Jacques Tati: The Complete Works

5 volumes in slipcase with outer carry-case

29.2 x 13.6 x 24.5 cm | 1136 pp

Taschen | 2019 | 9783836577113

Condition
Slipcase and books shrink-wrapped
Outer carry-case has a few minor marks (see images)

Oscar-winning French director/performer Jacques Tati (1907–1982) was a fiercely innovative and original filmmaker who found inspiration in the observation of life around him. By creating and playing unassuming characters thrown into the bustle of society―the hapless postman François and the maladroit Monsieur Hulot―Tati brilliantly exposed the ways in which class distinctions, social mores, architecture, and technology affect the basic ways that humans relate to one another.

Unlike Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, to whom he has frequently been compared, Tati took the everyday and recreated it, layered organically with visual and audio gags, for the audience to actively observe. His early work as a mime taught him how to generate laughter without words; in his films he used gestures, facial expressions, costumes, props, sets, sounds, music―everything but dialogue―to do the talking.

Tati’s films are truly universal and accessible to anyone, anywhere, who can appreciate the comedy of modern life. Tati once said “I want the film to begin when you leave the theatre.” His greatest achievement was to show us that together, as the whole of humanity, we are characters starring in the greatest spectacle of all: life itself.

In 2000, Macha Makeïeff and Jérôme Deschamps founded Les Films de Mon Oncle with the late Sophie Tatisheff, daughter of Tati, to preserve and promote Tati's archives and legacy. This definitive exploration of Tati's life and work, made possible by the complete and unprecedented access to the archives that they provided Taschen, features hundreds of photographs and film stills, the complete screenplays, interviews, original essays, and a vast selection of documents, letters, sketches, and notes spanning five volumes.

Designed by M/M (Paris), the set includes:

Volume I: Tati Shoots
Stills from all six feature films

Volume II: Tati Writes
The complete screenplays, plus those of the unmade films The Illusionist and Confusion, illustrated by pages from Tati’s original drafts

Volume III: Tati Works
A comprehensive survey of his life and work

Volume IV: Tati Explores
Essays on important themes in his films

Volume V: Tati Speaks
Quotations, interviews, and a previously unpublished memoir by Tati