Mon Oncle · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The house at night, seen from the garden. Two round windows are lit on the upper floor, and in each one a head moves slowly back and forth. They are eyes. The house is watching the gate, or the street, or nothing at all. The Arpels have no idea they are doing this. Tati sets the camera down at a polite distance, holds the shot, and lets the two heads drift until one turns away and a light goes out. The face closes.

Deleuze has a rule about faces that sounds like a technicality and isn't. A close-up doesn't show a face; the close-up is a face. Shoot anything tightly enough and it stops being an object that does something and becomes a surface that feels something. He calls the result the affection-image: feeling registered on screen, not yet spent on any action. Tati gets one here with no close-up at all, fifty feet back, whole building in frame. And because the face belongs to a house rather than a person, no actor can perform it. It has to be built. That is the first thing to know about this film. The gags are architecture. Deleuze suits it, because he reads films by what the image does rather than what the story means, and there is barely any story. The plot exists to be defeated: the Arpels will find Hulot a job at the plastics works and a wife next door. The real subject is a quarrel between two ways of building space.

Tati's invention is a comedy that refuses to point. Jean Bourgoin shot it in level wide and medium-wide compositions at about eye height. The camera doesn't push in for a reaction, and it never cuts to an object to warn you a gag is loading. American screen comedy had spent forty years perfecting the opposite: set up, punchline, cut to the face that confirms it was funny. Tati removes all three prompts and stages the joke in depth, so something in the far background competes with whatever you took to be the subject. Bazin was arguing in those same years that deep focus and the long take hand the viewer back the freedom to choose where to look. Tati got there from the music hall rather than from realism, and applied it to jokes. Deleuze's name for the result is the lectosign, the image that has to be read. A normal film image is instantly legible: it tells you where to look, and what you see implies what comes next. Strip that out and the image loses its self-evidence. You have to decipher it, scan it, go back over it. No single pass catches everything, which is why this film survives rewatching when gag comedies usually don't.

The two worlds are two theories of the frame. Deleuze treats a frame as a closed set, a system holding a certain quantity of information. The Villa Arpel is the saturated kind, every element functioning: trellis fence, geometric lawn, round windows, fish fountain, garage door with its electric eye. Walled, gated, sealed, almost no outside. Hulot's building is the opposite. His climb home is one improbable zig-zag of stairs, landings and windows in a single ascending composition, and the pleasure of it is that he keeps vanishing. He goes in at one opening and comes out three windows over. Deleuze calls that the relative out-of-field, the frame implying the space next door it isn't showing. Most of Hulot's building is out-of-field, which is what makes it habitable. Its best piece of technology is an accident: a beam of sunlight he swings around by pivoting a window, so a caged bird sings when the light hits it. The old world's machinery is unplanned and gives pleasure. The new world's is planned to the millimetre and produces friction.

Watch what the villa does to bodies. The garden path is stepping stones in gravel, the lawn is not to be walked on, and guests cross in a stiff diagonal shuffle because the ground has been cut into pieces that don't join up. Deleuze's term for a space whose parts no longer link into a path for action is the any-space-whatever, and he usually finds it in rubble and vacant lots. Tati finds it in landscaping, where the disconnection was deliberate and expensive. When a body can't simply cross a space, what's left is posture. Madame Arpel doesn't use her house, she demonstrates it, with a precision closer to mime than to acting: the wiping, the kitchen exhibited, the tour, the fountain switched on. Deleuze takes a word from Brecht for a posture that exposes a social relation without a line of dialogue, the gest. The fountain is the purest one here. It runs for visitors of adequate standing and is shut off for tradesmen, and that switch holds the household's whole theory of other people. Suzanne Baron's cutting lets it run. Shots are held long past where comedy normally breaks, because the gag needs a rhythm established before it can be broken. Fountain on, off, on. Deleuze calls such stretches dead time, where nothing advances the action and the everyday is simply held. In most comedies that is fatal. Here it is the engine, because the joke isn't an event. It's a habit becoming visible.

Now the large claim. Keaton's The Electric House is the direct ancestor of the Villa Arpel, and Steamboat Bill, Jr. set the contract Tati keeps: architecture as verifiable physical fact, staged in one unbroken wide shot, the joke legible in the frame with no cut to a reaction. But in Keaton the gadget house attacks and the hero answers it. The falling facade spares him because he happens to be standing where the window is. Situation, act, resolution, which is the circuit Deleuze calls the action-image, running at full power. Tati inherits the architecture and cuts the circuit. The Arpel machines aren't broken. They work. What fails is the fit between machines and bodies, and no act available to anyone here repairs a mismatch of that kind. Hulot wants nothing much, schemes at nothing, and is usually not even the cause of the gag. He is a disturbance passing through systems, and the people around him arrive as traffic rather than as characters: street dogs crossing between cuts, guests circling the garden, the two men at the roadside whom the boys trick into colliding. Deleuze would call such a group a dividual, a crowd working as one body. The film's one engine, the campaign to make Hulot useful, ends in expulsion. He is dispatched to a provincial post. Deleuze calls this condition the crisis of the action-image, when characters can no longer respond adequately to what they perceive, and he dates it to postwar Italy and the ruins. Tati arrives at it in 1958 by way of a suburban lawn, in the film that won him the Cannes Special Jury Prize and the foreign-language Oscar. The crisis got into comedy too, and nobody noticed, because they were laughing.

The debts run both ways and they are specific. Clair's À nous la liberté choreographed factory labour to a score with speech demoted beneath rhythm, and the Plastac sequence, where Hulot's inattention extrudes a run of lumpy sausage tubing, takes its cadence from there. Le Million showed that a track could be composed after the fact, and Tati builds his entirely in post: dialogue as a burble of social formulae, heels on stone, the metallic ping of kitchen fittings, the accordion theme withheld from the villa altogether, so the modern house is where the music stops. Modern Times supplied the labour-saving device that mangles the body it serves. Jour de fête gave him the method, fixed spatial layout plus wholly reconstructed sound, now applied to a house built as a set at the Victorine studios because no existing house had the sight lines his gags required. Forward, the line is just as legible: Roy Andersson's deep static tableaux, Kaurismäki's deadpan spatial comedy, Wes Anderson's frontal frames and his buildings-as-characters. Sound designers claim him. So do architects, who have rebuilt the Villa Arpel for exhibition and cite it as shorthand for design that puts image before inhabitation.

What the film did to the art was prove that a joke can carry a full argument about how people should live, and that a comedy can be composed rather than pointed. It keeps an honest edge, too. The old quarter is dusty, aimless and already condemned, and the building rubble at the edges of Tati's frames isn't decoration. The image keeps opening onto a France being demolished and rebuilt outside the shot, which is near to what Deleuze means by the Open: the frame as a slice of a whole that is changing and that no composition can hold. Hulot is unemployable in either world. Nobody is being invited to go back.

The last thing that happens is a small prank in an airport car park, between Arpel and his son, at the moment the uncle is being sent away. The gift transmits as its source is removed. Whether that is hope or a joke about hope, the film won't say. So watch it again, and don't watch Hulot. Watch the back third of the frame, where the film is doing its work while you are busy with the foreground. It won't point. That's the invitation.