Here's an extract from the 1949 film by Jacques Tati, Jour de Fête. The runaway bicycle segment of the film is sometimes described as an homage to the 1926 Buster Keaton film, The General, which deals with a runaway train. In Jour de Fête, Tati is a postman who struggles to complete his rounds due to the generosity of the villagers who ply him with wine at every stop. A similar scene occurs in the 2008 film Welcome to the Sticks when Philippe Abrams, a post office administrator, tries to set an example of efficiency for his postman.
Meanwhile, this extract shows a Chaplinesque exercise with a bicycle.
If you watch a lot of film essays, then you've probably heard the complaint that visual comedy is something of a lost art nowadays, with most mainstream comedies opting instead for jokes done strictly through dialogue and improv. So, let's look back at one of cinema's greatest visual comedians and see where he found his visual comedy.
Here's an extract from the 1949 film by Jacques Tati, Jour de Fête. The runaway bicycle segment of the film is sometimes described as an homage to the 1926 Buster Keaton film, The General, which deals with a runaway train. In Jour de Fête, Tati is a postman who struggles to complete his rounds due to the generosity of the villagers who ply him with wine at every stop. A similar scene occurs in the 2008 film Welcome to the Sticks when Philippe Abrams, a post office administrator,
tries to set an example of efficiency for his postman. Meanwhile, this extract shows a Chaplinesque exercise with a bicycle.
