Restoring the sound of Mr Hulot
The restoration of the soundtrack allowed us to bring back the entire sound range and rhythmic accents of Mr Hulot’s Holiday. Early in 1953, Tati began the sound editing of his film whose effects would become inseparable from his picturesque world. The background sounds often take precedence over the dialogue and are often more audible. Such is the case with the unusual sound of Hulot’s car, a contraption that contrasts with its driver’s discretion. In the description that Tati gives of the car’s effects, we read, for example, “drives off spluttering for no obvious reason,” which signals the vehicle’s disruptive role.
When Tati re-edited his film in the early 60s, he remixed the sound by eliminating certain dialogue and, inspired by Alain Romans theme music, he produced a new orchestral accompaniment that was more rhythmic and modern than the original chamber music soundtrack. In the Polydor Studios in Paris, it was Alain Romans himself who played the piano, accompanied by some of the finest jazz musicians in the capital. The muted trumpet and the strings were replaced by the swing of a ¾ electric bass guitar, saxophones and a vibraphone. On this occasion, the pop theme by jazz clarinetist Maxime Saury, “Mon Oncle et moi”, recorded two years earlier in Mon Oncle, replaced the original music for the scenes in which Hulot listens to the phonograph. In an interview with "Le Monde" en 1962, Tati said: “So I re-did the sound — recording quality has considerably improved since then – and I gave the film a more accelerated movement. In 1952, we danced slow numbers, holidays followed the rhythm of muted trumpets, today we go from the cha-cha-cha to the twist, there’s less waiting, we’re in a hurry.”
The soundtrack of Mr Hulot's Holiday is as lively and colorful as the film’s many characters: a haunting little phonograph melody for the lonelyhearts, the polyglot hubbub of a restaurant lunch, a card game enlivened by a radio newscast, a tennis game refereed by the twitter of birds, a fireworks display with jazz accompaniment... This sound eclecticism recorded on monaural tape is what we must recapture.
The restoration of the soundtrack was based on the sound negative using the film’s last mix (the 1978 version). L.E. Diapason, a post-production facility specializing in sound restoration, began by manually eliminating sound defects such as the “plops” produced by the numerous splices. The sound balance was dictated not by the voices (which generally serve as markers) but by the music because, as is often the case in this film, the voices occupy the same plane as the background sounds. In a few silent scenes, it was particularly important to conserve a slight hiss, thus providing sound texture. Even as it respects the bits of deliberately incomprehensible conversation, the film gains in intelligibility.
© Text written by Loubna Régragui (Thomson Foundation), Hervé Pichard (Cinémathèque française), April 2009.
A sample from the soundtrack (before and after restoration)
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