“Tashlin is the original pop-culture Pop Artist.”—J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Look at the films of Douglas Sirk through a filter of Warner Bros. cartoons, and you might see something like the comedies of Frank Tashlin. Like Sirk, Tashlin (1913–1972) depicted a fifties America of glaring colors and alienated culture—a world of illusions, imitations of life. But for Tashlin, the gaudy fantasies of a media-saturated public, the visions of consumer excess and packaged sex—travesties of biology—are objects of both parody and aesthetic celebration. He tagged his subject matter as “the nonsense of what we call civilization.”
Tashlin's first movies, made in the thirties and forties, were cartoons. Later, his live-action films flaunt an energetic disregard for the physical limits of reality; they deploy actors like Jayne Mansfield and Jerry Lewis as living cartoons, exaggerated gestural figures on an abstract ground. And what a ground—Tashlin gave new meaning to the phrase “broad comedy,” exploiting the possibilities of the CinemaScope frame like no other comic director. Our small sampling of Tashlin's work celebrates that wide, wide screen in films that are even bigger, louder, and funnier than American life.
Juliet Clark