Gadgets, Guests, and the Grammar of Modernity A double bill of Jacques Tati

There is something uniquely disorienting about Tati's comedy: jokes that arrive without fanfare, gags that unfold in the periphery while you're looking somewhere else, a world governed by its own imperturbable logic. This evening we screen two films that together form the most sustained and affectionate critique of postwar modernisation in cinema — Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958).

In Mr. Hulot's Holiday, the comedy is still porous and warm, rooted in the rhythms of a seaside resort where nothing quite goes to plan and nobody seems to mind. Hulot himself moves through the world like a benign disturbance — a figure of courtly anachronism whose very presence generates chaos. By Mon Oncle, the stakes have shifted: Hulot is now set against the sleek, automated world of the Arpel household, a monument to the convenience of a life thoroughly organised. The film's geometry is almost architectural in its precision — the old neighbourhood and the new suburb held in quiet but devastating contrast.

What do Tati's long takes, his carefully engineered soundscapes, and his refusal to centre the joke actually ask of us as spectators? How does he make modernisation legible as comedy without ever quite letting us feel superior to it?

Come ready to discuss the films' formal strategies, their relationship to French social transformation, and what it means that Hulot — perpetually bewildered, permanently out of step — is the figure we keep returning to.