Jacques Tati/Play Time

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."

The day after Christmas at my aunt's house, I had my niece on my lap and she was playing with the arm of the chair, which was made of strips of leather on a metal frame. The ends of the arms were looped to slide over the frame but were not secured, so it fell off after a while.

Early in development, as young infants grasp, suck, and manipulate objects, they learn something of the objects' affordances for action (Gibson, 1979). This is direct individual learning, and it may sometimes be supplemented by emulation learning in which the child discovers new affordances of objects by seeing them do thing she did not know they could do. But the tools and artifacts of a culture have another dimension -- what Cole (1996) calls the "ideal" dimension -- that produce another set of affordances for anyone with the appropriate kinds of social-cognitive and social learning skills. As human children observe other people using cultural tools and artifacts, they often engage in the process of imitative learning in which they attempt to place themselves in the "intentional space" of the user -- discerning the user's goal, what she is using the artifact "for." By engaging in this imitative learning, the child joins the other person in affirming what "we" use this object "for": we use hammers for hammering and pencils for writing. After she has engaged in such a process the child comes to see some cultural objects and artifacts as having, in addition to their natural sensory-motor affordances, another set of what we might call intentional affordances based on her understanding of the intentional relations that other persons have with that object or artifact -- that is, the intentional relations that other persons have to the world through that artifact (Tomasello, 1999a). -- Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, pp. 84-85

Maybe Tati's humor is not purely visual because one has to have the intentional affordances of artifacts in the back of one's mind to appreciate the (re)discovery of their natural affordances. Modernist design is good for contrasting these because form is based upon an idealized function.

there's a scene where a boy watches the slow disappearance of a ring of condensation from a wooden table where a hot cup has been standing. It's something I'd seen in life, but never in a film. Very simple, very real, rather microscopic, pretty 'undramatic'. And yet a very powerful, poetic, emotive symbol of ghostly disappearance.

Symbolic representation is supposed to be built upon sensorimotor representation, but I suppose a lot of culturally coded representation gets in the way of (or preempts) individual discovery. I wonder how obvious this stuff is. On the one hand it has to be coded; on the other, it has to be discovered.

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