Day pass to all three films: £20.00 full price / £15.00 concessions

Ticket for individual film: £8.50 full price / £6.00 concessions

Mon Oncle (1958): Film screening with introduction (U / France / 117 mins)

11:15-13:30

Slapstick prevails when Jacques Tati’s hero Monsieur Hulot is set loose in Villa Arpel, the geometric, oppressively ultramodern home of his brother-in-law in the suburbs of Paris.

Young Gérard Arpel is very fond of his gauche uncle and the children in his neighbourhood but his disapproving parents resolve to get Hulot a job or a wife. The disastrous outcome is a masterpiece of design and symmetry and of technically brilliant gags.

The heart-warming ending is true to Tati's vision of the modern world as a confusing place that is ultimately full of charm and humanity.

Jaques Tati's multi-award-winning third feature, Mon Oncle, is his first colour film and is a supremely amusing satire of mechanised living and consumer society that earned the director the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

With specially recorded onscreen introduction from film historian and archivist Serge Bromberg.

Playtime (1967): Film screening with introduction and discussion (U / France / 124 mins)

14:30-17:15

Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with his 1967 film Playtime.

For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the lovably old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a baffling modern Parisian world.

With every inch of its super wide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.

Introduced by Matthew Sweet (BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking). Following the screening, Sweet, Catherine Wheatley (King's College London) and Bristol Ideas director Andrew Kelly will discuss Tati’s legacy.

Trafic (1971): Film screening with introduction (PG / France / 96 mins)

18:30-20:20

Overlooked by many, Tati’s Trafic sees the bumbling Monsieur Hulot, kitted out as always with tan raincoat, beaten brown hat and umbrella, take to Paris’s highways and byways.

In this, his final outing, Hulot is employed as an auto company’s director of design, and accompanies his new product (a 'camping car’ outfitted with absurd gadgetry) to an auto show in Amsterdam. Naturally, the road there is paved with modern-age mishaps.

This late-career delight is a masterful demonstration of the comic genius’s expert timing and side-splitting knack for visual gags, and a bemused last look at technology run amok.

With an introduction from Catherine Wheatley, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London.

Tati Day is presented by Slapstick Festival, Bristol Ideas, South West Silents and Arnolfini.

Supported by the British Film Institute.

This programme is part of Opening Up the Magic Box, a heritage element of Film 2021 which marks the centenary of the death of Bristol-born film pioneer William Friese-Greene and the 125th anniversary of the first public cinema screening in Bristol, which took place at the Tivoli on 8 June 1896, as well as celebrating Bristol – a UNESCO City of Film since 2017. It is generously funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Tati Day is also part of Future City Film Festival. The festival normally takes place every two years in the autumn but had to be postponed last year due to the pandemic. It will now run through 2022 as a series of special events. We are grateful to the British Film Institute for their support for the festival.

Bristol Ideas: Tati Day