PARADE
- Jacques Tati’s last feature, Parade (1973), is about as unpretentious as a film can get. One of the first films to have been shot mostly in video (on a shoestring budget for Swedish TV), it’s a music-hall and circus show featuring juggling, music, gags, pantomime, minor acrobatics, and various forms of audience participation. Though it might seem a natural for TV–and in fact has been shown on TV, as well as theatrically, in Europe–it has never been broadcast in this country. Most critics who have seen it, including many passionate Tati fans, regard it as minor and inconsequential. (A striking and valuable exception is Kristin Thompson, whose article on it appeared in the film journal the Velvet Light Trap three years ago.) When, in 1984, a severely mutilated version–missing at least 15 minutes, including the crucial and sublime epilogue–was released in England, London reviewers who scream bloody murder if slasher films are slightly trimmed couldn’t be bothered to raise even a minor protest.
There is no such thing as “backstage.”
When a European rock band performs in the film, for instance, it is the unhippest hippie band imaginable, at least by our own standards, and when we see some of the youths in the bleachers clap and dance to the music, we become painfully aware of Tati’s remoteness from that segment of his audience (he was in his mid-60s when he made Parade). Even in Playtime (1967), Tati’s supreme masterpiece, the gaucheness and lack of stylishness of the leading female character, a young American tourist, represents a stumbling block for many viewers.
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Still another potential problem is represented by the visual quality of the video in Parade, which is fairly muddy by contemporary standards. Tati was probably the first major filmmaker to shoot in videotape, and he approached it with the same artisanal craft and innovative daring that he brought to cinema; but the technical options available in video in 1973 were far from what they are today. To the best of my knowledge, the only previous theatrical color feature shot mainly or wholly in video was Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer’s dreadful Two Hundred Motels (1971); the visual clarity of Parade is light-years ahead of the quality of that film, but it is still a far cry from the overall definition available in video transfers today. There are certainly positive and even exciting aspects of witnessing the birth of a new medium (an experience afforded in similar ways by some of the earliest films, made around the turn of the century)–but for a contemporary audience it is also liable to be somewhat disconcerting, or, even worse, disheartening.
In an attempt to sabotage the centrality of Hulot, the character Tati had created and played in his two previous features, in Playtime Tati created a series of false Hulots–characters who resembled Hulot from a distance–which deliberately and productively confused both on-screen characters and the audience. (In the final sequence, when Hulot buys a farewell gift for the American tourist, it is significantly one of the false Hulots who winds up delivering it.) But the public only wanted more of their hero Hulot, not a mechanism demonstrating that everyone else–on the screen and in the audience–was equally funny and important.
At least three basic Tatiesque principles are set forth in this passing detail. There is the notion of bricolage, or the appropriation of impersonal objects for personal use that enables people to reshape and reclaim their environment, an idea central to Tati’s work (the restaurant sequence in Playtime formulates it on an epic scale), which reaches its distilled essence throughout Parade, both offstage and on. (Tati, one should note, directed all the stage acts himself, altering in some instances the performers’ usual props, costumes, and gestures, such as getting the jugglers to juggle with paintbrushes–another good example of bricolage.)
