Mon oncle

Mon oncle is the odd duck in this retrospective programme: the film dates from 1958, 16 years before FFG launched. We show it as a reminder of the most popular exhibition organised by the festival, dedicated to the playful genius of comedian and filmmaker Jacques Tati. On the face of it, Mon oncle is a somewhat reactionary satire on the hygienic perfection and sterility of modern architecture, symbolised by an ultra-modern white villa equipped with the latest gadgets with which the old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot hopelessly struggles. However, this caricatural gem of pragmatic architecture is portrayed by Jacques Tati with such love, endearing mockery, visual precision and technological sophistication that this intelligent comedy seems to have the opposite effect more than half a century later: now it looks like an ode to modernism.

"Tati’s work is all about gears - how they turn, how they interlock. At once a minimalist and a ringmaster of spectacle, he constructs elaborate visual contraptions - successions of gags, linked by theme rather than story - which illustrate the mechanisms behind our modern world." - Current