alr

Mr. Hulot's Holiday
(Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot)

Screening on Film
Directed by Jacques Tati.
With Jacques Tati, Nathalie Pascaud, Michele Rolla.
France, 1953, 35mm, black & white, 86 min.
English language version.

Descended from the great silent film comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd), Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot—a recurring character in several of his movies—is a blithely clumsy troublemaker, an insouciant twit who leaves uproar in his wake without being aware of it. Directly eschewing any attempts at narrative, the film provides a series of vignettes at a vacation resort, with the distracted Hulot providing a lot of laughs. As director, Tati composes the film with a perfect eye and ear for the comic possibilities in his mellow environs: composition, lighting, minimal garbled dialogue, and odd sounds such as a duck call and a door repeatedly opening and shutting. This is a superior work that ranks among all-time classic comedies.

Part of film series

Read more

Serge Daney:
L’Homme cinéma

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Read more

Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Illusory Tableaux of Georges Méliès

Read more

Activism and Post-Activism. Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981-2022

Read more

Fables of the Reconstruction. Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

Read more

Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

Read more

Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

Read more

Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

Read more

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue