The clown/film-maker has an honoured place within the history of cinema, particularly in the first half of this century. In the silent era, Chaplin, Keaton and Mack Sennett were among the most innovative explorers of the new medium. They helped develop a visual language which transcended national and linguistic barriers; but their art also had its roots in the variety and vaudeville theatre of the turn of the century.
Perhaps this, along with the advent of sound, goes some way to explaining why the clowning tradition has diminished so much in recent decades (although the profits of the depressing, shoddily-made Mr Bean show there's still some commercial life left in the form).
In the post-war years, only one such filmmaker has achieved international commercial and critical success, although one wonders how aware contemporary audiences (particularly in the English-speaking world) are of the films of Jacques Tati, some 17 years after his death.
Born to a comfortably well-off Franco-Russian family, Tati was of the first generation fully to experience the new concept of the "leisure industry", which forms the setting for most of his work. He had little interest in joining the family firm but, as a young, amateur rugby player in 1920s Paris, he first exercised his talent for visual comedy by entertaining his team-mates after matches. Their enthusiastic reaction soon led to professional engagements, and by the late 1930s, Tati was a successful stage performer and beginning to dabble in cinema.
The German occupation put a stop to all that (like many Frenchmen of his generation, Tati's wartime record is enveloped in a fog of obscurity), and it wasn't until 1947 that he directed his first feature film, Jour de Fete. In 1952 he introduced his alter-ego, the angular, pipe-smoking Monsieur Hulot. In Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and in Mon Oncle (1958), he perfected the Tati worldview: exquisitely constructed, superbly-timed visual entertainments, in which words are non-existent or reduced to meaningless absurdity. The style reached its apotheosis in Playtime (1968), an extraordinary, surreal visual poem to urban modernism which bankrupted Tati and left him wandering Europe in search of financial support for the last 15 years of his life.
David Bellos makes much of Tati's early apprenticeship in his father's picture-framing business as a possible foundation for his visual perfectionism, and finds plenty of supporting evidence in the recurring fascination with architectural motifs which runs through the films.
Some contemporaries chose to see the Modernist design and depiction of leisure activities as a critique of consumer capitalism, which is hardly borne out by the films themselves, except on the most superficial level. Rather, there is a fascination with surfaces, lines and pure movement. It is perhaps Tati's misfortune that the worlds he created were of his near future, which is now our past - the bourgeois holiday resort of Les Vacances was out of reach of most French people in the austere early-1950s, but now looks like pure nostalgia; the enormous glass-and-steel Parisian set he created for Playtime was to be mimicked and exceeded within a few years by the vast office development at La Defense.
Bellos's biography aims explicitly to set Tati's films within the context of France from the 1940s to the 1970s, and attempts to unravel some of the enigmas of the man himself. He is more successful in the former than the latter - the political and cultural ferment of the Fourth and Fifth Republics is well evoked, as is the way in which the resolutely non-intellectual Tati was adopted and championed by the critical establishment.
Tati the man remains opaque, though: an autocratic perfectionist in his art, a disastrous decision-maker in his business ventures, a manipulator who exploited friends and proteges for as long as they could take, he fits the same profile as many other great film-makers, but his peculiar genius resists analysis; as in his films, words are not enough.
Hugh Linehan is an Irish Times journalist
