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

Description

Listening to a Tati film is an astonishing experience! Sound and music speak for themselves, taking up more space than words, more than the conventional and boring discourse of adults. Hulot is silent or mumbles. Tati knows the noises of the modern world well: beeps, rings, crackles, jackhammers, cars, mechanical, electrical, rubbery sounds, secretaries' high heels and typewriters, factory noises, creaking doors, sighing armchairs, machines and technical gadgets, Franglais, vacuum cleaners, and all the small household appliances... He turns all this urban and domestic clutter, 'plastoc, plastic, plastac', linoleum and Formica, into a virtuoso sound score. All the signals and alerts, warnings and sirens lose us in urban spaces. Tati mischievously disorients us. He records extensively, on five tracks! and with clever and delicious rhythms. A pleasure for the senses. And for those who have heard 'Mon Oncle', 'Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot', 'PlayTime'... their view of the world will be changed. Never again will you perceive the noises of towns 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, barking dogs, the wasp that buzzes around and annoys François the postman on his bike until he glides into the river... When we met Jacques Tati, on Rue de Bièvres, in his modest office full of filming memories, he spoke to us about music hall, its rules, silent cinema, his famous pantomime act 'Impressions sportives'... a tribute to the minimalism of gestures and noises, and not a word. As for the music in his films, which he described to us as colors, it bursts into the disaster, inaugurates the celebration: the drummer's madness, frantic dancing at the Royal Garden... Never illustrative, it disrupts the rumor of the modern world and traverses history like a real character. During editing, images and sounds are the same material, the same story. Tati holds 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 décors, the refinement of neon lights, the modern city and its airport, the Saint-Maur style or La Villa Arpel, Sainte-Sévère or l'Hôtel de la plage, the motor show or the circus tent, Daki the dachshund, little Gérard, the American tourists... everything will return in your reverie. Phantasmagoria. If, unfortunately, you have never seen a film by the brilliant Tati, nor his footwork, nor his melancholic antics, the poetic and funny perdition of Hulot, nor met all the characters drawn with precision by the filmmaker, then your imagination will take flight. You are embarked. Sound, for Tati, is the great affair of cinema. Magnificently obsessive, he captures and seizes sounds and music in a clever, sensual architecture. Joy of perception! The noises of the world concern and amuse him; they say as much as the image, the shift into modernity, they tell of our clumsiness, maladaptation, the disorientation of the people we are. From music hall, he retained a fondness for the sound engineer'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 images, it's still cinema! Let me also tell you: Tati had planned for 'Confusion', his last screenplay, to work with The Sparks, that talented group who created the music for 'Annette', Léos Carax's astonishing film... From the whistling canary in the ray of sunshine in Mr. Hulot's house to the fantastic puppet of a musical, we are certainly on the side of poets. --- Macha Makeieff ---