The Astor Theatre -Jour de Fete in Thomson Color

Jour de Fête in Thomson Color

Jacques Tati's gentle comedy, Jour de Fête, is a remarkable film, Indeed, it is regarded by many as his finest work.

But most people have not had the chance to see Jour de Fête as Tati intended it to be seen ... until now!
Tati's idea was to use colour as part of the narrative and, for reasons lost to history, he used a French colour system known as Thomson Color - an experimental, three-colour, lenticular, additive process touted as being "better than Technicolor" by its proponents. But it is difficult to understand how anybody could have seriously thought any additive system to be superior to a three-colour, subtractive system.

And it is obvious that Tati himself had serious doubts because he decided to play it safe by filming in black & white at the same time. Two cameras were used (they appear to be Bell & Howell models in this location shot - select the thumbnail for a larger image) which meant that the two versions could not be exactly the same (apart from the colour issue).
His doubts were well placed. The Thomson Color process was hideously complex and the technology for producing a viable release print simply did not exist. So it was the "back-up" B&W version that was released in 1949.

It was inevitable that Tati would try to do something about it. He shot some new sequences in black & white, hand-coloured them and incorporated them in a re-edited version that was released in 1964 with a "colour" title card.
He used one of the new scenes of an artist visiting the village in an attempt to realise his aim of using colour to show the drabness of the villagers' lives. All of the people were dressed in dark colours and all the buildings had been painted an almost-uniform grey. Then the carnival arrived and the first bright colours should have appeared ...

The artist sequence was a poor substitute and it was to take more than 30 years before anything approaching Tati's original vision finally hit the world's screens.
His daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, and the film's cinematographer, François Ede, worked with the original, Thomson Color negative, restored it and produced a modern, three-colour, subtractive release print.

They made no attempt to "improve" the colour to match modern standards. Instead, they worked within the limiitations of the Thomson Color process.
We have no way of knowing if Jacques Tati understood fully those limitations. It appears that he was able to see some tests - possibly using a three-strip or a colour-wheel additive-projection system.

But they are obvious from the first few frames of the restored version and, from the flesh tones and green-brown dominance, it would be easy to believe that it was a two-colour instead of a three-colour process. It's also possible, on a big screen, to see artifacts from the lenticular coating on the negative (which was used to split the light beam).
There's certainly a drabness and a "sameness" about all the colours. Was that what Tati wanted? Did he know how it would look or were his intentions exaggerated?

To a certain extent it probably doesn't matter because what you'll see on the screen with this restored version of Jour de Fête is very, very close to how it would have looked had it been possible to strike a colour print in the late '40s.

Visit the official Tativille web-site.

Jour de Fête and several other Jacques Tati films are distributed throughout Australasia by Potential Films.

	But most people have not had the chance to see Jour de Fête as Tati intended it to be seen ... until now! Tati's idea was to use colour as part of the narrative and, for reasons lost to history, he used a French colour system known as Thomson Color - an experimental, three-colour, lenticular, additive process touted as being "better than Technicolor" by its proponents. But it is difficult to understand how anybody could have seriously thought any additive system to be superior to a three-colour, subtractive system.
	And it is obvious that Tati himself had serious doubts because he decided to play it safe by filming in black & white at the same time. Two cameras were used (they appear to be Bell & Howell models in this location shot - select the thumbnail for a larger image) which meant that the two versions could not be exactly the same (apart from the colour issue). His doubts were well placed. The Thomson Color process was hideously complex and the technology for producing a viable release print simply did not exist. So it was the "back-up" B&W version that was released in 1949.
	It was inevitable that Tati would try to do something about it. He shot some new sequences in black & white, hand-coloured them and incorporated them in a re-edited version that was released in 1964 with a "colour" title card. He used one of the new scenes of an artist visiting the village in an attempt to realise his aim of using colour to show the drabness of the villagers' lives. All of the people were dressed in dark colours and all the buildings had been painted an almost-uniform grey. Then the carnival arrived and the first bright colours should have appeared ...
	The artist sequence was a poor substitute and it was to take more than 30 years before anything approaching Tati's original vision finally hit the world's screens. His daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, and the film's cinematographer, François Ede, worked with the original, Thomson Color negative, restored it and produced a modern, three-colour, subtractive release print.
	They made no attempt to "improve" the colour to match modern standards. Instead, they worked within the limiitations of the Thomson Color process. We have no way of knowing if Jacques Tati understood fully those limitations. It appears that he was able to see some tests - possibly using a three-strip or a colour-wheel additive-projection system.
	But they are obvious from the first few frames of the restored version and, from the flesh tones and green-brown dominance, it would be easy to believe that it was a two-colour instead of a three-colour process. It's also possible, on a big screen, to see artifacts from the lenticular coating on the negative (which was used to split the light beam). There's certainly a drabness and a "sameness" about all the colours. Was that what Tati wanted? Did he know how it would look or were his intentions exaggerated?