As unreceptive oafs scanned their Facebooks in the dark, I had my first encounter with Godard (“Weekend”), witnessed for the first time that inexplicable miracle at the center of “La Jetee” and bore the full-on existential catharsis that is “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”
It was also during this time that I first saw Jacques Tati’s “Playtime.”
I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as UCSD’s celebrity filmmaker/alleged corporal punisher Jean-Pierre Gorin and call aspects of contemporary film theory — particularly the notion of “the gaze” in a feminist context — “pathetic,” but I have often been confused by the way many of my peers read film. The focus always seems to fall almost exclusively on the content rather than the form, the on-screen action rather than the constructed illusion. I’ve often heard students dismiss a film simply because they didn’t like one of the characters — not the way in which these characters were developed by the style or narrative, but the characters themselves (as if they were real people that we had to grudgingly tolerate in order to enjoy the rest of the movie).
I often connect this seeming disinterest in the visual construction, the sound and the edit to a change in the function of the moving image. I recall watching “The Office” with a friend back in high school who would always gossip about the characters as we were watching the show. Each time Steve Carell’s oblivious Michael Scott would do something poignantly immature or misogynistic, she’d turn to me and say something like, “Can you believe it? He would do that!” I thought this was totally weird, but I also began to realize that while I derived my pleasure from witnessing snappy and smart dialogue and phenomenal improv character acting, she was having an experience more similar to a scandalous party with a group of close friends.
“The Office” strikes me as a particularly good example because it’s representative of an almost style-less style — the high-def, handheld aesthetic that has come to define a majority of movies and, maybe more importantly, television shows. When you remove or significantly downplay other fundamental elements of filmmaking in favor of an as-close-to-real-life illusion, the content (the dialogue, the character interactions, the story) becomes the only residual concern. Perhaps this kind of media has become so ubiquitous and expected that most people are less interested in how it’s made than they are in consuming more of it.
But the best way to tell a story is with words — and while film may not always have the potential to do more than words, it certainly has the potential to do something entirely different.
This is why Tati — and forefathers like Buster Keaton — can feel so incredibly modern today. The mechanics involved in making an audience react simply by moving bodies through space and time, or cutting to another image, are incredibly and deceptively complicated. Not to mention, these techniques create a visceral impact that can be entirely outside the logic of words.
“Playtime” accomplishes this to the 10th degree; often there are literally ten or more silent films going on at one time in the same frame. Tati develops the most elaborate collection of setup-releases crucial to silent film (bodies moving through and interacting with Tati’s massive environment) and then leaves little else. There’s no protagonist, no real plot or conflict and the dialogue is extremely minimal. By today’s standards, it sounds like an unwatchable film.
Tati spent his ludicrously inflated budget not on A-list celebrities (for his purposes, this would’ve been pointless), but on his true stars of the film: the massive, vaguely sci-fi sets that personify Paris as some colorless future/parallel state. Here, he stages a city-scale dance — an elaborately choreographed Rube Goldberg machine made of bodies and sets, which Tati sets off in the first few minutes — and then allows us to simply observe as it churns and shape-shifts over the course of a single day in the city. Depending on where you look, “Playtime” is at any moment slapstick or beautiful (usually both). What’s more is that Tati is always hyper-aware of the fact that, while the advent of sound may not have ruined cinema, as many purists claim, it certainly made things more complicated. So while “Playtime” operates much like a silent film, in the way Tati’s equally brilliant preceding masterpieces did, it is also completely reliant on sound to further play with our expectations and construct the fantasy world. Silence is replaced by the ceaseless drone of city sound, and the distinguishable sound effects that punctuate this chaos serve not to provide any specific message but rather to contribute to an atmosphere that — like the film’s iconic lobby computer — blinks and buzzes with the organized hysteria of a human nervous system.
The film becomes downright shocking when, after the third or fourth viewing, you begin to catch all of the tricks Tati has hidden under this surface (the elaborate game of “Where’s Hulot?” takes the cake).
Tati most recently regained a mainstream presence in 2010 with Sylvain Chomet’s modestly beautiful “The Illusionist,” an Oscar-nominated animated film which was based on an unfinished Tati project and featured a protagonist modeled directly after Tati’s Mr. Hulot. But Tati’s oeuvre of classics is more urgently relevant and game-changing than ever. For now, it waits patiently to seduce those unsuspecting new fans and remind us of the incredible potency of cinema in its purest forms.