Jacques Tati (born Jacques Tatischeff; born 9 October 1907 in Le Pecq, Yvelines, France – died 5 November 1982) was a French filmmaker. Throughout his long career he worked as a comic actor, writer, and director. In a poll conducted by Entertainment Weekly of the Greatest Movie Directors Tati was voted the 46th greatest of all time. With only six feature-length films to his credit as director, he directed fewer films than any other director on this list of 50.

And, incidentally, I am perhaps one of his greatest admirers. Hopes you enjoy his amazing work.

Jour de Fête ("The Big Day") is a 1949 French comedy film directed by Jacques Tati. Jour de Fête tells the story of an inept and easily distracted French mailman who frequently interrupts his duties to converse with the local inhabitants, as well as inspect the traveling fair that has come to his small community. Influenced by too much wine and a newsreel account of rapid transportation methods used by the United States postal system, he goes to hilarious lengths to speed the delivery of mail while aboard his bicycle.

In Jour de Fête, several characteristics of Tati's work appear for the first time in a full-length film. The film is largely a visual comedy, though dialogue is still used to tell part of the story, at one point using a background character as a narrator. Sound effects are a key element of the film, as Tati makes imaginative use of voices and other background noises to provide humorous effect. The film introduces what would be a key theme in Tati films, the over-reliance of Western society on technology to solve its (perceived) problems.
The movie was originally filmed in both black-and-white and Thomson-color, an early and untried color film process. In using both formats, Tati feared that Thomson-color might not be practicable, a concern that proved well-founded after the Thomson firm went bankrupt before the film could be processed. Tati then released the black-and-white version (which features occasional short bursts of colour, hand-coloured by Tati directly onto the frames). In 1995, new technology allowed the restoration of the color copy, which was finished and released by Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff and cinematographer François Ede.

The film was shot largely in the town of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre and the surrounding region; many of the locals played the roles of extras.

Les Vacances de M. Hulot (released as Monsieur Hulot's Holiday in the UK and Mr. Hulot's Holiday in the US) is a comedy film starring and directed by Jacques Tati. It introduced the pipe-smoking, well-meaning but clumsy character of Monsieur Hulot, who appears in Tati's subsequent films, including Mon Oncle (1959), Playtime (1967), and Trafic (1971). The film gained an international reputation for its creator when released in 1953. The film was very successful as it had a total of 5,071,920 admissions in France.

Les vacances de M. Hulot follows the generally harmless misadventures of a lovable, gauche Frenchman, Monsieur Hulot (played by Tati himself), as he joins the "newly-emerging holiday-taking classes" for an August vacation at a modest seaside resort. The film affectionately lampoons several hidebound elements of French political and economic classes, from chubby capitalists and self-important Marxist intellectuals to petty proprietors and drab dilettantes, most of whom find it nearly impossible to free themselves, even temporarily, from their rigid social roles in order to relax and enjoy life.

The film also gently mocks the confidence of postwar western society in the primacy of work over leisure and the value of complex technology over simple pleasures, themes that would resurface in his later films.

Mon Oncle (My uncle) is a 1958 film comedy by French filmmaker Jacques Tati. The first of Tati's films to be released in colour, Mon Oncle won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a Special Prize at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film, receiving more honors than any of Tati's other cinematic works.

The film centers on the socially awkward yet lovable character of Monsieur Hulot and his quixotic struggle with postwar France's infatuation with modern architecture, mechanical efficiency and American-style consumerism. As with most Tati films, Mon Oncle is largely a visual comedy; color and lighting are employed to help tell the story. The dialogue in Mon Oncle is barely audible, and largely subordinated to the role of a sound effect. Consequently, most of the conversations are not subtitled. Instead, the drifting noises of heated arguments and idle banter complement other sounds and the physical movements of the characters, intensifying comedic effect. The complex soundtrack also uses music to characterize environments, including a lively musical theme that represents Hulot's world of comical inefficiency and freedom.

At its debut in 1958 in France, Mon Oncle was denounced by some critics for what they viewed as a reactionary or even poujadiste view of an emerging French consumer society, which had lately embraced a new wave of industrial modernization and a more rigid social structure. However, this critique soon gave way in the face of the film's huge popularity in France and abroad - even in the U.S., where rampant discretionary consumption and a recession had caused those on both the right and the left to question the economic and social values of the era.The film was another big success for Tati as with a total of 4,576,928 admissions in France.

Playtime (sometimes written PlayTime or Play Time) is French director Jacques Tati's fourth major film, and generally considered to be his most daring film. It was shot in 1964 through 1967 and released in 1967. In Playtime, Tati again plays Monsieur Hulot, a character who had appeared in some of his earlier films, including Mon Oncle and Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. Tati had grown ambivalent towards playing Hulot as a recurring central role. Unable to dispense with the popular character altogether, Hulot appears intermittently in Playtime, alternating between central and supporting roles. Shot in 70 mm, Playtime is notable for its enormous set, which Tati had built specially for the film, as well as Tati's trademark use of subtle, yet complex visual comedy supported by creative sound effects; dialogue is frequently reduced to the level of background noise.

Trafic (Traffic) is a 1971 comedy film directed by Jacques Tati. Trafic was the last film to feature Tati's famous character of Monsieur Hulot, and followed the vein of earlier Tati films that lampooned modern society.

Tati's use of the word “trafic” instead of the usual French word for car traffic (la circulation) may derive from a desire to use the same franglais he used when he called his previous film Play Time, and the primary meaning of trafic is “exchange of goods,” rather than "traffic" per se.

In Trafic, Hulot is a bumbling automobile designer who works for Altra, a Paris auto plant. He, along with a truckdriver and a publicity agent (Maria Kimberly), takes a new camper-car (designed by Hulot) to an auto show in Amsterdam. On the way there, they encounter various obstacles on the road. Some of the obstacles that Hulot and his companions encounter are getting impounded by Dutch customs guards, a car accident (meticulously choreographed by the filmmakers), and an inefficient mechanic. In the film, “Tati leaves no element of the auto scene unexplored, whether it is the after-battle recovery moments of a traffic-circle chain-reaction accident, whether it a study of drivers in repose or garage-attendants in slow-motion, the gas-station give-away (where the busts of historical figures seem to find their appropriate owners) or the police station bureaucracy.

 "From now on no celebration, no artistic or acrobatic spectacle can do without this amazing performer, who has invented something quite his own…His act is partly ballet and partly sport, partly satire and partly charade. He has devised a way of being both the player, the ball and the tennis racquet, of being simultaneously the football and the goalkeeper, the boxer and the opponent, the bicycle and the cyclist. Without any props, he conjures up his accessories and his partners. He has suggestive powers of all great artists. How gratifying it was to see the audience's warm reaction! Tati's success says a lot about the sophistication of the allegedly "uncouth" public, about its taste for novelty and its appreciation of style. Jacques Tati, the horse and rider conjured, will show all of Paris the living image of that legendary creature, the centaur."

Colette