Parade

Once a hoofer, always a hoofer: Jacques Tati bends shoe leather in his Parade

Jacques Tati's Parade was reviewed as a feeble array of circus and music hall acts when it was released in 1974. I found the film to be a near masterpiece, almost on par with Playtime. Tati was using the film to preserve a record of his music hall pantomimes that brought him to fame in the 1930s, but it is most striking today as a playful example of structuralist cinema. Tati mixes videotape, 16mm film and 35mm film to blur the boundaries between audience and performer. He shapes live and studio performances from different venues into an organic whole where, as the song goes, life is a carnival. The onscreen audience is stocked with ringers who interact within the circus ring: we are all players in life's passing show in Tati's view. Backstage activity is not hidden from the viewer, but is part of the show. Sometimes the humor is as tired as the whoopee cushion gag in Playtime, but Tati's visual wit never flags. I though in my youth that Tati lacked the Dionysian fervor of a major artist, but his Apollonian architecture is delighting me in my dotage. The circular structure of Parade is the work of a modernist chafing under the structures of modernism while celebrating color, movement, and humanity.