Chelsea the Cinéaste

According to Albert Camus, rebels are not egotistical individuals. For an act of rebellion to succeed, suffering must be seen as a collective experience. The dictum, whatever its words, is invariably along the line of “I rebel – therefore  we  exist.” Any occasional indulgence in individual self-interest would derail the movement from its primary motivations, which comprise, above all, a resolute denial of superior authority and a dogged pursuit of the common good. For a rebel, his final choices inevitably boil down to either “All” or “Nothing” – all of his appeals answered and sufficiently taken care of, or to concede defeat, which means, in many cases, death: “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knee.” The Rebel  was published in 1951, a seminal essay that heralded the upcoming “age of revolt”, which, as history shows, has soon evolved into a subculture of its own. A growing interest in challenging the entrenched, antediluvian societal values and traditions gri

Nabokov once said that “satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” With Jacques Tati’s  Mon Oncle  (1958), the satire and the parody are both a lesson and a game; or, more precisely, a game whose lesson has no other purpose than to highlight the contingency of playing. The  oncle  is Tati’s alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, who lives in a rundown area of an affluent suburb of Paris, within which his sister’s villa – a Le Corbusier-inspired futuristic monstrosity – ostentatiously stands. A bumbling, taciturn (with only two spoken lines throughout the film) flaneur, Hulot is the odd man out of the more polished and supercilious world of his sister and brother-in-law, but wins companionship and admiration of his nephew, who shows manifest disdain of the sundry technological wonders by which he is surrounded, and prefers the simple pleasures of outdoor activities and mischief-making.  If the film is intended as a satire of the advent of modernisation, Tati’s invariably equitable, congenial a