REPRESENTATION OF THE CITY IN JACQUES TATI'S PLAYTIME

Playtime by Jacques Tati from www.dvdclassik.com/critique/play-time-tati/galerie

Rows of monumental high-rise duplicates planted in equal distances from one another in straight lines and perpendicular angles; this rectilinear gridded city in Jacques Tati’s Playtime 1967, best conveys the template of cities praised by the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne. Playtime not only critiques the homogeneity of cities and the symbolic high-rise but goes further exposing, with exaggeration, the social impact of technological reproduction, its reflection on the consumerist economy plagued by mass media.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin writes both architecture and film are received “by a collectivity in a mode of distraction.”  This is evident in Playtime where people operate within the city and the buildings unconsciously, furthermore using a 70-millimeter format, he captures the whole front of the city, emphasizing the “central vacuum”  yet ­­keeping spectators distracted by activating the edges. Tati included “the dialogue within the sound,” consequently the soundtrack also keeps audiences distracted with the multilayering of sounds. This constant audiovisual distraction in Playtime introduces the spectators to stimulations we are exposed to in the city but which we ignore or consume unconsciously. This bombardment of stimulations anesthetizes the senses, as Georg Simmel wrote in The Metropolis and Mental Life, the city “stimulates nerves to their utmost reactivity until they can no longer produce any reaction at all.” In the first half of the film, architecture dominates the mise-en-scene. Tati directed the actors to walk in straight lines and right angles to give the impression that they are “trapped by the guidelines of the architects”. Modern architecture forces people to sit straight, walk straight and is intolerant of mishaps such as dropping ones umbrella.  Modern architecture not only dictates the actions of people but also erases the genius loci of the particular place; this sterile city, which is Paris, could be anywhere, “in a place that is not a place, but rather a monochrome purgatory of glass and metal, a glistening, antiseptic environment.”  Tati pokes fun at this notion with posters of Hawaii, London, Chicago in a travel agent’s office with the carbon copy of the glass and steel International Style buildings depicted. In doing so he crystalizes Benjamin’s words who expressed his concern on mechanical reproduction writing “It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence.”

In addition, the grid, defined by Krauss as “modern art’s will to silence” and its “hostility towards literature, narrative, and discourse” is presented by Tati as an element conspiring against humanity. The city as the grid is portrayed in its naked determined materialism. Furthermore, just as the symbolists drew the window as grid transmitting light and reflection, Tati also plays on the multiple definitions of the French word glace: glass, mirror, and ice. As Hulot walks in the city his reflection as a shadow follows, and at moments tricks him into bumping into the glass doors or windows. All this glass dematerializes the physical, threading between reality and illusion, consciousness and unconsciousness. Here Tati manifests Krauss’ words “the grid’s mythic power is that is makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion or fiction)."