Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle :

Anti-design and Humanism in Postwar France.

by Stéphane LAURENT

Professor Stéphane LAURENT, is in charge of the Art and Industry program at

Jacques Tati’s most famous visual comedy Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958) is
commonly considered as a hilarious struggle with the growing modernity and
consumerism in post-war France. We would like to argue this meaning thanks to
the presentation of the specific context of the reception of modernity in Tati’s
life and more generally in the country in the mid-twentieth Century.
The story tells an opposition between two ways of life : one materialistic
conducted by the Arpel family who stays in an ultra-modern villa on the
outskirts of old Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, in the south eastern suburb of Paris ; the
other bohemian assumed by Monsieur Hulot, that dates from a quainter, older
France. M. Hulot inhabits an antiquated lot and he is the uncle of Gérard, the 8
years old Arpel’s son, who fastens himself to him to escape from the utilitarian
monotony of his predicable home life. His unemployment fears and exasperates
his sister who succeeds in convincing her husband to employ Hulot at Plastac,
his factory making plastic pipes.
Jacques Tati, who plays Mr. Hulot, uses his talent as a former mime to
criticize the machine-like objects and architecture, which refer to the modernist
movement creations and particularly to those elaborated by Le Corbusier. Tati
was born in Le-Pecq, in the western area near Paris, not far from Poissy, where
the Swiss architect erected his famous villa said to be adapted to the modern life.
Rejecting the subtleties of the contemporary architecture aesthetical language,
Tati adopted the common popular mockery of the ugliness and mechanical
efficiency of the “Maison du Fada” (Crazy man’s House), a nickname given to
the Unité d’Habitation built in Marseille by Le Corbusier and achieved six years
before.
Despite its inspiration in Le Corbusier architectural works, the villa belongs
to an original design of the fifties. The script has been written together by
Jacques Tati, Jean Lhôte and the painter and tapestry designer Jacques
Lagrange1. Lagrange, a close friend of Tati since 1947, has already participated
to M. Hulot’s Holiday script (1953) and would also be associated to the script,
and appointed as the costume and/or set designer for the following movies
Playtime (1967) and Parade (1973) except maybe for Trafic (1971), for which
his collaboration is not certain. The drawings Lagrange produced to conceive the
Arpel’s house obviously refers to the villa La Roche-Jeanneret and also to other
villas elevated by Robert Mallet-Stevens in the twenties, but with a mere cubic
design according to its grey color and its two rounded windows looking like two
eyes. In his biography devoted to Jacques Tati, David Bellos concludes that the
Villa Arpel belongs to an old-fashioned model of modernist architecture
conceived after the WW12. In fact, when Tati shows the towers on the
background of the hole in the wall used as a doorway by dogs and children, he
does not ignore the evolution of the modern architecture; through the concept of
the villa Arpel, he aims to present an understandable visual archetype of
modernity. From the point of view of the last décorateurs of the time and of
many artists of the Ecole de Paris like Lagrange, who will be appointed as chef

1
Robert Guinot, Jacques Lagrange, Les couleurs de la vie, Saint-Paul, Lucien Souny, 2005, p. 77-80.
2
David Bellos, Jacques Tati, His life and Art, London, The Harvill Press, 1999, p. 258.
d’atelier at the Ecole des Beaux-arts, Le Corbusier has defined the rules applied
by his followers. In other words, he could be considered as a symbol of the
whole modern architectural production including skyscrapers for condominiums
and offices. By suppressing the use of traditional styles, materials and classical
references to nature and to the human being conducted by Vitruvius and by the
architects since the Antiquity, the modern society was offered a dangerous
practical and economical construction based on concrete, standardization and
geometry. Mr Hulot’s lot represents the atmosphere of an opposite irrational and
immemorial world defended by most of the French artists of the time, especially
by singers like Jacques Dutronc (Le Petit jardin) and Jean Ferrat but also by
writers like Henri Vincenot and René Barjavel. Barjavel’s most famous novel
Ravage, describes a futuristic society suddenly forced to return to a simple life
after a definitive power failure.
Unlike the architecture, which serves as a general frame for the action, the
characters pay a special attention to the furniture, especially the lady neighbour
who comes to visit the Arpels. The objects displayed in the interior of the villa
are odder and more sophisticated. Some are designed by Lagrange and Tati
themselves while others are created by confirmed contemporary French
designers : Scoubidou armchairs by Guariche, Michel Mortier and Joseph-André
Motte, lighting by Serge Mouille and Guariche, ceramics by Pol Chambost. The
performance with such artefacts results of the skill of Lagrange and obviously
participates of the hit after some attempts to show modern design have
successfully featured in B-serial French movies like Les Femmes s'en balancent
(1954) and Bernard Borderie’s La Môme vert-de-gris (1953).
Following the path of Jean Giroudoux’s Pleins pouvoirs and of Raoul Dufy,
the famous painter and textile designer and author of the Fée Electricité,
Lagrange wishes to humanize the new industrial society. He has been shortly
educated at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs when he was a
teenager in 1933-1934, and as many other artists of his time like Pablo Picasso
or Fernand Léger, he has experimented stage and tapestry design and even
architecture. He has contributed to the decoration of the Pavilion of Electricity at
the 1937 Paris World Fair and to the painting of the ceiling of a cinema in 1946.
After My Uncle Lagrange will be involved in the decoration of many buildings
for which he will use new techniques such as projected gritted painting
enlightened by elevators (33, rue Croulebarbe, 1959) or panels of mosaic
(Rillieux-Crépieux, 1959) and coloured prefabricated aluminium (Junior High
School, Aigurande and Couhé-Vérac, 1965) for making the facades. Such
commitment one can also find at the same time in the French industrial design
production named Esthétique industrielle, figures out a typical aspect of design
in Post-war France. More than resisting to the functionalist movement and to the
Americanization of the society, it aims to develop an alternative creativity in
popular culture aside from the French tradition of style, heritage and luxury,
which has finally lasted longer.