Playtime

Clowning around in Tativille

With the addition of sound, cinema gained something. But it lost something in return. More specifically, comedy lost something. Before the talkies changed film forever, not only did the comedy giants of cinema, such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, rely on their bodies to convey story, message, and humour, but they made it their strength. But the talkies relied on the dialogue to be funny, as opposed to using physical action, and much of the hilarity became intellectual, and was therefore lost. Chaplin and Keaton didn’t have this; they only had their physical genius, resulting in new, innovative, and inventive ways to use their bodies in order to extract humour from ‘the everyday’. Their incredible ability to use the physicality of their own bodies in interaction with the varying ridiculous — often dangerous — environments they found themselves in was what set them apart from the others.

With his 1967 masterpiece, Playtime, French filmmaker Jacques Tati is taking us back to those greats of visual comedy. Like a lot of great cinema, Playtime offers a poetic juxtaposition. It is a film that juxtaposes the contemporary city — and all its over-perfected, absurdist postmodern architecture — with a sense of nostalgia for those old silent films. Tati said he learnt all he needed to know about filmmaking from comedian Little Tich’s slapstick dance routine, Big Boots. And like Little Tich — like Chaplin and Keaton — the humour in Playtime arises from Tati’s clown-like character Monsieur Hulot’s interaction with a recognisable environment.

Unsurprisingly, Tati came from a vaudeville world of clowns, acrobats, and magicians. He originally trained as a mime artist, and characteristics of the mime can be seen in Monsieur Hulot. Dialogue is restricted; Hulot tends to talk in inaudible noises and mumbles. Mime is an art based entirely in exaggeration where everything is communicated through movement and action, and this essential need to use the physicality of the body translates onto Tati’s screen.

Like Chaplin, Tati was a true master of the form — a genius of perfection. And like Chaplin’s Tramp, Tati’s Hulot is a flâneur. Interestingly, the flâneur is a concept that originated on the Parisian streets, championed by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project — an enormous collection of writings on Parisian city life — and Charles Baudelaire in his many poems and writings. Benjamin wrote in his aforementioned Arcades Project:

“Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a century’s long movements of street, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour?”

In their works, the flâneur was a stroller and a bumbler of the streets: an observer of all walks of life. But in the comedic cinematic role, the flâneur is updated, enhanced. The psychogeography of the city is transformed into c0medy. Rather than a middle-class man of leisure with the freedom to wander the streets, these flâneurs are proletarian clowns. The clownish flâneur interacts with his environment through physical comedy, and outlandish, ridiculous feats, yet they represent the everyman. Hulot, with his gangly arms, hunched back, and grey, ill-fitting clothes could be the man we see sat on the bus every day on the way to work. The lack of dialogue enhances the flâneur’s role as an observer, rather than a narrator, but the role of narrator is appropriated by Tati’s Hulot. In the modern city, the walker of the streets can no longer merely observe. The city is an uncomfortable, absurdist space where interaction is inescapable, further increased by all the new technologies, gadgets, and gizmos that come with this new space. Think how many of Tati’s jokes involve doors, chairs, corridors, buses: all things we use through interaction, and all things that seem to develop with the quickly transforming modern world. By the end of the film, the city, with its carousel roundabouts, seems to have transformed into a fairground. The city is a confusing playground for the flâneur and the filmmaker: a modern arcadia.