Jacques Tati/Play Time

I often think of Tati's Play Time alongside Godard's Week End (not coindentally, two titles based on English phrases adopted into French were used for two films which--among other things--examine the absurdity of modern life)...even though Tati was, as you say, a populist (although he admired Godard's work and expressed a desire to work with him), his play with form and his very *extremity* pushed him into the realm of the avant-garde. Both artists seem to ask too much of the cinema, ask it to do things the audience is unprepared and perhaps even literally unable to do (in Tati's case, follow several lines of action and several developing gags in one widescreen image; in Godard's case, assembled a story presented in fragments of scenes, flash frames, etc.). ...

Why, none other than my current album, 'Oskar Tennis Champion', which is named after an early Tati short and takes as its theme the collision of Modernist Utopia with the bananaskin of human fallibility. It's Tati's theme, but it seemed very relevant to me in 2002 because

1. We were looking at the 20th century -- and Modernism -- as something completed, finished, and asking ourselves what became of its utopian dreams.

2. 9/11 had just happened; a day on which jets demolished two Modernist towers closely resembling the set Tati built for 'Playtime'. It would be insensitive to call that a pratfall, but perhaps it was the biggest bananaskin in history.

I knew it would be mostly silent and that the lack of subtitles was supposed to mirror or induce the same confusion as Hulot (the quiet door-slam manager slipping in and out of German, in and out of subtitles &c.) You could see a lot of the joins, that you could see the people being directed, some scenes just far too busy with synthetic life moving just so.

I knew it would be relatively slow paced but not with these infuriating still lingers where Tati just waits for everything he wants off the screen to move off the screen. I don't like slapstick really or when one joke gets spun out into the thinnest thread you couldn't hang a sylph off.

I didn't find it funny but more than that it was frustrating, I could feel my insides flexing trying to move me - it took me quite a while to get up off my seat even though my brain was willing me upwards, a reverse vertigo had set in to counteract the constant twitching inside me that had mounted into me wanting to leave. It was really uncomfortable. So I crept out quietly after an hour.

I'm probably being unfair or not 'getting it' or not even giving it a chance but when something provokes such a severe physiological discomfort I think my reactions are 'valid' (and honest), however ex post facto rationalising they are.

Not since the silent era has Hollywood actually privileged the visual over the textual. And I think if you're not the kind of person who enjoys modern dance (cos Tati is basically a brilliant choreographer) or can stand in front of an Andreas Gursky photo for several minutes (cos Tati is an amazing photographer -- that exterior night scene where we see into two apartment windows at the same time!) then you probably will find Tati frustrating. God knows, the film bombed when it came out, so you're not alone.

But 'Playtime' is certainly amongst the top 100 films of the 20th century, and says -- without words! -- some incredibly important things about how people lived then. Its stature grows with each year. Some may find it unwatchable (too visual to be watchable?) but it will be watched for a long time to come.

Elaborately constructed slapstick makes me marvel at its ingenuity, but ingenuity is better served in engineering or architecture rather than working out a way for someone to get kicked up the arse.

But that's exactly the thing that's so great about Tati! We try, with ingenuity and engineering, to construct a perfect world, but there's always some little snag tripping up our utopia, some spanner in the works. But then someone comes along who, with ingenuity and engineering, depicts the exact way the spanner enters the works, and puts as much talent into showing stuff breaking down as others put into fixing it! He even builds a simu-city outside the real city only to model the way things go wrong, then pulls it all down! He's either a madman or...

The scene in Playtime with Hulot trying out on weirdly-reacting soft chairs in a pristine vitrine-like corporate lobby is similar. It's not just a Mr Bean fart joke, it's a study of the texture of the chairs themselves and a comment on the incompatibility between Modernist design and the human form, between the human and the corporate scale... And it's an elegant rumination on the impossibility of elegance.

Yes, I do find him a sympathetic character.. As I say, that end sequence is really poignant. His attempts to communicate with and be chivalrous toward this woman as they walk through the city in the morning.. Knowing the possibility of meaningful interaction is remote, that she is soon to depart, but making the attempt ... he buys her a gift .. I don't know. The way they sort of randomly ended up in each other's company in the early morning after the nightlong of revelry at the restaurant.. It's touchingly romantic and very sad at the same time.

have you noticed the moment where she leans on his shoulder to fix her shoe (??) and he notices she's wearing a wedding ring?

my favorite moment (maybe?) in "jour de fete" is when the buzzing bee leaves francois to bother the farmer on a hill, but there's no bee, there's just a buzzing noise which changes pitches to indicate where and who he's bothering. a good example of tati's use of sound cues to replace visual cues and his use of the whole screen/sound world.

so you saw the color version? apparently tati's daughter--she oversaw the restoration, and was a filmmaker herself--used one of her father's revised soundtracks for the film (maybe from the 60s?) instead of the original, which angered some people. i don't know enough about it to know if she made the right decision; maybe the 1948 soundtrack was a mess when it came time to restore the film in 1994. but the color is definitely worth it. i was surprised when i saw it how muted and subtle were the colors considering the technology being used. certainly they don't feel like the kind of oversaturated color being used in some hollywood productions at that time. worth nothing too is that the original "black and white" version included some stray objects and bits of decor stencilled in various colors for effect. something that has its own beauty, so it's worth seeing "both" versions (both is in quotes because it seems like there's actually 100 versions of this film).

haha yeah that's great! my mind explodes at the thought of how hard that shot must have been to set up.

i like the way tati (ha! i almost typed "godard"! well it IS sort of similar to "week-end") finds select mometnts--literally moments, not even entire shots sometimes--to isolate hulot and the young american tourist, so that its clear they've caught each other's eye somehow but have little time or space to go any further in the midst of the restaurant and other chaos.

yeh, similarly with the sequence when the two waiters are carrying out the chef mannequin so that it looks on-screen like they're carrying an actual body.

as for "jour de fete's" antiamericanism, i think it's more of an ambivalence, lampooning both the american's obsession with efficiency and the french's eagerness and perhaps inability to adapt quickly.

in "playtime" it's not necessarily antiamericanism (though the figure of the rich texan guy is definitely a silly, even a bit affectionate, stab--but his lines were cowritten with art buckwald) as much as a lampoon of the general tendency of modernist urban architecture (perhaps in its way the ultimate symbol of corporate consolidation and power) to turn every place into the same place. this is literalized in those hilarious travel posters in the lobby, where you have "the alps" with a skiier flying past a skyscraper identical to the one tati is walking around in.

haha! though granted a good half of them are mine...

and this by colette, on tati's sport mimes: "he is both the player and the ball, the football and the goalkeeper, the boxer and his opponent, the bicycle and its rider. he makes you see invisible partners, and objects in his empty hands. he plays on your imagination with the talent of a great artist... when jacques tati imitates horse and rider, paris sees a mythological creature come to life, the centaur."

i once had an argument with someone who insisted that tati was "basically a silent filmmaker", an assertion he was incredible fond of but which is controverted by the first five seconds of "mr. hulot's holiday."

i'd agree with that, evan

i think i could listen to just the audio tracks of his movies on their own. such amazing sounds.

yeah, they are basically elaborate (and fetching!) pieces of musique concrete.

in fact, there's a collection, "tati sonorama," where the first CD is selections from his films' musical scores, and the second is basically raw chunks of the soundtracks -- music, sound effects, dialogue (such as it is), etc. i prefer the second CD!

you should get it while it's still vaguely affordable, since it's out of print: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00186VRJI/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=new&qid=&sr=

On last night's Carson rerun on Antenna, one of the main guests was Chevy Chase (this was in '79), and he singled out Tati for extensive praise when asked by Johnny about who made him laugh.

You should repost that on his defend the indefensible thread.

My dad loved Jacques Tati, but my dad was a weird Francophile.

Playtime was incredible. Trafic wasn't quite Playtime, but it was still pretty great

I think my second favorite Tati film after Playtime though is Mon Oncle

Boy, my students, to my surprise, took to Playtime yesterday. It took them a while to let its rhythms work on them, though.

Why surprise?

Long, French, no close-ups, made before May 2019.

and I assume the screen wasn't mammoth, which is a disadvantage

I've got an auditorium, so the projector screen is wall-sized.

oh that's good

saw M Hulot's Holiday for the first(!) time the other night. loved it. maybe my favorite type of movie, just gently whimsical and absurd, a repetitive jazz score which plays off the environs perfectly, a gently sad ending as he pauses and then just decides to get in his car and head off.

i was blown away by the fact that much of the boat/shark gag was filmed in 1978(!!)

Had no idea there were two versions! I guess that scene is a Jaws reference then?

the scene i can't get enough of is when he's painting his boat and the can of paint keeps floating around to the other side of the boat and he never even clocks it's moved but somehow always puts his paintbrush down exactly where it's floated to in order to load up with more paint, just the best