One of cinema’s greatest comedians, French director Jacques Tati (1907-1982) has produced some of the most beautiful, inspired, light, funny and poetic comedies ever.

Very little dialogue and a lot of visual creativity, reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, these are perfect light little gems for the summer months!

All films in French with English subtitles, and on showing on beautiful 35mm prints!

WHAT THE NEW YORK MUSEUM OF MODERN ART SAYS

The very prestigious New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) organised a Jacques Tati season in January 2010, and here is what they say about him:

BUSTER KEATON AND WES ANDERSON

"One of cinema’s greatest comedians, Tati was also one of its most radical modernists. His experiments with sound, color, and image, and with language, design and technology, are a fundamental, if often overlooked, bridge between the innovations of Buster Keaton and Max Linder in the silent era, those of his contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras and Robert Bresson, and filmmakers today who owe much to his style and humor, from Roy Andersson to Wes Anderson, Otar Iosselliani to Elia Suleiman, Takeshi Kitano to Sylvan Chomet.

ABSURD

As many critics have observed, Tati plays the straight man to an absurdly comical world, with his loping, springy gait —where is he, a man with no discernable ambitions, heading with such purpose?—always at the ready with his raincoat and highwater trousers, his pipe and hat, and a fishing rod or umbrella in hand, and always alone in a crowd, whether at a seaside resort or in a steely modernist office building, stuck in a traffic jam or returning to his salad days of pantomime on the circus stage.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING PLAYFUL

Tati’s mise en scène has been compared with that of a Breughel painting (Raoul Dufy is equally apt): through long-take, deep-focus, all-over tableaux, a Babel of languages, and the burbling eruptions of machines gone haywire, he creates an entire cosmos, a meticulously choreographed chaos in a Cartesian world, and a singularly new, transformative, and democratic way of experiencing the moving image.

In this way, as in so many others, Tati celebrates the importance of being playful."

Info taken from the New York Museum of Modern Art, here: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1023

THE ILLUSIONIST

You might have heard of a recent animation film called The Illusionist (2010, dir. Sylvain Chomet) - it was inspired from Jacques Tati's life, and from a script he had written in his youth.

BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE!

http://www.wegottickets.com/searchresults/page/1

£4.50 advance tickets

OR £5 and £3.50 (conc) on the night