Tati and America: Jour de fête and the Blum-Byrnes agreement of 1946

TY - JOUR

T1 - Tati and America

T2 - Jour de fête and the Blum-Byrnes agreement of 1946

AU - Bellos, David

N1 - Funding Information: Bellos David 06 1999 10 29 145 159 sagemeta-type Journal Article search-text 145 Tati and America: Jour de fête and the Blum-Byrnes Agreement of 1946 SAGE Publications, Inc.1999DOI: 10.1177/095715589901002901 David Bellos A reviewer signing as 'Maxi' made the following comments in Variety on 1 June 1949: This pic is an education. It took an American showman to demonstrate to the French, on their home plate, that a picture could be made here on a $30,000 budget and gross $12,000 in its first week's simultaneous release in four small Paris first-run houses headed by the Champs-Elysees' Balzac. This is a constructive answer to local producers' gripes that Hollywood opposition kills their industry. Borrah Minevitch, who has been in Paris a couple of years, put together the money, story, star and, above all, the knowhow.1 Surprisingly, the film being thus praised is that nostalgic comedy of la France profonde, Jacques Tati's jour de fbte. Yet the name of Borrah Minevitch appears in none of the general studies on Tati,~ nor is there any reference to American involvement to be found in Frangois Ede's detailed and fascinating investigation of the production history of what was intended to be the first feature film in a new, all-French colour process.' So was the Variety review a joke? Or a provocation? Given the standing of Jour de f6te as a major icon of post-war French culture, and given the often polemical . Address for correspondence: Department of Romance Languages, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. 1 'Maxi', Jour de fête, Variety - Film Reviews, 1949, 53. 2 The principal works are: Geneviève Agel, Hulot parmi nous (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1955); Théodore Louis, Jacques Tati (Brussels: Club du livre de cinéma, 1959); Armand J. Cauliez, Jacques Tati (Paris: Seghers, 1962); Brent Maddock, The Films of Jacques Tati (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977); James Harding, Jacques Tati Frame by Frame (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984); Michel Chion, Jacques Tati (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1987); and Marc Dondey, Jacques Tati (Paris: Ramsay, 1989; reprinted 1993). 3 François Ede, 'Jour de fête' ou la couleur retrouvée (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1995). 146 public discussion of the relationship between American and French cinema in the years of its making (1947-1949), the question seems worth delving into. Borrah Minevitch's alleged role in putting together the money and the talent to make Jour de f6te is all the more mysterious for the fact that there is more source material available on the history of Tati's first foray as a director than on the vast majority of French films. All the material points not to American involvement, but to conscious rivalry with American cinema. The same general competition with America seems to hold for the whole of Tati's subsequent film œuvre. With the exception of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Parade (1974), Tati's mature films are easily viewed as a series of satirical essays on the follies of modernization, a phenomenon which, throughout the trente glorieuses, was conventionally assumed by the French to be synonymous with Americanization. Mon Oncle (1958) holds up modern domestic conveniences (electrical kitchen equipment, garden decoration, automatic garage doors) to ridicule, and seems to establish a straightforward opposition between old-French messiness in the vieux-quartier (good) and new-American neatness in the soulless suburb where the Arpel family lives (bad). Playtime (1967) gives a vast panorama of modern group travel (by 'Economic Airlines'), of hi-tech office buildings, of a jerry-built restaurant, and of the overwhelming banality of modern architecture, in a presentation so dead-pan as to convince many that it is deeply satirical. Trafic (1972) targets the civilization of the motor-car (from superhighways to all-purpose camping-cars, from sporty yellow runabouts to giant parking lots). However, with the exception of Jour de fête, Tati's works do not deal explicitly with America or with unambiguously American themes: the perception of a pro-European, anti-American bias in the main works depends on assimilating all things modem, shiny and/or uncomfortable to the 'American way of life'.4 But in Jour de f6te, which pits a cycling scion of rural France, the not-altogether-bright postman played by Jacques Tati, against the US Postal Service, America - or at least, the idea of America - plays a real, and historically significant, role. What requires explanation to begin with is how the forty-year-old Tati got his first chance to direct a feature film in 1947, at a time when the French cinema industry was still recovering from wartime damage and contraction, and relied very heavily on directorial talents established before and during the Occupation. Born 1907, the son of the well-to-do owner of an art-restoration and picture-framing business with premises near Place Vend6me, the unacademic 4 This equivalence is presumably what justifies Kristin Ross's assertion that 'Tati made films treating the Americanization of everyday life...' (Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995)), 42. 147 and apparently unambitious Jacques Tatischeff left home around 1931 to earn a meagre living as a music-hall mime, under his stage name of Tati (sometimes written Tatti, or Taty, at that time). With a single act of 'Sporting Impressions', he eventually became quite well known, and performed in prestigious Paris venues (the ABC, the Lido, the Bal Tabarin) and also in a number of European capitals and resorts (London, Berlin, San Remo) before the outbreak of war in 1939. At the same time, he did his best to get into making burlesque shorts, following in the footsteps of his Anglo-Saxon predecessors and rivals, Chaplin, Keaton and Sennett, who had all trodden the boards before becoming world-famous on film. Tati often said in later years that he started making films because he did not want to become that sad figure, an old music-hall artiste, with nothing but memories to show for a long career. However, On demande une brute (1934), Gai dimanche (1935) and Soigne ton gauche (1936),5 the only three early shorts of which copies have survived,' are much more than filmed variety acts, even if all three are vehicles for the physical clowning of the performer Tati. They contain some formal ideas (such as a cycling postman, in Soigne ton gauche), some of the comic gags (a goldfish mistaken for a sardine, in On demande une brute) and some of the themes (motor cars, tourists, and a dreadful restaurant that prefigures the dining room of the Hotel de la Plage, in Gai dimanche) that are easily recognizable origins for gags and ideas in Tati's mature work. It is said (but remains impossible to verify) that none of these burlesque shorts was distributed in the 1930s; but as the credit sequences on the extant copies were added after the war, and as documentary sources are both gappy and unreliable, it is not even clear who really produced these uneven but fascinating essays in film. Tati's claim that he saved up his earnings from the stage to buy his own reels of film, which he then shot, reel by reel,' may just possibly be true; but it sounds more like a retrospective glamorization of youthful adventures. In the early shorts as in the post-war films, Tati always plays a Keaton-like figure, with a po-faced expression of innocent bewilderment. Exploiting his 5 These are the dates given by Paul Davay in 1968 (see below, note 13), and traditionally repeated by most of the authorities, including Raymond Chirat, Catalogue de Courts-métrages français de fiction, 1929-1950 (1996). But the Unifrance-Film catalogue of shorts, published in 1953, gives the date of 1947 for Soigne ton gauche, and Chirat gives 1937 for ... L'École des facteurs. Claude Beylie, 'Jacques Tati inconnu', Cinéma , 57 n° 23 (1957), 10-14, puts the shorts in the following order: Gai dimanche, 1935; On demande une brute, 1936; Soigne ton gauche, 1937. See also note 12 below. 6 Two others - Oscar Champion de tennis (1932) and Retour à la terre (1938) - were 'never really finished', and have been lost. Even if the documentary basis for their inclusion in Tati's filmography is close to nil, there is no reason to doubt Tati's own memory of having made them. 7 Interview with Jacques Tati, Arts (13 May 1953), 4: 'J'ai commencé en 1934 à tourner mon premier film avec l'argent que me rapportait mon numéro de music-hall; j'achetais dix mètres de pellicule par-ci, par-là....' 148 great height, he seems to designate himself as antidote or alternative to 'the clever wee fellow', Charlie Chaplin. For all their amateur feel, these first forays into burlesque film clearly seek to offer a French alternative to the dominant modes of film comedy (slapstick, miserabilism, the comedy of the victim) in the first decade of the talkies. It is not at all clear that Tati's film career was going anywhere when war broke out in 1939. At any rate, mobilization interrupted it. After seeing some sort of action in the fall of France in May-June 1940, Tati made his way back to occupied Paris, and resumed his career as a mime. He also performed at least once in Berlin; but at some point, and for reasons we do not fully know, he found it necessary to flee the cities, and to hole up with his friend Henri Marquet in the very heart of rural France, in a farm that belonged to the family of another chum from the Paris music-hall circuit, Andr6 Delpierre (Pierdel). The farm was at Le Marembert, a few miles from Sainte-S6v6re-sur- Indre, which is a fairly long way from anything, apart from Georges Sand's rural paradise, Nohant. Vichy had quickly reorganized the entire French film industry on corporatist lines, and to get any employment at all (even as a hairdresser or set-builder) accreditation from the COIC was required.' As far as is known, Tati never sought to obtain a 'carte d'identite professionnelle' valid for cinema work during the war, perhaps because his own pre-war activity in the industry had been too marginal, too amateur, and too unsuccessful to entitle him to one. What Tati did not know at the time, or for a long period thereafter, was that he was nearly selected to play the mime Debureau in Marcel Carn6's Les Enfants du paradis. Carn6, doubtful that Jean-Louis Barrault would actually be able to meet all the commitments he had apparently taken on, found himself impressed by the mime-act he saw at the A.B.C. on one of his wartime trips to occupied Paris. On his return to Nice he spoke about the 'Tati option' to Fred Orain, the director of production at the Studios de la Victorine, where Les Enfants d u paradis was due to be made. But Orain thought an unknown figure like Tati was too much of a risk: and he, like Carn6, was not in too much of a hurry to finish the film, reckoning at that late stage that it would do better as the first French film of the Liberation that looked increasingly likely, rather than as the last flower of Vichy France.' At the Liberation, the COIC was instantly replaced by a new body, the Centre National de la Cin6matographie (CNC), which nonetheless retained 8 See Pierre Darmon, Le Monde du cinéma sous l'Occupation (Paris: Stock, 1997), particularly pp. 108-14, for details. 9 Marcel Carné, La Vie à belle dents (Paris: J.-P. Olivier, 1975), 242-3; Edward Baron Turk, Child of Paradise. Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), repeats the anecdote. See also Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Le Cinéma sous l'Occupation. Le Monde du cinéma français de 1940 à 1946 (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1989). 149 many of the key features of its predecessor, such as state-backed advances to producers. Official accreditation by the CNC remained an absolute requirement for the exercise of any creative, technical or managerial profession in the cinema industry. As Tati had none such, the question of how he came to direct Jour de f6te in the first place is a minor puzzle of its own. Carn6's 'Tati option' had stuck in Orain's mind, and when Claude Autant-Lara was looking for non-speaking extras for his first post-war films, the mime Tati seemed worth trying out. Tati's appearances in Diable au corps (as a soldier in a crowd) and in Sylvie et le fantôme (as a ghost) may be of little consequence in themselves,10 but they allowed Orain to get to know the gangling giant, who at this stage had an interesting proposal to make. That proposal was to go back to making burlesque shorts, in the tradition of the pre-war comic cinema. Tati reckoned that the French market for shorts was likely to remain substantial, since the wartime abolition of the 'double feature' had not been rescinded, and a typical evening at the movies now consisted of a newsreel, a short and a feature. Even more to the point, Tati had written a little spoof on the French post office, in which he would like to act the main role of a cycling postman. Orain, who commanded wide respect as a technician and had an excellent business head, was now chair of the Conseil Sup6rieur Technique for the cinema, a task force set up by the CNC to advise on the modernization of French film studios and of the industry in general. A long-standing and valued employee of Andr6 Paulve (the effective owner of the Victorine Studios in Nice, and of much else besides), he decided nonetheless in 1945-46 to strike out on his own, and become a producer in his own right.ll And he must have had enough influence in the CNC to get Tati his carte d'identité professionnelle as an actor (for the Autant-Lara roles) and as a scriptwriter too. Orain set up a new company, Cady-Film (named after his dog, so he says), through which he contracted Rene Clement to direct Tati's twenty-minute short, entitled L'Ecole des facteurs. Clement was an old friend of Tati's: indeed, he had directed the best of Tati's pre-war films, Soigne ton gauche. 'Neanmoins 1'entreprise sembla un instant vou6 au n6ant, car Clement tomba malade', Paul Davay reported in an article that Tati seems to have considered 10 In an interview in Cinématographe, 37 (1978), 22-223, Claude Autant-Lara stresses the difficulty and importance of the special effects used in the scenes in which 'le père Tati' appeared. 11 Karim Ghiyati, Panoramique sur la carrière de Fred Orain. DEA, Section d'histoire du cinéma, Université de Paris-I, 1996. 12 Company formed on 1 March 1946, articles registered on 17 March 1946, with a capital of 150,000 francs divided equally between Orain and Tati, who - for a short time - was its 'gérant de société'. Archives de Paris, Archives du Tribunal de commerce, n° 308.691B. The Cady-Film logo on the title credits of current copies of Soigne ton gauche must have been added after 1946. 13 Paul Davay, 'L'Extravagant Monsieur Hulot', Elite, February 1968. The clipping in the Archives Tati is annotated in what I take to be Tati's hand as 'bonne biography de JT' [sic]. 10150 reliable. But it may also be that Clement withdrew because he was so fully engaged in making La Bataille du rail, a sombre document utterly incompatible in style, scope and intention with Tati's jolly whirl. But Orain did not drop the project, or contract another director: he used a loop-hole in the regulations of the CNC which allowed authors to direct adaptations of their own works, in order to parachute Tati into the director's seat. 14 It was the experience of directing L'Ecole des facteurs which entitled Tati to get CNC accreditation as a réalisateur, and opened the path to the making of jour de fbte. The chronology of events - and thus the relationship of the work to the large historical issues which we are trying to trace - is at best rather murky. Dondey, like most published sources, gives the date of L'Ecole des facteurs as 1947, which was probably its date of release; if we accept the official documentary evidence, it cannot have been made before March 1946, when the production company was formed; but in an appendix to Cady-Film's application for an advance from the Credit national in November 1948, we find, over Orain's signature: Activites Septembre 1945 Production d'un court m6trage, École des facteurs. Film d'essai du film Jour de fête.15 Is it possible that Tati's first post-war short was made alongside the two Autant-Lara films which Orain produced for Paulve, and in which Tati had bit parts? That the idea of Jour de f6te - and of making a 'trial run' of its central cycling gag - goes back to the euphoric days of the summer of 1945, months before Orain and Tati even bothered to set up the production company? It is not out of the question, especially as there is no obvious reason why Orain should have intentionally or unintentionally put down wrong dates in his application to the Credit national. The Autant-Lara films were made partly in the studios at Nice and partly on locations outside Aix- en-Provence ; and that also seems to be where the exteriors of L'Ecole des facteurs were shot. L'Ecole des facteurs deals with the modernization of the French post office. It opens with a training session inflicted by a uniformed martinet (played by Paul Demange, who also acted in Sylvie et le fant6me) on a squad of three cycling postmen, required to increase their delivery speeds in order to connect with the new airmail service from a local strip. The largest of the 14 The same loop-hole is what allowed Georges Perec to co-direct (with Bernard Queysanne) the film version of his novel Un homme qui dort (1974). 15 Bibliothèque du film (Paris), CN 811 (Archives du Crédit national) 16 There are also several studio photographs of Jacques Tati dated 'Aix 1945' in the Tati Archives in the possession of Mme Sophie Tatischeff. 11151 three - Jacques Tati - shows that special combination of ineptitude and grace which is the hallmark of his comic miming style, and most of the film consists of shots of his exaggerated cycling prowess (including overtaking a peloton of racing cyclists) around country lanes, with a Jean Yatov6 fairground score remarkably similar to the one used for similar scenes in the later Jour de f6te. What is made fun of in this first fruit of Tati's comic imagination after the war is the French post office, its quasi-military managerial style, and its inhuman pursuit of productivity increases. But L'Ecole des facteurs ends in a triumph for the clumsy cycling postman. After many a slip and turn, Tati gets to the airfield just as the plane is taxiing out. In a supreme push on the pedals of his fixed-wheel machine, he races the aircraft along the grass track and manages to lasso its tail-fin with the satchel that contains the mail. The parody of many a Wells Fargo Western and of cinematic horsemanship is quite patent. Bravo! The mail will get through! is the unspoken but unmissable message over the closing shot of Tati's grinning face. And beneath or alongside that message is a more general optimism - that modernization can be coped with, and that France, be it ever so rural and sleepy, will rise again. The story has been told many times that after his war-time stay in and around Sainte-Sévère,17 Tati promised the local folk who had kept him fed and protected that he would return one day and make them all famous; and for that reason Jour de f6te was treated as a homage not just to la France profonde in general, but specifically to the town of Sainte-S6v6re. Even today, the town treats the film and itself in that way. That may be how things turned out, but there is little sign that such a homage was part of the original set of intentions for the project that now seems to have begun somewhere near Aix as early as 1945. In the memory of Jacques Mercanton, who was director of photography for both L'Ecole des facteurs (which he dates to 1946) and Jour de fête, the location was found more by chance than design: Nous fimes de tr6s longs et lointains rep6rages jusqu'en Provence, car nous cherchions des zones ensoleill6es, le film comportant de nombreuses scenes en ext6rieurs. Mais 1'atmosphere du Midi et la tournure des lieux ne plaisaient pas a Tati, nous nous sommes rabattus sur une region qu'il connaissait. Il avait habit6 a Marembert, a dix kilometres de Sainte- S6v6re et je fus emballe par son cote pittoresque.l8 So it seems to have been Mercanton's idea rather than Tati's to shoot at 17 It is not known how long Tati lived there. With documented performances in Paris in 1941 and 1943 and in Berlin in 1943, and with his marriage to Micheline Winter in Paris in May 1944, his refuge in the country, if it was at all extended, could not have been continuous. But that should not be taken to reduce the significance which it had for Tati in those extremely uncertain and difficult times. 18 Quoted in Ede, op. cit., (Note 3), 38. 12152 Sainte-S6vbre; and in all the known drafts of the scenario, as in the pre- launch publicity material for the finished film, the story is set in a presumably fictional village called Follainville.19 None of the surviving drafts and synopses of Jour de fete2° is dated, and it is by no means obvious how to sort them into a chronological or developmental order. In the shortest of the versions (2 pp.), entitled Jour de f6te like the film, the role of the bicycle stunts seems small by comparison to the amount of screen time they eventually came to fill: yet the 'film d'essai', L'Ecole des facteurs, consists exclusively of bicycle stunts.21 The next longest version (8 pp.), attributed to Tati, Marquet and the professional screenwriter Rene Wheeler (as in the film's final credits), has two major differences from the final product. First, its title is La F6te au village.22 Secondly, the 'mad cycling round', prompted as in the film by a documentary on the US Post Office, though with a quasi- Olympic motto, Toujours plus fort, toujours plus vite (in Latin, Fortius, [Altius], Citius), figures not as reality, but as a dream. And in the longest (14 pp.) and most professionally laid-out of these drafts, entitled Mon Village, the travelling fairground arrives in a truck decorated with a large poster: Cinema Poulain Frbres Ce soir, grande representation Une r6cente super-production avec la grande vedette TOM MIX et son cheval dans Les Rivaux de 1'Arizona et un documentaire None of the drafts found quite corresponds to the film actually made, even though they are all clearly recognizable as try-outs. We can speculate that the actual shooting script was not really finalized until the location was found, or perhaps even until shooting started. Jour de f6te was shot in Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre between May and October 1947, with some completion shots taken further south, near Aix-en-Provence, in the last fine days of autumn. (It is said that the crew had to stick fallen 19 There are several real places with that name in France, but none of them appear to have any connection with Jour de fête or with Tati. 20 Those consulted are part of the Archives Tati, a private collection in Paris. 21 It was not the commercial success of L'École des facteurs which unlocked the financing for Jour de fête: the short had not even been released when the shooting of the feature film began. It presumably had more value as an unexploited asset; at any rate, it was mortgaged against the advance from Dubail (letter from Fred Orain to Paul Wagner, 27 March 1947, reproduced in Ghiyati, op. cit, (Note 11), 73). 22 Orain was still using that title for the film as late as 27 March 1947. See Ghiyati, op. cit., 73. 13153 leaves back on the trees with gum, but that is almost certainly a tall story told to impress youngsters many years later on.) According to his later correspondence with the Credit national, Orain put in 2 million francs of his own money; Discina, the distribution company, put up an advance of 2 million; and Dubail, a private bank represented by a certain Paul Wagner, put up the bulk of the money, some 6 million francs.23 There is no trace of American finance, or of a Mr Minevitch, in the papers submitted to the Credit national, or in the half-dozen surviving letters penned by Orain during the shoot to inform Wagner of progress, and to keep the money flowing.24 The sums involved were small, and kept low by the way in which the production company, the director, actors and technicians agreed to be paid: by percentage on the film's eventual proceeds. As we now know thanks to Frangois Ede's painstaking research, the financing of the film was also assisted by the free loan of a colour camera, operator, and crew from the Thomson Houston company, who treated the film as a promotion for their new (and, alas, not fully invented) colour process. The first post-war years were not easy for France. By the summer of 1947, the economy was at an all-time low, and the urban population was closer to starving than it had been even under German Occupation. But it was in the cinema that the French believed they had suffered their worst defeat - at the hands of their allies, the United States. In the differences between L'Ecole des facteurs, whose inspiration dates from 1945, and Jour de fête, conceived no later than 1946 but finalized only the following year, we can make out very obvious traces of that developing Franco-American rift, in the cinema as in other more obviously political aspects of French life. With its railway system shattered, its industrial plant plundered, its capital resources largely stolen, and its agricultural economy under-equipped and undermanned, France was hardly in a position to feed itself, let alone to rebuild its infrastructure, when it emerged from the war and Occupation. Help was needed, and it could come only from America. The provisional government of Charles de Gaulle sent the former socialist Prime Minister, L6on Blum, to Washington in the spring of 1946 ('Karl Marx goes to see Father Christmas', according to a headline in the Wall Street Journal)25 to negotiate at least some of the credits France needed to prevent even more suffering - and (from an American perspective) to ward off the possible threat of a communist take-over. Blum dealt directly with Secretary of State James Byrnes, a politician with close ties to the cinema industry, to which he 23 These details from the archives of the Crédit national: see footnote 15 above. 24 Transcriptions in Ghiyati, op. cit. 25 Quoted by Irving Wall, 'Les Accords Blum-Byrnes', Vingtième siècle, 1987: 52-4. 14154 would later return, as chief legal counsel of the MPAA.26 The Blum-Byrnes agreement certainly brought temporary relief to the French economy; but it was greeted that summer by the French as a wicked betrayal - of the French film industry. Though the Blum-Byrnes deal had cancelled French war debts to the USA and extended a credit line of 1.37 billion dollars to Paris, the communist daily L'Humanite on June 8 declared in its headline: Franco-American Agreement Is Death Sentence for French Cinema. Over the following weeks, French newspapers of all political persuasions covered the dispute, and almost all predicted dire consequences for the cinema. It was the first major outburst of anti-American feeling in post-war France, and it comes directly between the making of L'Ecole des facteurs and Jour de fête. The reason for the upset is simple to understand. Prior to the war, French cinema had enjoyed a numerical quota system protecting it against competition from abroad: from 1936, 188 foreign (primarily American) films were allowed into the country each year. From June 1940, all films made in non-Axis countries were banned; as the French never took much to German cinema, films made in France had French screens to themselves for the entirety of the Occupation, and thus supported an industry of surprising vitality and extent. Even allowing for the collapse of so many French activities during the Occupation and immediate Liberation period, it is still a shock to learn that in 1945, the cinema industry was the second-largest in the land, surpassed in number of persons employed only by the railways. The 'secret annex' to the Blum-Byrnes agreement, of which the announcement was delayed until well after the main terms had been publicized, replaced the numerical quota system with a 'screen quota'. French cinemas would be obliged to show films made in France for four weeks out of every thirteen; for the other nine weeks, they could show what they liked. Given the backlog of over 2,000 films made in America since 1940 which had never been seen in France, it was not hard to guess what the screens would be showing for nine weeks every quarter; and it was assumed that the audience for French-made films could thus be no greater than a small quarter of the seats available in French cinemas in any given year. The professional and general press reacted to this arrangement with expressions of outrage.2' Their polemical protests were based on the perception that American films would be more popular than home-made ones. This was likely to be especially true for colour movies, for Hollywood had at long last got the technology right. It had glorious spectaculars in 26 See Patricia Hubert-Lacombe, Le Cinéma français dans la guerre froide, 1946-1956 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996), 7-43, for a detailed account of the agreement and its reception in France. 27 See Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, 'Les Accords Blum-Byrnes et le cinéma français', 1895, 13 (1993). 15155 Technicolor to distribute - and France still had only black-and-white. The fears and predictions were at least partly correct: American movies got the lion's share of French cinema audiences in the following years; but they were also a little exaggerated, for despite the 'American invasion', the French film industry maintained and even slightly expanded its production of feature films, from around 80 per year in 1946 to over 110 in 1953.28 Jour de f6te was reconceived in the winter of 1946-1947 as France's home-grown riposte both to the imminent invasion of American movies, and to the dominance of America in colour-film technology. It is more than likely that the colour idea came from Orain: as president of the Conseil Sup6rieur Technique, he had unrivalled access to information about the technological prospects of the French cinema industry. But he was sensibly cautious about new technology: he planned to shoot in black-and-white as well, just in case anything went wrong with the colour process - which it did. No means was ever found of printing positive copies from the honeycomb emulsion on the Thomsoncolor negatives, and the film released as Jour de f6te was edited from the black-and-white back-up reels.29 Some participants in the drama have hinted darkly that the failure of Thomsoncolor was an American plot, designed to protect the effective colour monopoly of Eastman-Kodak. Ede has put that myth to rest, and the boot quite firmly on the other foot. Jour de f6te was put together and loudly trumpeted as a French ploy, if not exactly a plot, to dethrone the Rochester firm. 30 Jour de f6te incorporates nearly all the stunt material of the earlier short, with most of it reshot and a few pieces edited in: the cycle racing sequence, the campanology sequence, the self-propelling bicycle gag, and the whole idea of a comically accelerated cycling postman's round. What changes, and what changes profoundly, is the context and the motivation for the set of cycling gags. In the earlier version, the motivation was entirely French: the PTT itself had decided on the need for greater efficiency amongst its rural wheelers. In the later, longer version, the motivation is entirely, and doubly, American. Jour de f6te is the story of a small town's annual fair: it begins with the arrival of the travelling fair, and ends with its departure. What the travellers bring are a traditional fairground roundabout and amusement stalls - shooting booths, lucky dips, and so forth. But they also bring a marquee and a movie projector, to show a full programme in a rural village no doubt very far from any brick-and-mortar movie theatre. The feature film they cart 28 Hubert-Lacombe, op. cit., 180-3, gives detailed tables. 29 See Ede, op. cit., for the detailed story of this unbelievable deception. 30 See the article in L'Ecran français, 114 (May 1947) reproduced by Ede, op. cit., 44. 16156 around has a French title on the poster - Les Rivaux de l'Arizona31 - but it hardly requires the picture of a cowboy on horseback to tell us it is an American film. The main film shown is preceded by a newsreel, as was the norm at that time. The clumsy postman Fran~ois, played by Tati, gets to see the newsreel only through a gap in the canvas marquee, and then only in fragments; he is moreover a little tipsy by this time. The fragments purport to be a documentary on the US Postal Services, lauded in a dithyrambic but barely comprehensible sound-track as ever more speedy, efficient and modern. Taunted by villagers that he will never be quite like a real, that is to say, American, postman, Frangois sets off to prove them all wrong. The 'Cine Poste' documentary is obviously a fabrication (it consists of a montage of stock shots of circus motor-cycle stunts, the Mr Universe contest, and helicopter training exercises) and the voice-over, once it has been decoded, is a comic compendium of cliches. What the montage is intended to articulate are French anxieties about the huge advance that American civilization and technology had taken over their own; but also to minimize them, by showing American achievement as no more than the exaggerated nonsense of a propagandizing movie journalist. But in the cinema, and most especially in colour technology, American domination was both real and very painful. What Kristin Ross says of Tati in general may well be most applicable here: 'Tati made films treating the Americanization of everyday life in France that in fact thematized the situation of the French film industry.'32 In the course of his round, Frangois the postman has to transport a broken telephone to head office in the front basket of his bicycle,33 and along a delightful open road he comes upon US military police in a jeep. This is not a fantasy like the 'cin6-poste' montage: there were tens of thousands of US troops in France between 1945 and 1967, when de Gaulle had them leave, and there was a huge US base at Chdteauroux, the nearest big town to Sainte- S6v6re. Tati has his postman make fools of the soldiers and of modern technology, for he pretends to be calling Paris (or is it New York?) on his mahogany-framed, wind-up (and disconnected) portable phone. The soldiers are so stunned at the appearance of technology in rural France that after bumping into each other in a standard comedy routine with the jeep, they drive past the pedalling giant and stare at him so hard that they steer off the road and into the ditch. 31 This may well be a sly nod to Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, in which the hero writes a popular serial about 'Arizona Jim'; Guy Decomble, who acts the fairman in Jour de fête, also played a minor role (one of the typographers) in Renoir's film. 32 Ross, op. cit., (Note 4), 42 33 The French Post Office was then (and was until quite recently) the monopoly operator of telephone services in France. 17157 This triumphant episode added in Jour de f6te is in correspondence with the only significant non-contextual sequence that figures in L'Ecole des facteurs but was cut from the longer film. In both short and long versions, the postman's bicycle 'escapes' from where it had been parked and rolls on its own along its well-worn route back to the village bar, where it comes to rest by the door. (The stunt was not done with nylon wire or any technical support, but, as in the circus, by tweaking the front wheel nuts - two turns to the left to make the bike turn right, and vice versa - and then just letting go). The postman finally catches up with his mount, and enters the bar. In Jour de f6te, a noisy party is in progress (for it is the day of the fair), and Frangois has a few more drinks at the bar as well as taking the floor and dancing a couple of steps without a partner. In the earlier version (and here, it is not a particularly special day at all), Tati enters the bar, has a drink, and goes to the back-room, where a small set of people are dancing to a record. The girls are presumably locals; but the men are entirely recognizable by their hats, shirts and trousers, as GIs.34 So we can see that between 1945 and 1947, American forces in France have been transformed in Tati's work from jitterbug dancers into military police, from participants in French conviviality into slightly menacing butts of a joke about modern machinery. This transformation, it hardly needs to be said, strictly models the changes in the view of America from a position situated inside French film culture between 1945 and 1947. Jour de f6te does not end in a triumph for Frangois the postman, or for the American postal service. Tati finally meets a cyclist's defeat - he rounds a bend before a bridge much too fast, loses his steering, comes off the road, and flies straight into the river. Drenched and bruised, plodding homewards with his battered steed, Frangois comes across villagers now bringing in the harvest, and joins in the work in the field, as if that was his natural place. The 'competition' with the US Post Office is dismissed with a 'bof!'; and the perennity, normality and necessity of the 'French way of life' is reasserted as the comforting, nostalgic conclusion to the film. The change in French attitudes to America between the period immediately following the Liberation and the period following the Blum-Byrnes agreement could hardly have been articulated more clearly and more economically than in the additions and subtractions made by Tati to his cycling postman scenario. Jour de f6te is more a 'pro-French' than an 'anti-American' movie; but it exists in a context where the only enemy that can be talked about in a comic vein is the USA, and where the greatest threat to people working in French film was the American cinema industry. 34 Dondey, op. cit., (Note 2), 42, does not mention this detail, but he does point out that one of the 'local girls' is actually Micheline, Tati's wife. As she is not visibly pregnant on the screen (her daughter Sophie was born in October 1946), we can date these shots to the spring or very early summer of 1946, at the latest. 18158 In none of his subsequent work did Tati deal with the issue of America quite so directly; nor did he ever again end a film with quite such a transparently 'meaningful' conclusion. The relatively heavy-handed reassertion of French and rural values - not so very far from Vichy values, when you think about it - is also a sign of the times. Never again would France be quite so fragile, nor quite so much in need of positive and comforting solutions. But although Tati never quite stopped fiddling about with Jour de f6te, he came fairly soon to see it as an imperfect work. That assessment is usually seen as expressing Tati's wish to stop being an acrobatic comic in the music-hall tradition; but it may also be Tati's realization that such a moralizing and reassuring message as the one given by Jour de f6te was not really what he had to say in his work at all. The 1949 review in Variety with which we began now seems like plain misinformation. Borrah Minevitch, though, is by no means an invented name. He was a gifted American harmonica-player, with many stage shows and a number of films to his credit. After the war, when he settled in France, he got to know Jacques Tati, and it seems that the larks and japes that Minevitch and Tati performed for weekend guests were more hilarious than anything seen on the screen.35 But there is no evidence whatsoever that Minevitch brought Tati and Orain together, or had any role in providing the finance for Jour de f6te. What he may well have done is to arrange the film's release in the US through his contacts in the American film world; and even more surely, he masqueraded as 'Maxi', or else pretty much dictated his self- eulogizing film review. If he had a purpose other than to tease his friend, it was to prepare the US launch of a film that could easily have been seen as anti-American, in the increasingly xenophobic mood that had already begun to afflict the US. In one respect, of course, 'Maxi' was right: Jour de f6te is an education. It showed that a new form of film comedy could be invented, indebted neither to the French tradition of verbal wit nor to the model of Chaplin; it also demonstrated that a low-budget film could still be made within the structures of the French film industry and earn very significant sums for its backers, despite the impact of the Blum-Byrnes agreement; and it proved above all that Jacques Tati was a masterful director as well as a memorable screen personality. For those with eyes to see, it also showed how it was possible to direct irony simultaneously at American hubris and at French misperceptions of how to compete in the modernization stakes. But what it does not show is that it took an 'American showman' to get it all going. Perhaps 'Maxi', alias Borrah Minevitch, simply thought that he was 35 Daniel Gélin, Deux ou trois vies qui sont les miennes (Paris: Julliard, 1977), 258, mentions a party at Minevitch's millhouse home, circa 1952, where Tati entertained, amongst others, Mrs Gregory Peck. 19159 having the last laugh on Jacques Tati by inserting himself into the film's production history. But Jour de f6te, which has had at least three careers in France and abroad,36 goes on producing ironical reflections on the cultural rivalry between France and America. The latest twist came in 1997, for the fiftieth anniversary of the film's shooting. Whilst the town of Sainte-S6v6re draped itself in the colours of the original film for a grand celebration, an American team was taking part for the first time in the Tour de France. What's more, it was sponsored by the US Postal Service. I watched the final stage on the Champs-Elysees, which brought the riders past the cinema where Jour de f6te was first shown. 'US Postal' came in last. 36 Tati re-released the film in a 'colorized' version in the early 1960s, with a new sound-track and new sequences involving a Dutch painter; the original colour version was reconstructed by François Ede and re-released in 1995. 1 'Maxi', Jour de fête, Variety - Film Reviews, 1949, 53. 2 The principal works are: Geneviève Agel, Hulot parmi nous (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1955); Théodore Louis, Jacques Tati (Brussels: Club du livre de cinéma, 1959); Armand J. Cauliez, Jacques Tati (Paris: Seghers, 1962); Brent Maddock, The Films of Jacques Tati (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977); James Harding, Jacques Tati Frame by Frame (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984); Michel Chion, Jacques Tati (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1987); and Marc Dondey, Jacques Tati (Paris: Ramsay, 1989; reprinted 1993). 3 François Ede, 'Jour de fête' ou la couleur retrouvée (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1995). 4 This equivalence is presumably what justifies Kristin Ross's assertion that 'Tati made films treating the Americanization of everyday life...' (Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995)), 42. 5 These are the dates given by Paul Davay in 1968 (see below, note 13), and traditionally repeated by most of the authorities, including Raymond Chirat, Catalogue de Courts-métrages français de fiction, 1929-1950 (1996). But the Unifrance-Film catalogue of shorts, published in 1953, gives the date of 1947 for Soigne ton gauche, and Chirat gives 1937 for ... L'École des facteurs. Claude Beylie, 'Jacques Tati inconnu', Cinéma , 57 n° 23 (1957), 10-14, puts the shorts in the following order: Gai dimanche , 1935; On demande une brute, 1936; Soigne ton gauche, 1937. See also note 12 below. 6 Two others - Oscar Champion de tennis (1932) and Retour à la terre (1938) - were 'never really finished', and have been lost. Even if the documentary basis for their inclusion in Tati's filmography is close to nil, there is no reason to doubt Tati's own memory of having made them. 7 Interview with Jacques Tati, Arts (13 May 1953), 4: 'J'ai commencé en 1934 à tourner mon premier film avec l'argent que me rapportait mon numéro de music-hall; j'achetais dix mètres de pellicule par-ci, par-là....' 8 See Pierre Darmon, Le Monde du cinéma sous l'Occupation (Paris: Stock, 1997), particularly pp. 108-14, for details. 9 Marcel Carné, La Vie à belle dents (Paris: J.-P. Olivier, 1975), 242-3; Edward Baron Turk, Child of Paradise. Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), repeats the anecdote. See also Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Le Cinéma sous l'Occupation. Le Monde du cinéma français de 1940 à 1946 (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1989). 10 In an interview in Cinématographe , 37 (1978), 22-223, Claude Autant-Lara stresses the difficulty and importance of the special effects used in the scenes in which 'le père Tati' appeared. 11 Karim Ghiyati, Panoramique sur la carrière de Fred Orain. DEA, Section d'histoire du cinéma, Université de Paris-I, 1996. 12 Company formed on 1 March 1946, articles registered on 17 March 1946, with a capital of 150,000 francs divided equally between Orain and Tati, who - for a short time - was its 'gérant de société'. Archives de Paris, Archives du Tribunal de commerce, n° 308.691B. The Cady-Film logo on the title credits of current copies of Soigne ton gauche must have been added after 1946. 13 Paul Davay, 'L'Extravagant Monsieur Hulot', Elite, February 1968. The clipping in the Archives Tati is annotated in what I take to be Tati's hand as 'bonne biography de JT' [ sic ]. 14 The same loop-hole is what allowed Georges Perec to co-direct (with Bernard Queysanne) the film version of his novel Un homme qui dort (1974). 15 Bibliothèque du film (Paris), CN 811 (Archives du Crédit national) 16 There are also several studio photographs of Jacques Tati dated 'Aix 1945' in the Tati Archives in the possession of Mme Sophie Tatischeff. 17 It is not known how long Tati lived there. With documented performances in Paris in 1941 and 1943 and in Berlin in 1943, and with his marriage to Micheline Winter in Paris in May 1944, his refuge in the country, if it was at all extended, could not have been continuous. But that should not be taken to reduce the significance which it had for Tati in those extremely uncertain and difficult times. 18 Quoted in Ede, op. cit ., (Note 3), 38. 19 There are several real places with that name in France, but none of them appear to have any connection with Jour de fête or with Tati. 20 Those consulted are part of the Archives Tati, a private collection in Paris. 21 It was not the commercial success of L'École des facteurs which unlocked the financing for Jour de fête : the short had not even been released when the shooting of the feature film began. It presumably had more value as an unexploited asset; at any rate, it was mortgaged against the advance from Dubail (letter from Fred Orain to Paul Wagner, 27 March 1947, reproduced in Ghiyati, op. cit , (Note 11), 73). 22 Orain was still using that title for the film as late as 27 March 1947. See Ghiyati, op. cit ., 73. 23 These details from the archives of the Crédit national: see footnote 15 above. 24 Transcriptions in Ghiyati, op. cit . 25 Quoted by Irving Wall, 'Les Accords Blum-Byrnes', Vingtième siècle , 1987: 52-4. 26 See Patricia Hubert-Lacombe, Le Cinéma français dans la guerre froide, 1946-1956 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996), 7-43, for a detailed account of the agreement and its reception in France. 27 See Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, 'Les Accords Blum-Byrnes et le cinéma français', 1895 , 13 (1993). 28 Hubert-Lacombe, op. cit ., 180-3, gives detailed tables. 29 See Ede, op. cit ., for the detailed story of this unbelievable deception. 30 See the article in L'Ecran français , 114 (May 1947) reproduced by Ede, op. cit., 44. 31 This may well be a sly nod to Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange , in which the hero writes a popular serial about 'Arizona Jim'; Guy Decomble, who acts the fairman in Jour de fête , also played a minor role (one of the typographers) in Renoir's film. 32 Ross, op. cit ., (Note 4), 42 33 The French Post Office was then (and was until quite recently) the monopoly operator of telephone services in France. 34 Dondey, op. cit ., (Note 2), 42, does not mention this detail, but he does point out that one of the 'local girls' is actually Micheline, Tati's wife. As she is not visibly pregnant on the screen (her daughter Sophie was born in October 1946), we can date these shots to the spring or very early summer of 1946, at the latest. 35 Daniel Gélin, Deux ou trois vies qui sont les miennes (Paris: Julliard, 1977), 258, mentions a party at Minevitch's millhouse home, circa 1952, where Tati entertained, amongst others, Mrs Gregory Peck. 36 Tati re-released the film in a 'colorized' version in the early 1960s, with a new sound-track and new sequences involving a Dutch painter; the original colour version was reconstructed by François Ede and re-released in 1995.

PY - 1999

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