do good Parkour although you probably don’t use any techniques like saut de bras or saut de chat.” (Benedikt Bast) • It is a fresh way of looking at one’s physical world, viewing architecture as function rather than form. Parkour teaches pkvision, the ability to look at the environment and see the potential for movement within it.
• Parkour is self-expression, not performance. Once you start drawing attention to it, creating crowd-pleasing movements, is it still parkour?
• Instead of society discouraging parkour because of liability and insurance issues, parkour should be recognized as a valuable form of self-expression for youth, an alternative to over-indulgence in alcohol, drugs, or video games, and as an activity that does not require equipment or the formation of teams. Older practitioners of parkour send a message to youth that it is still okay to play.
The Urban Playground
So there we were in London in July, taking advantage of all the good productions offered at affordable prices (£10 and up) at the National Theatre, when we discovered that their outdoors series, Watch this Space, was sponsoring the performance troupe Urban Playground (an offshoot of the Prodigal Theatre in Brighton), in five days of parkour workshops, forums, and performances.
UPG (Urban Playground) performers come from backgrounds in contemporary dance and in Eastern European theatre labs, and specifically Grotowski’s system of physical actions. They are older (thirty-somethings) and approach parkour less from a daring stunt angle and more from that of actor training, movement, and theatrical exploration. Their literature favors the term l’art du déplacement, and this definition of the term from Parkourpedia fits them nicely: “The spirit is still the same as Parkour, there is still the aim of being strong, to be useful and the need to overcome fears, but the movement is less concerned with speed and efficiency and more to do with the aesthetic of the movement.”
UPG subverts traditional parkour use of found space by traveling with their own mobile playground, and this summer they even opened a permanent facility as well, the “UK’s first permanent, free, outdoor Parkour Training Area” in Crawley (West Sussex). They brought the mobile version to the National with them, and used it for their workshops and performances.
The Old Man & the Seesaw
Sorry about the pun, which at any rate may be wasted on those of you unschooled in the writings of Ernest Hemingway or Karen Gersch. I’m sure parkour has been done on a seesaw, but not by me. In fact, you could certainly argue that parkour has never been done by me, despite my decades of climbing trees, rocks, and man-made objects, not to mention hugging parking meters. But here’s the story:
UPG’s residency at the National included a series of short (free) workshops, including one just for kids, one just for women, and one just for brave souls over the age of 50. I somehow managed to qualify for the last one and, egged on by my sweetheart Riley, joined her in this afternoon adventure, wondering how my bad hip would feel after diving off rooftops and all that. Could I become the George Plimpton of parkour… and live to tell about it?
As it turned out, the workshop was not really challenging physically, but the process was quite interesting and worthwhile. Though it was taught from a dance and movement theatre perspective and certainly not from a physical comedy angle, it did give me a feel for the potential discoveries possible when one art form “samples” another.
Because of light rain, the workshop began in an upstairs lobby space. There were just eight of us: four students and all four UPG performers as teachers: Alister “Buster” O’Loughlin, Miranda Henderson, JP Omari, and Janine Fletcher. Not a bad faculty–student ratio, eh? Led by Buster, the workshop was first framed by a discussion of the history of parkour and of UPG’s involvement. The warm-up began with follow-the-leader movement throughout the lobby space, with the kinds of walks and stretches that I’m sure many of you have experienced in workshops you’ve taken. The difference here was in the more deliberate use of the physical environment, from simply making contact with various surfaces (walls, steps, railings, furniture, etc.) as we passed near them, to pushing off and rolling off of walls as you ran, to engaging with obstacles rather than simply detouring around them.
Next was floor work, where we did some basic shoulder rolls, with the usual emphasis on smoothness, spreading out the contact with the floor, and controlling one’s center of gravity well enough to roll in slow motion. Maintaining the line of attack of the roll was emphasized, and to work on our orientation in space we did them in pairs side by side, holding our partner with our free hand, trying to stay in unison as much as possible.
By then the rain had let up so we got to move outdoors to the “jungle gym.” The first exercise was simply to move “through” one of the structure’s horizontal bars on our own, either going over or under it, while our workshop leaders observed our choices. While it was not a question so much of right or wrong technique, there were some good suggestions for increasing efficiency and awareness of the space. One was to touch the apparatus as we went through even when we didn’t need it for support, the idea being that this would aid our proprioceptive awareness of where our body parts were. The second was a specific technique for gripping the bar as we passed under it that involved crossing one wrist over the other so as to provide a smooth transition as our orientation rotated 180º.
We repeated these simple movements many times, focusing on efficiency and spatial awareness, and then built on them with a series of variations. We passed through one bar and then immediately through another at a 90º angle. We played with grips and positioning for maneuvering over the bar. We developed more complex paths through the structure and had one person begin when the person in front of them was only part way through, adjusting the timing to avoid collisions. By the end of this segment all eight of us were exploring the cubes and railings, as many as four at a time, moving in and out at will, developing awareness of the structure and of one another’s movements.
Our Micro-Choreography
After a break for lunch, we were ready to start putting together what UPG terms a micro-choreography, a very short piece to be performed then and there for whatever public we could muster in the middle of a rainy afternoon. For yes, it had indeed started raining again, and we had a dilemma on our hands. All of the open-air structures were getting soaked, but what audience there was to be found would have to be outdoors. There was, however, an overhang just outside the National’s coffee shop with a row of tables under it. Ever resourceful, UPG chose to commandeer the last table and its four plastic chairs and throw together some minimalist parkour.
The entire piece, three minutes plus, was put together in under an hour, with Miranda as choreographer. The process was clearly from the world of dance, with the vocabulary borrowing from parkour basics. We began in our chairs, and we each came up with our own three to five movements involving the chair, which we then stitched into our own movement phrases. Here and throughout, Miranda’s role was not to give us any specific movement, but rather to help us make choices from what we’d come up with and to structure it in a dynamic way. She focused on building on moments that worked best; when she saw a dynamic relationship developing she sought to bring focus to it.
Next we tackled the table, some of us literally. Again we came up with a variety of movements, picked our favorites, and sequenced them, but since there were four of us and only one table, we also had to work out the timing of our movement in coordination with the whole group.
The final stage of our magnum opus involved descending two short nearby stairs, finding different ways to get down them. Clearly this was an example not of moving efficiently through the stairs space, but of transforming them into a plaything. Again, we had to coordinate this with one another and eventually work toward an ending of sorts.
The modernist performance philosophy behind all this is that dramatic relationships and moments arise from the dynamics of these structured improvisations without any specific intention being imposed. Performers interact, patterns emerge. Rather than the piece telling a story, the audience is free to take whatever narrative from it they like. For me as a participant this went against my clown and actor instincts. I had to fight the urge to seek out eye contact and grow it into a psychological relationship with another character. It was hard not to think in terms of status and control, hard not to want to transform a physical movement into a physical comedy bit. (Yeah, yeah, that’s also the story of my life, but we’ll save that for another post…)
While the end result (below) was clearly a “process piece,” I liked the process and can see its potential for developing all kinds of material. And yes, the rain did let up and we did get an audience of 30 to 40 people, all of whom gave us a standing ovation because it was still too wet to sit down. All I could think of was the storied tradition of the National Theatre: Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier and now Towsen.
In Performance with the French duo Gravity Style:Quartet
For the weekend performances of Quartet, UPG was joined by
two leaders of France’s Gravity Style, Charles Perrière, and Malik Diouf, original members with David Belle in the group Yamakasi, back in Lisse in the 90s. They’ve been collaborating with UPG for several years and on the weekend put together several semi-improvised performances.
UPG’s interest in mixing genres is echoed in Gravity Style’s concept of gravity art: “Around the art of dispalcement (parkour), the sportive and artistic discipline popularized by the Luc Besson Film, Yamakasi, it brings together a wide range of physical performance such as acrobatics and urban dance and integrates them into different artistic contexts.”
The performance of Quartet they did later that night was scaled back somewhat because everything was still quite wet, but it went over very well with the audience. The video below, shot with a handy-dandy Flip camera, is from far enough back to take in the whole space, so you lose some detail. To remedy that, here are some photos of the performance taken by Riley that help balance things out.
And here’s the video (about 11 minutes):
Parkour and Physical Comedy
If UPG’s choreography eschews character and plot, and other manifestations of parkour are self-expression, what does it all have to do with physical comedy? Physical comedy as a specific genre is usually based on meticulously planned out characters, stories, and blocking. Still, I do see some useful connections:
• Movement vocabulary
The most obvious link is between the acrobatics seen in a lot of parkour and that robust branch of physical comedy that emulates the daredevil antics of Lloyd and Keaton and likes large spaces and big movement.
• Intention, or, why did the chicken cross the road?
The parkour traceur’s intention is a given, the desire to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. The physical comedian is more likely to be running from someone. Speed is an issue, the intention is survival.
• Obstacles and Inventiveness
The obstacles are what make parkour and physical comedy interesting. Both the traceur and the physical comedian are creative in their solutions to overcoming these obstacles. While these solutions are efficient and “simple,” they would not be the obvious choice for most people, which just reinforces the eccentric nature of the physical comedian’s character. Likewise, it is usually the clown’s m.o. to overcome obstacles in an inventive way, even when not working in a physical mode.
A textbook example of parkour-style physical comedy is the climactic scene in Keaton’s College (1927), where Buster — an abject failure as a college athlete — must make a mad dash to his girlfriend’s dormitory room, where she is being held captive by an overly-insistent male rival. The intention is clear, the obstacles many. In the course of his rescue mission, he successfully makes use of many of the sports techniques that had eluded him on the playing field.
It should be noted that the pole vault was the only time in his silent-film career that Keaton used a stunt double.
Not only can physical comedy make use of parkour-style leaping and bounding, it can also make fun of it. Here’s a sharp parody of Douglas Fairbanks by Will Rogers. You may think of Rogers as primarily a verbal comedian and political satirist, but he had a long career in silent movies as well, making fifty of them! In this excerpt from Big Moments from Little Pictures (1924), Rogers channels his inner clown as he offers us a rather fey Robin Hood showing his very merry men the fine art of jumping.
And then there’s this parkour parody from the current season of the tv sitcom The Office:
Good ending, but I gotta admit it, overall I thought Rogers was a lot funnier.
Physical Comedy in the 21st Century??
Since we’re doing some genre-bending here, I’ll close with a cool video by Vidéo El Dorado that combines Mayan ruins, parkour, visual effects (time remapping ), and of course more monkeys. Not sure if it fits my “physical comedy in the 21st century” category because it’s not exactly comedy, but it is cool. Did I mention that it has monkeys?
Well, that’s a lot of stuff to throw at you. I hope it makes sense to all you old folks! I know I’m a novice here and just scratching the surface, so here’s some more info for the insatiable:
Links
• Jump Four — a 2003 BBC documentary about parkour that features French free runners leaving their trace on London’s landscape. This is available on YouTube, segmented into five parts.
• Parkour-Videos.com— “all the best videos of parkour”
• Parkourpedia — a reference source compiled by the Australian Parkour Association
• American Parkour— site for AMK
• Training Videos — also from the AMK site
• New York Parkour — site for NYPK, parkour group for NYC / New Jersey area
• Sandbag — parkour events staged all over the world to promote the fight against climate change
• Point B— a 2009 documentary about parkour
• Parkour in Casino Royale — James Bond chases Sebastian Foucan. I’d like this a lot better if there weren’t so many cuts undermining the believability of the leaps. I want to see the take-off, flight, and landing all in the same shot, thank you very much!
• Update (3-15-2010):Parkour Motion Reel — from Vimeo, a short but cool hand-animated flip book about parkour.
Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of an American Comic Genius Co-produced by Image Entertainment (USA) and Lobster Films (France) 2-disc DVD; run time 149 mins. 2004
Several DVDs have come out in the past year or two that I should be blogging about, multi-disc sets of the work of Harry Langdon, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charley Chase, for example. Instead, I want to do some catching up and write about a DVD set that came out five years ago on the work of Charley Bowers (1889 – November 26, 1946) . Why? Because it’s exciting stuff, and because today is Thanksgiving and it was on this day 63 years ago that Bowers passed away in almost total obscurity. Let’s see if I can show you why we should be thankful for his life’s work.
I suspect that most of you are saying “who in the hell is Charley Bowers?” In brief, he was a cartoonist, animator, and silent film comedian who, between 1926 and 1931, created a series of short films (no features), sometimes labeled “novelty comedies,” that combined live action with stop-motion animation, and that display a unique comic imagination. While much of silent film comedy exhibits a certain formulaic sameness, Bowers is a refreshingly original thinker whose work I think you’ll love.
Bowers’ name does not even appear in many of the standard books on the silent era, such as Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns (1975), and the reason is simply that his films were lost for decades. Even Neil Pettigrew’s more recent authoritative history,The Stop-motion Filmography, does not mention Bowers, but that book came out in 1999, this DVD in 2004. Although Bowers was popular enough in his day to be able to write, animate, and usually star in over twenty movies for R-C Pictures and Educational Pictures, by the time Keaton, Chaplin, et. al. were being appreciated anew in the 60s and 70s, his name had long been forgotten.
The story of his rediscovery is told on a 15-minute documentary on disc 2 of the DVD. Raymond Borde of the Toulouse (France) Cinémathèque was a relentless collector of old films. He knew that traveling carnival acts would often open performances by showing a short American silent film comedy, so he would buy these from them whenever he could, paying for reels by the kilo, sight unseen. He hit the jackpot one day when a rusted cannister of films he bought from a gypsy family turned out to contain three films by Bowers. The only problem was that instead of being attributed to Charley Bowers, the sole credit was to Bricolo, the French name for his movie character. No one knew who this Bricolo was, and years went by without any progress. The films were even shown in a retrospective at the 1976 Annecy (France) film festival, without anyone yet knowing this was the work of Charley Bowers.
One day this ad in an old film directory was discovered, providing the link between Bricolo and Charley Bowers. This eventually led to a film historian in Montreal who had some slight knowledge of him and to a folder of info buried away at the Library of Congress. More information was uncovered, as were more films, but there are still eleven lost films, and the details of his life are few. The only account of his early years is from a 1928 press bio that seems too colorful to be true: he was born in 1889, the son of a French countess and an Irish doctor. When he was five, a tramp circus clown taught him tightrope. At age six, he was kidnapped by a circus. When he finally made it back home two years later, the shock killed his father.
Hmm..
What we do know is that between 1916 and 1926 he wrote, produced, and directed hundreds of cartoon film shorts based on the Mutt & Jeff comic strips. At some point he made the transition from these hand-drawn cel animations to stop-motion animation, in which you move or manipulate a physical object a small amount, recording a single frame so that when the movie is played back the object appears to move at normal speed. Here are two brief clips about an automated restaurant that show this transition. The first is from one of his Mutt & Jeff cartoons, Grill Room Express (1918, aka The Extra Quick Lunch), the second from He Done His Best (1926).
In 1926, he began combining stop-motion animation with live action, and there are historical references to the “Bowers process” and to a “Bowers camera” that he invented precisely for this purpose, but so far I haven’t uncovered any info on this. Bowers has been credited by some with being the first filmmaker to develop this hybrid form. This may not strictly be true, but the extent to which he did this, and the overall technical level of both the animation and the live action was very likely groundbreaking for 1926. In fact, the story has it that a scene where a herd of elephants seem to enter the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. so fooled people that certain muckety-mucks demanded an official investigation.
Before going any further, let’s get more of a taste of his work. (Both of these next two clips are on YouTube, but there’s not much more of his work up there.) First is a sample of Bowers the silent film comedian from Egged On (1926), the earliest film we have of this hybrid form. The live action star is none other than Charlie Bowers, playing an eccentric, misunderstood outsider whose persona has been compared to that of Keaton. (As a performer he’s no Keaton, but he gets the job done.) Charley the eccentric inventor can’t pay the rent, but he’s on the verge of riches with his invention of the unbreakable egg. His approach to selling his invention is a good example of Bower’s offbeat sense of humor.
The second clip, from his only sound film, the 1931 It’s a Bird, showcases his amazing animation talents. An expedition to deepest, darkest Africa has netted Charley a rare metal-eating bird, which he hopes will prove to be his road to riches:
A Bowers film tends to follow the same general formula. Charley is an eccentric but brilliant inventor, a 1920s Doc Brown, only Bowers is younger and counting on his creations to help him escape poverty and win the girl. To solve the predicament at hand, he typically throws together a Rube Goldberg contraption from spare parts that somehow performs miracles that defy the laws of science. His character’s French name, Bricolo, is from the French verb bricoler, to tinker, and the French noun bricolage, do-it-yourself. Bricolo’s invention always works, but his ultimate success can still be thwarted by unforeseen twists of fate. One aspect of his films I particularly enjoyed is the unpredictability of his endings. The first one I watched did not end well for Charley, so I assumed the stories would always be aiming for Chaplinesque pathos. The next film, however, was the opposite, more along the lines of a Keaton or Lloyd ultimate-vindication finale. He keeps you guessing.
Bowers attracted the attention of André Bréton, leader of the surrealist movement, who wrote of It’s a Bird! that it “took us away, for the first time, our eyes opened to the dull sensory distinction of reality and legend, to the heart of the black star.” (Those surrealists sure had a way with words.) And in his Fifty Year Surrealist Almanac (1950), Bréton listed the one film that had meant the most to him each year, and It’s a Bird! was one of those films, as was Duck Soup for 1933.
Bowers’ movies are uneven affairs, a bit choppy, what with the combination of elements, and at times the storytelling can come to a screeching halt while he shows off with lengthy animation sequences. In his best moments, however, Bowers’ humor is wonderfully quirky and even downright brilliant. At one point his character says “sometimes I nearly ran out of ideas,” but with Bowers the opposite is the case, his head bursting with wild premises. There he is, struggling to invent a non-slippery banana peel, or trying to win a Charleston contest by taking a correspondence course.
His physical comedy always goes one step further. His sweetheart’s cop father doesn’t throw him out the door, he throws him thru the door. In A Wild Roomer, he tows an entire staircase out of a house — by accident. I’m pretty sure he has the highest WDR (wall destruction ratio) of any silent film comedian.
Bowers also does not shy from social commentary. In Fatal Footsteps, he satirizes uptight townspeople who are fighting the popularity of social dancing, and particularly the upcoming charleston contest. The name of the town is not subtle: Dumbville. Sam, the leader of the opposition is exposed as a hypocrite, but even he is eventually converted to the joys of cutting a rug when he accidentally puts on Charley’s latest invention, a pair of automated dancing shoes.
By movie’s end, Sam is getting his fellow old fogies to dance, and the final shot of the film is a fish dancing in its bowl.
Another example is the ending to Now You Tell One, one of my favorite Bowers movies, but I won’t spoil it for you since you can watch it below. It all starts at a meeting of a “Liar’s Club.” The head of the club is disappointed in the stories the members are coming up with. Stumbling on Charley and his story, he brings him to the club to tell it. Beginning of the movie within the movie.
It seems Charley fell for this girl and when he visited her house he discovered a sad picture. The girl’s house is seriously overrun with mice. The woodwork is full of holes and collapsing, the father gone batty from the onslaught. The sole cat is battered and beaten down. Charley moves in and sets to work developing a breed of more robust cats to fight the infestation. Here’s the rest of the movie:
There are a few hours of this on the DVD, so check it out. It looks like it’s on back order from most DVD vendors, but it is available on NetFlix.
Happy Thanksgiving, all!
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Disc One Egged On (1926; 24:08) He Done His Best (1926; 23:42) A Wild Roomer (1927; 24:27) Fatal Footsteps (1926; 22:20) Now You Tell One (1926; 22:21) Many a Slip (1927; 11:35) Nothing Doing (1927; 21:13) Disc Two Grill Room Express (1918; 5:36) [alternate title: The Extra-Quick Lunch] A.W.O.L. (1918; 5:24 ) Say Ah-h (1928; 14:03 = part 2 only) It’s a Bird (1930; 14:09 ) Believe it or Don’t (1935; 7:55 ) Pete Roleum & his Cousins (1939; 15:38) Wild Oysters (1941; 10:07) A Sleepless Night (1940; 11:00) Special Features Photo Album slideshow (1:45) Looking for Charley Bowers (15:43)
First Prize for Cello produced by Pathé in 1907 Length: 2:43 from Europa Film Treasures
I find comic films from the earliest days of cinema — the pre-Arbuckle, pre-Keaton, pre-Chaplin era — to be fascinating but not necessarily funny. First Prize for Cello, on the other hand, really made me laugh. I love the escalating absurdity, I love the assembly line inside the apartment (the dresser up the stairs!), and I especially love the ending. There’s no directorial credit on this, but someone knew what they were doing.
Enjoy!
That ending reminds me of the George Burns story, which he used in the title of his memoir, Living it Up: or, They Still Love Me in Altoona! If I’m remembering it correctly, Burns tells of a dismal (pre-Gracie) career in vaudeville, where he was going nowhere fast. However, one night he played Altoona (Pennsylvania) and everything clicked, the audience absolutely loved him. He thought he had finally figured it all out, but in the next town and all the towns after that he continued to bomb. Still he persevered, strengthened by the knowledge that they still loved him in Altoona. And then there’s our cellist, undeterred to the end and ultimately triumphant, a testament to the performer’s eternal optimism.
If the name Georges Méliès rings a bell at all, it probably makes you think of that wacky Trip to the Moon movie from the Dawn of Film that was okay in its time, but… that time was long ago. Yes, Méliès almost single-handedly invented special effects, pioneering such techniques as stop-action substitution, dissolves, multiple exposures, and time-lapse photography, in the process creating the science-fiction film genre, but nowadays his corny sense of humor, flimsy storytelling, and overuse of the same gimmicks make the work seem dated. In fact, it was out of fashion by the time the Keystone Cops came on the scene in 1912
And yet… and yet… there is much to admire in his films. His dreamscape visuals, based on his own superb drawings, are a precursor to surrealism and all that followed, including animation ranging from Yellow Submarine to many a music video. His appearance in this blog, however, is a result of me stumbling upon an exhibition of his work, Méliès: Magicien du Cinéma, at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris earlier this summer, while visiting the Jacques Tati exposition. The Méliès exhibition turned me on to some crazy crossover between his brand of cinema, inspired by stage magic, and the world of clowning and physical comedy. Méliès’ began his performance career as a magician and in 1888 bought and ran the famous Paris magic theatre, Théâtre Robert Houdin. Exhibits on filmmakers don’t always have a lot of stuff to show, other than the movies themselves, but this one was stuff-eriffic, full of all sorts of magic and early film equipment, and even a large-scale model of Méliès’ studio (unfortunately destroyed in 1947) in the nearby Paris suburb of Montreuil.
[Small world department: Houdin was a great French magician whose name was adapted by Ehrich Weiss, who as Harry Houdini became even more famous than his hero; years later Houdini was said to have given Joseph Keaton, Jr. his enduring nickname after the 6-month-old boy survived a fall down a flight of stairs: “that’s quite a buster your son just took.”]
But What Does This Have to Do with Physical Comedy? Yes, the exhibition has since closed, but here are a couple of clips with ties to physical comedy.
The first is Guillaume Tell et le Clown (1898), loosely related to the classic William Tell clown entrée, a parody of the legend of William Tell, who was said to have saved his own life and sparked a rebellion against tyrannical rule by successfully shooting an apple off his son’s head with a crossbow. In the clown entrée, as performed by François and Albert Fratellini, difficulties in balancing the apple on the son’s head and then the son eating the apple down to the core thwart the clown’s aspirations to greatness. (This entrée was collected by Tristan Rémy in his book, Entrées Clownesques, most of which is available in English, translated by Bernard Sahlins in Clown Scenes.) Charlie Chaplin used the gag in a short 1917 war bonds charity film he made with Scottish comedian Harry Lauder. That movie was never released, but Chaplin came back to the gag again in his 1928 silent movie, The Circus.
Update: For a discussion about the why and wherefores of performing the William Tell entrée in 2009, see this post (and subsequent posts) on Jon Davison’s blog.
Méliès’ texte explicatif describes his version as follows: “The clown, wanting to present the scene of Willian Tell and the apple, constructs a mannequin out of various materials and places a melon on its head. When he turns and starts to walk away from it, the mannequin comes to life and slaps him. The clown, surprised, reassures himself that it’s truly a mannequin, but when he turns around, he gets struck by the melon in his back. He is grabbed by the mannequin, who has come to life and throws the clown on the ground, escapes, and leaves the clown there all by himself.”
The Fat & Lean Wrestling Match from 1990 is even more clever:
Méliès explained that this stop-action substitution effect, which he used so frequently (too frequently), was actually discovered by him by accident in 1897 when his film jammed and he stopped to fix it. “During this minute,” he said, “the passersby, buses, carriages had moved on of course. When I projected the film, I saw a bus changed into a hearse, and men changed into women.” Actually the technique had been used two years earlier at the Edison studios in The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots to create a decapitation effect. Whether or not he was familiar with this, Méliès still deserves credit for fully (too fully) exploring the potential of the technique.
Of course film made a lot more possible, but the idea for these transformations was even older. In Joseph Grimaldi’s day they were called tricks of construction. Here’s some of what I wrote about it in my Clowns book:
Grimaldi’s Clown derived just as much fun from gadgets and machinery. Thanks to a lifetime in pantomime, Grimaldi was well versed in trickwork and was himself the designer of many effective “tricks of construction.” In these transformations, something new and unexpected was created out of something quite ordinary, usually with satirical overtones, such as changing a lobster into a soldier by boiling it…. Many of these inventions found their way into the circus (and cartoons) as sight gags. Grimaldi’s “New American Anticipating Machine,” often seen today as the hot dog machine, is the most common example. Clown steals a dog from an unsuspecting gentleman, stuffs the pooch into the machine, cranks the handle, and pulls out a long row of sausages. When the owner returns and whistles for his dog, the sausages wag just like a real dog’s tail.
Okay, done with with Physical Comedy Yep, that’s the physical comedy portion of this post, at least for now, but there’s more!
Although it’s not all that physical, here’s his fantasmagorical A Trip to the Moon (1902) for those who haven’t seen it:
That voiceover narrative, from a Méliès text, was added later, but for a more modern take you might want to check out this version, using music from Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts, or this one, or this one, both of which have original electronic scores that kind of work in their own way.
Even more interesting because it’s visual is the Smashing Pumpkins music video, Tonight, Tonight, which is practically a remake of A Trip to the Moon.
For a shot-by-shot analysis of the movie, check out this post from Dan North’s excellent film blog, Spectacular Attractions. North also has an interesting post on episode 12 of the HBO mini-series, From the Earth to the Moon, which intercut scenes of the Apollo 17 moon landing with re-creations of the shooting of Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune.
You can find links to a lot of Méliès material by typing his name into the search engine at: missinglinkclassichorror.co.uk
The Cinémathèque exhibit book, L’Oeuvre de Georges Méliès, is really excellent. Big, thorough, gorgeous, fun, perfect for the coffee table. Yes, it is in French, but it’s lavishly illustrated and includes a ton of Méliès drawings. You can get it from the French Amazon by clicking on the link above.
Likewise there is now an excellent DVD collection of Méliès’ films put out by the good folks at Flicker Alley, who do some real quality work in restoring and releasing old movies. I bought this, I really like it, and once I’ve watched all 782 minutes of it (or enough to sound like I did), I’ll post a DVD Report to the blog. And do I really need to mention that the movies look 100 times better on DVD than on YouTube?
This is also a good place to once again plug one of my favorite blogs, Circo Méliès, described as “a place for the meeting of cinema, circus and variétés in the widest sense of the term.” It’s in Spanish, and I only speak enough Spanish to get me to the train station and buy a beer (not necessarily in that order), but I still get a lot out of this blog.
Finally, a word of warning to those who think being on top of the latest technology is a guarantee of everlasting prosperity: When Méliès fell out of favor, he couldn’t pay back some big loans and went seriously broke, ending up selling toys out of a booth at the Montparnasse train station.
Okay, okay, I know that’s a bummer of an ending.
To finish on a more positive note, check out the award-winning graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, in which — spoiler alert! spoiler alert! — Méliès of Gare Montparnasse ends up playing a prominent role. I just came across this last week, but I bought it and read it and highly recommend it. I promise it provides a happy ending to this post.
As many of you know better than I, street theatre and circus are flourishing in Europe, thanks in no small part to government funding of the arts. The happy result is that it seems like every town has its street theatre festival, where you can spend the day or even a long weekend catching a wide variety of international performers and consuming a whole lot of calories. I think museums are okay in moderation, but hanging out at a performance festival, especially one outdoors, gives me a much better feel for a place and its people. The fact that it’s free doesn’t hurt either.
Antibes (France) had a three-day festival the last weekend in May — Déantibulations: Festival Arts de Rue — and I got to spend a good part of Saturday there. Antibes is just 20 minutes west of Nice and is known as the former haunt of Pablo Picasso and current site of a significant Picasso museum, the outside of which I distinctly remember seeing as I dashed from one performance site to the next.
Here are some video highlights of last year’s festival:
And here’s some footage I shot just to give you the feel of this year’s event… Disclaimer #1: Video Footage All video is shot on a cheapo ($135) Flip camera and thrown together on the fly. Hey, it’s only a blog!
Disclaimer #2: My Festival Attention Span As much as I enjoy these festivals (coming soon: report on the Berlin Street Theatre Festival), I like to do other things too, so chances are I’m only going to see a fairly small part of the festival. I’m not attempting a comprehensive report, and for all I know I may be missing some phenomenal performances. As the French say, such is life. _______________________________
The first show I saw was Hocus et Pocus, a comedy duo in diapers whose premise is that they are Siamese twins, joined together by a large plastic umbilical cord, each one unable to function without the other. Here’s a YouTube clip of their work:
As you can see, they’ve got some truly nifty juggling/manipulation chops, and I found a lot to like in their work. They also do a lot of other stuff — knife throwing, music, a levitation gag, etc. — which you don’t see in the above video; here’s a quick look at their one-man band duet from Antibes:
At the festival, however, I felt the show needed to be a lot tighter (yes, shorter), especially running as it did close to an hour in the hot sun. The umbilical cord premise was interesting enough — the desire for freedom, the necessity of cooperating — but once you set up a push-pull relationship like that, I think it really has to become your story and you have to build everything around it. The characters have a situation to deal with and I wanted to see the tricks grow more out of their attempts to problem solve. Disclaimer #3: Storytelling Hey, I warned you in my blog intro (over there in the sidebar >> ) that I like physical comedy that deals with context and storytelling, but the flip side is that I’m over-sensitive to comic premises that get dropped half way through a show. It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the show, just that I’d like to see them go further with their ideas. Okay, so maybe I am too literal-minded…. _______________
Next up was a trio performing a piece called Le Tennis, basically a partner juggling act but two of the performers were opponents in a tennis match, passing and sometimes hurling the clubs at each other over the net, with a percussionist-referee providing comic commentary. They had changed the venue because of windy conditions near the waterfront, so I got there late and only saw the last half of this, but what I did see was performed with flair and considerable skill, and was quite popular with the crowd. The festival site doesn’t provide any info on these guys, and I haven’t found a web site link, but here’s some footage I shot from the back of the crowd showing them mixing a little kung-fu with tennis and juggling.
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While waiting for the featured evening act, I caught a few musical acts —a hip-hop group, a large ensemble playing Brazilian music, and a French reggae band — all a lot of fun, and also caught an interesting theatre piece by Sara Martinet called The Bath. This was dance, not physical comedy, but it had a nice sense of whimsy, inventive use of props, dynamic rhythm changes, and a performer with a strong presence and wide range of movement. The collaboration between dancer and percussionist (Jean-Philippe Carde) was excellent, and the score worked quite well with the movement. I feared it would be too dry and artsy for my plebeian tastes, but I thought it was excellent, as did the crowd.
Here’s her Vimeo clip:
And here’s some Flip camera footage of the piece at the festival:
Milo e Oliviain Klinke Although this was a street theatre festival, several of the acts involved elaborate set-ups that one would not usually associate with the low-maintenance mises-en-scène adapted by most street performers. Such was the case with Milo e Olivia, from Italy (Accademia del Circo di Cesenatico), by way of Blue Lake, California (Dell’Arte School) and Montreal (Ecole Nationale de Cirque), who drew a large crowd to their prime-time Saturday night spot.
Klinke, a “poetically comic new circus show,” is the story of two oddballs — a porter and a vagabond who apparently travels the world inside of wooden crates — who meet, fall in love, flirt and fight, but in the end unite. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. The plot doesn’t always make perfect sense, and the skills are somewhat arbitrarily incorporated into the story. But so what? The performers were so engaging, the circus work so varied and at such a high level, and the non-stop inventiveness so refreshing that the end result was delightful. Here’s a video from their web site, which will give you some idea of their work:
Unfortunately, I think this rally fails to capture the energy and the spirit of the live performance. Partly it’s the classical music background, not in keeping with the show’s eclectic music choices. (I especially liked their use of Bjorg’s It’s Oh So Quiet.) Partly it’s just that video and live performance are not the same thing (so get off your ass and go see some live performance!). Here’s part of their diabolo routine shot live in Antibes, though cut off when I ran out of batteries. (Note to Self #1: always bring extra batteries. Note to Self #2: read notes to self.)
Among his many skills, Milo is a master of the unsupported ladder. A couple of live clips from Antibes:
All in all, a good time… You have to hand it to those French. As long as you don’t actually read the pretentious program notes, much less expect the acts to live up to all that poetic hyperbole crap, they do produce some good shows and, as always, attract international talent that may not get as much support on their home turf.
The first movie comedy I saw starred Danny Kaye. I might have been 6 or 7 and I laughed so hard that I still remember thinking, gee, I didn’t know anything could make you laugh that hard. My first Jacques Tati movie was Playtime. I was 19 and in Europe for the first time and, despite a show biz childhood, I had seen little if any silent film comedy. I was amazed. I remember thinking, zut alors, I didn’t know you could do that! It was as if I had discovered a new art form.
Although Playtime lost a lot of money, Tati’s legacy is in very good shape. His stature has grown, his movies are finding a new international audience on DVD, and this summer he is the subject of a retrospective in France housed at the Cinemathèque Française (through August 2nd), but with events outside of Paris as well. Here’s a very short promo for the Tati exposition:
Authorized Digression: Did you see Tati’s trademark pipe in that short animation? Well, believe it or not, they had to remove it from the print posters in the Paris métro:
Yep, I find that amazingly stupid (and I’m fairly anti-tobacco). What’s next, Chaplin’s cane? But what do you think? I think it’s about time this blog had a Raging Controversy! Don’t be shy — cast your vote in the poll (Raging Controversy #1) in the sidebar to the right.
There are a ton of Tati clips on YouTube, but you might want to avoid them. Better to see the whole movie to really get the whole picture. Tati weaves a complete tapestry with each movie, and what makes him unique is the overall world he creates, far more than just the isolated gag. [See the André Bazin article link below.] Furthermore, his cinematographic style and his sense of detail are best appreciated on the widest screen available; he even shot Playtime in 70 mm. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Playtime are good starting points, though others will certainly argue for Mon Oncle, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1958.
What is singular about Tati is his ability to find physical comedy in everyday life. He is the master of observational visual humor; one critic labeled him “an entomologist of the material world.” Despite some big gags such as the fireworks scene in Hulot’s Holiday, most of his stuff is subtle and quirky. Often the main event happens off-camera, and our imagination is left to fill in the blank. “I want the film to start when you leave the theatre,” Tait explained.
Although he has a great eye for social interaction, we know very little about Tati’s characters, his alter ego Hulot included, and there is nothing that you could call a plot. People come together, they interact. Hulot, usually too old-fashioned for this modern world, struggles mightily with his environment, with the world of things, but nevertheless exudes a contagious joie de vivre, most appreciated by the very young and the very old. Before long the characters go their merry ways with tales to tell and fond memories of that odd man. End of story.
Tati is not the only director to attempt to revitalize the silent film form after The Jazz Singer (1927) precipitated its fall from public favor. To my mind, however, he may be the only one who truly succeeds, and he does so by finding his own style rather than by imitating the classics. I believe it was the Czech clown Bolek Polivka who said something to the effect that if you’re going to be silent, there needs to be a reason. Rather than choose silence, Tati relegates actual dialogue to background chatter. Environmental sounds and human speech are part of a broader soundscape that works seamlessly with the visual humor. Buster Keaton, who commented that “Tati started where we left off,” is said to have been so impressed that he asked Tati about working on new soundtracks for Keaton’s silent films.
Just as it’s hard to capture the essence of Tati in a YouTube clip, one might also wonder what a museum exhibit can add to the actual films. At least I wondered that. Here’s what the expo has to offer in Paris:
• A museum exhibit at the Cinemathèque with props, costumes, and dozens of screens with clips from the movies and from his life.
Good job here. Tons of costumes and props, some original, some reconstructed. Models of sets. Dozens of monitors showing not just clips but also some nice thematic compilations of Tati’s work juxtaposed with that of other directors.
A life-sized reconstruction of the set for Mon Oncle.
I didn’t get to see this, but you can see a video of it going up here.
A screening of a fully restored “director’s cut” version of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.
This was wonderful. The movie is 87 minutes long, but it felt like 50. If this comes to a movie theatre near you, don’t miss it! Like I said, a large screen does make a difference.
A commemorative book, Jacques Tati : Deux temps, trois mouvements.
I bought it, I like it, but not necessarily a must-have. Tons of images and documents and about 75 pages of short pieces on Tati, mostly by other artists. You can buy it here from the French Amazon.com
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Finally, I know I said that YouTube wasn’t necessarily a good way to get to know Tati, but here are a few unusual clips you might miss. The first is said to be Tati’s first screen appearance (he speaks!) dating from 1935:
The next is Tati dancing, again from an early short, The School for Postmen(1947). You can see the whole movie here. (In two parts.)
And you can even sing “the Jacques Tati”:
Update: Alert reader Jonathan Lyons has alerted me to another Tati song, Jacques Tati by the El Caminos. It’s available on iTunes, but I also found it here.
Other Perspectives:
David Kehr on Playtime:
Jacques Tati’s Playtime is perhaps the only epic achievement of the modernist cinema, a film that not only accomplishes the standard modernist goals of breaking away from closed classical narration and discovering a new, open form of story-telling, but also uses that form to produce an image of an entire society. After building a solid international audience through the 1950s with his comedies Jour de fête, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, and Mon Oncle, Tati spent ten years on the planning and execution of what was to be his masterpiece, selling the rights to all his old films to raise the money he needed to construct the immense glass and steel set—nicknamed “Tativille”—that was his vision of modern Paris. The film—two hours and 35 minutes long, in 70mm and stereophonic sound—opened in France in 1967, and was an instant failure. It was quickly reduced, under Tati’s supervision, to a 108-minute version, and further reduced, to 93 minutes and 35 monaural, when it was released in the United States in 1972. Even in its truncated form, it remains a film of tremendous scope, density, and inventiveness.
Playtime is what its title suggests—an idyll for the audience, in which Tati asks us to relax and enjoy ourselves in the open space his film creates, a space cleared of the plot-line tyranny of “what happens next?,” of enforced audience identification with star performers, and of the rhetorical tricks of mise-en-scène and montage meant to keep the audience in the grip of pre-ordained emotions. Tati leaves us free to invent our own movie from the multitude of material he offers.
One of the ways in which Tati creates the free space of Playtime is by completely disregarding conventional notions of comic timing and cutting. There is no emphasis in the montage to tell us when to laugh, no separation in the mise-en-scène of the gag from the world around it. Instead of using his camera to break down a comic situation—to analyze it into individual shots and isolated movement—he uses deep-focus images to preserve the physical wholeness of the event and long takes to preserve its temporal integrity. Other gags and bits of business are placed in the foreground and background; small patterns, of gestures echoed and shapes reduplicated, ripple across the surface of the image. We can’t look at Playtime as we look at an ordinary film, which is to say, passively, through the eyes of the director. We have to roam the image—search it, work it, play with it.
With its universe of Mies van der Rohe boxes, Playtime is often described as a satire on the horrors of modern architecture. But the glass and steel of Playtime is also a metaphor for all rigid structures, from the sterile environments that divide city dwellers to the inflexible patterns of thought that divide and compartmentalize experience, separating comedy from drama, work from play. The architecture of Playtime is also an image for the rhetorical structures of classical filmmaking: the hard, straight lines are the lines of plot, and the plate glass windows are the shots that divide the world into digested, inert fragments. At one point in Playtime, M. Hulot stands on a balcony looking down on a network of office cubicles, seeing and hearing a beehive of human activity. As an escalator slowly carries him to the ground floor, the camera maintains his point of view, and the change in perspective gradually eclipses the human figures and turns the sound to silence. It is one of the most profound images of death ever seen in a film, yet it is a death caused by nothing more than a change in camera placement. Tati’s implication is that life can be restored to the empty urban desert simply by putting the camera in the right position, by finding the philosophical overview that integrates all of life’s contradictory emotions, events, and movements into a seamless whole. His film is proof that such a point of view is possible.
Georges Feydeau’s 1897 farce masterpiece, La Dame de chez Maxim’s (The Lady from Maxim’s), at the Odéon National Theatre here in Paris was sold out this week, but that didn’t stop your intrepid reporter from splurging a whole 3 euros on a rush ticket for a partial view seat in the 2nd balcony. I’m not qualified to write a full-fledged review here, not having read the play in over 30 years and often finding the three and a half hours of French dialogue, as heard from my seat on the fire escape, going too fast for my ears. (Je le lis mieux que je l’écris; je l’écris mieux que je le parle; je le parle mieux que je l’entends.) However, even I could tell the production kicked ass, with especially strong performances from Nicolas Bouchaud as the husband and Norah Krief as a dancer from the Moulin Rouge.
But why should a physical comedy blog devote space to Feydeau? • Because he was a master of comedy situation and plot • Because he used all sorts of gags (see below) • Because he thought visually and, as I’ve written elsewhere, wrote reams of stage directions, plotting the physical action of his precision farce machinery down to the most minute detail.
So here are two aspects of the production that I thought worth sharing with you clowns.
A typical Feydeau farce is set in an elegant belle époque Paris residence, with bedrooms and salons and the doors that connect them an essential part of the tightly choreographed action. For this production, the director, Jean-François Sivadier, chose to merely suggest the set. Only the essential furniture is there, and what doors and walls are necessary hang by cable from the rafters and come and go as they please. At certain moments, doors even rotate 90 degrees from their base (as if the hinges were on the bottom). For the party scene, the characters mostly sat on chairs downstage facing the audience.
Look’s interesting, eh? And it was kind of refreshing, but I ended up being disappointed by it. One of the big jokes of the play is that Monsieur Petypon wakes up to find a woman who is not his wife in his bed — a Moulin Rouge dancer. As was the style, it’s actually all very innocent, but before he can sort things out, his chamber is overrun by friends and family, prompting him to tell a few lies that of course backfire, weaving a web of deceit that cannot be happily unraveled until the last scene, shortly before midnight. Petypon’s home is his castle, but his castle is being invaded, so walls and doors matter. Not only could they have done more with this, but what they did do seemed inconsistent; for example, breaking the fourth wall by having characters enter from the audience weakened the power of the other walls, so that this abstract representation of Monsieur Petypon’s world never became the force it might have been.
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Feydeau loved gags and sure knew how to milk them. In this play, the main gag centers around a chair with magical powers: anyone who sits in it is frozen in place, as is anyone who touches them. Luckily there’s a button that unfreezes them, but only Petypon and his best friend know about it. (I had no idea they had such advanced technology back in 1897!) If you think of the gag in physical terms, it’s at least a second cousin to your standard Dead and Alive routine.
What’s interesting is that, unlike in a variety act, Feydeau has three and a half hours to develop the gag. It first appears fairly early in the play and gets some quick laughs. It doesn’t reappear again until the last act, just when we had forgotten about it. Of course you need a reason to repeat it or it would probably prove stale. This Feydeau accomplishes by integrating it into the plot’s final farce madness, and by increasing the number of characters frozen (see photo, below). Nicely done!
Finally, if you’re in France reading this, you can catch all of this yourself because it will be broadcast live on the Arte network on Wednesday, June 10th à 20h45. Hey, someone tape this for me!
