SWING ! (OST Jour de fête – Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot – Mon oncle – Playtime – Trafic – Parade) (2 vinyls)

Description

Watching a Tati film is an astonishing experience! Sound and music take the floor, take up more space than words, than the conventional discourse of adults and its boredom. Hulot is silent or stammers. Tati knows the noises of the modern world well: beeps, bells, crackles, jackhammers, cars, mechanical, electrical, rubbery sounds, secretaries’ high heels and typewriters, factory noises, creaking doors, sighing armchairs, machines and technical gadgets, Franglais, the vacuum cleaner, and all the little household stuff... He turns all this urban and domestic clutter, “plastoc, plastic, plastac,” linoleum and Formica, into a virtuoso sound score. All the signals and warnings, alerts and sirens lose us in urban spaces. Tati mischievously disorients us. He records in grand style, on five tracks! and in learned, delicious rhythms. A pleasure for the senses. And for anyone who has heard Mon Oncle, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, PlayTime... their view of the world will be changed. You will never again perceive the noises of cities and villages in the same way. The modern city is a playground for Hulot; he invents an unprecedented soundscape. And then there is the organic, the countryside, the barking dogs, the wasp buzzing around and annoying François the bicycle postman until he flies into the river... When we met Jacques Tati, rue de Bièvres, in his modest office full of filming memories, he evoked music hall, its rules, silent cinema, his famous pantomime number Impressions sportives... a tribute to the minimalism of gestures and sounds, and not a word. As for the music in his films, which he described to us as colors, it bursts into the disaster, ushers in the party: drummer’s madness, frenetic dancing at the Royal Garden... Never illustrative, it shakes up the hum of the modern world and crosses history like a true character. During editing, images and sounds are one and the same material, one and the same story. Tati has the secret of tempo. Not a sound, a note, a silence too many in his script. Absolute refinement. So, try the experience tonight. Put the vinyl on the turntable, lie down, close your eyes, listen. If you know Tati’s films, the journey will be visual and total: long takes, colors, crazy sets, the refinement of neon lights, the modern city and its airport, the Saint-Maur style or La Villa Arpel, Sainte-Sévère or the Hôtel de la plage, the auto show or the circus tent, Daki the dachshund, little Gérard, the American tourists... everything will come back in your reverie. Phantasmagoria. If, by misfortune, you have never seen a film by the brilliant Tati, neither his footwork nor his melancholic antics, the poetic and funny downfall of Hulot, nor met all the characters drawn in outline by the filmmaker, then your imagination will take flight. You are on board. Sound for Tati is the great affair of cinema. Magnificently obsessive, he captures, seizes sounds and music in a learned, sensual architecture. Joy of perception! The noises of the world worry and amuse him; they say as much as the image, the shift into modernity, tell of our clumsiness, the maladjustment, the disorientation of people like us. From music hall, he kept the taste for the sound effects man’s suitcase, for sounds recreated in a poetic elsewhere. From the village, he brought back the fairground, the accordion; from the modern city, “American-style” music, jazz and a few very Parisian tunes and other melodies for carousels... Without the images, it is still cinema! I should also tell you: Tati had planned for Confusion, his final screenplay, to work with Les Sparks, that talented group who imagined the music for Annette, the astonishing film by Léos Carax... From the whistling canary in the sunbeam of M. Hulot’s house to the fantastic puppet of a musical comedy, we are certainly on the side of the poets.--- Macha Makeieff ---