“Like all the great comics,” the film critic André Bazin once wrote of the late French actor-filmmaker Jacques Tati, “he creates a universe.” Just as Charlie Chaplin had the Little Tramp, Tati (1909–82) had Monsieur Hulot — lanky, gracious, oblivious, a gentle beast making his way through befuddling worlds. Thanks to a comprehensive series beginning tomorrow at the French Institute, the works of this essential comedian, including his 1967 panoramic masterpiece “Playtime,” can be fully appreciated in all their ingenious design on the big screen.

Born Jacques Tatischeff in a Parisian suburb, Tati sidled out of the family business of frame-mak ing to become a mime and music hall performer. But observing Tati’s sly performances, one is tempted to think of him, the grandson of van Gogh’s framer, in terms of an effort less artisan. Grace and precision mark his movement and his setups as he works his way through and around a situation, refashioning and playfully rethinking — an artist of surroundings.

Tati began his career with affectionate looks at French rural life. After starring in a René Clément short as a farm boy aspiring to boxing, he quickly began directing his own films. His pre-Hulot creation was a fussy, mustachioed mailman in the 1947 short “Ecole des Facteurs,” expanded into feature form as 1949’s “Jour de Fete” (showing Tuesday). Ordinarily manically cycling about, the postman gets drawn into the bonhomie, quibbles, and little routines of a village about to hold a festival. The gangly mailman’s misadventures are a bit slapstick, but they show the loose-limbed invention to come.

A star was born with 1953’s “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” (April 24), which became an international hit with its sweet setting and post-Chaplin physical comedy. Riding in on his backfiring jalopy, the mostly mute Hulot joins France’s mad summer holiday rush. At a seaside town, dressed in dubious summer casuals, he lopes about in his unique stalking gait, peering curiously about before inevitably doing the half-right thing. Good-natured, distracted, grown-up but somehow ageless, he’s hard not to love, even if his fiendishly effective tennis technique appears to be pulled from the pages of a fencing manual.

As a scenarist, Tati’s quick sketches, like the middle-aged grump in “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” who throws away the beach shells his wife collects, showed that his abilities extended beyond doing a one-man show and toward crafting a whole landscape of behavioral observations. The film slyly lampooned several provincial elements of the French political and social class system. Shifting to satires of modernity but keeping the same essential character, 1958’s “Mon Oncle” (April 20) inaugurated a new degree of set and sight-gag design, and an increasing predilection for building-sized long shots that let jokes unfold without attention-drawing closeups.

Hulot’s sister, who lives with her husband in a gadget-filled ultramodern house with windows like eyes, nudges her brother toward respectable work at a factory. Hulot gives it a shot but is as ineffectual and harmless as ever. He happily returns home each day to an endearingly misshapen old-world structure that requires zigzags down stairs and across balconies to reach his roof-top garret.

By 1967’s “Playtime” (April 10), producers expected Tati to be the main event, but this masterwork, which took nine years to complete, proved once and for all that he had grander ambitions involving a total vision of “democratic” filmmaking, multimillion-franc sets, and a zillion clever ideas to fill every inch. The result was a comedy epic that rewards newbies and veterans alike with its meticulous set pieces and gags laced through foreground and background, as well as a satire to be shelved with the best critiques of modernism and modernity.

“Playtime” starts at the Orly Airport and moves through the re-created concrete-and-glass labyrinths of new Paris, before culminating with a Dionysian jazz party at a restaurant’s grand opening. The mild, murmuring Hulot, lost on the way to an obscure business appointment, keeps crossing paths with a chattering American tourist group, while cultural Paris is marked with the running joke of fleeting window reflections of the Eiffel Tower.

Tati saw his monumental film as a work for viewers to discover, letting them root around actively and find their own fun. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen it, but even now I notice some new tiny detail with each viewing, like the way an airline clerk tucked in an Orly segment vamps ever so slightly while intoning a flight announcement. The care taken with her delivery also underlines Tati’s distinctive impacted sound design, as carefully and cleverly constructed for comedy as Fritz Lang’s was for darker moods. Much of the dialogue, apart from essential lines, is toned down to the background, whereas sounds that are crucial in comic gags are typically amplified.

Anything after “Playtime” would be a letdown, and Tati’s next feature, “Traffic” (Tuesday) is a merely amusing riff on car culture, with Hulot hitting the road in his souped-up wagon. But some unusual candid shots show Tati still chasing new reality-based forms, and his final feature, 1974’s “Parade” (April 24), is essentially a filmed circus performance. The French Institute, ever the stop for regular lovers of French flicks that rarely hit the big screen, is also showing a series of Tati shorts (April 17), including the Clément short, Tati’s own “L’Ecole des facteurs,” and an extremely rare soccer film finished by his daughter. (If all that still isn’t enough for you, the animator Sylvain Chomet, who made “The Triplets of Belleville,” has based his next feature on an unfinished script by Tati.)

The budget overruns and meager box office of “Playtime” bankrupted Tati for years afterward, but his so-called folly was nothing less than exactly what he set out to do. And with its clash between functional spaces and what one critic called Hulot’s playful “metaphorical vision,” it was, like his other works, a movie that alters how one views the world afterward. History and generations of fans leave no question on the final judgment: The mostly mute comedian showed that the last great silent comedy star came after the talkies.

Through April 24 (55 E. 59th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-355-6160).