BUY TICKETS HERE
Join us on July 21 at 1 p.m. for our weekly Sunday screening series, featuring actor-director Jacques Tati’s enchanting “PlayTime” (1967) in digital projection.
PLAYTIME | 1967 | DIRECTOR: Jacques Tati | WITH: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Rita Maiden | RUNNING TIME: 2H 35M | UNRATED no offensive material | 2K DCP PROJECTION
Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with PlayTime. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the lovably old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a baffling modern world, this time Paris.
With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, PlayTime is a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
“Playtime is a movie that unfolds entirely in a public space. Even the strange sequence showing us adjacent living rooms is shot exclusively from the street; and the only time we see Barbara in her hotel room is when a maid delivers her evening dress. So there’s something inappropriate and contrary to Tati’s design for the film about its being viewed in private spaces, especially on any screen smaller than oneself.
“Playtime assumes a precise contiguity and continuity with the public space of a movie theater, where we share its experience with others—just as the customers and employees of the Royal Garden eventually manage to carve out a common social investment in an establishment that’s gradually disintegrating around them. Even if we sometimes wind up laughing at different gags, we’re all laughing to some degree at ourselves, and the sense of mutual recognition is crucial.
“Mobile phones have sadly made the sense of public urban space as it exists in Playtime almost archaic, a kind of lost paradise. The utopian vision of shared space that informs the latter scenes—beginning in the new Royal Garden restaurant at night and continuing the next morning in a drugstore and on the streets of Paris—is made unthinkable by mobile phones, whose use can be said to constitute both a depletion and a form of denial of public space, especially because the people using them tend to ignore the other people in immediate physical proximity to them.
“Nevertheless, given his capacity to keep abreast of social changes, I have little doubt that Tati, if he were alive today, could and probably would construct wonderful gags involving the use of these phones. And if he were making Playtime now, I suspect he’d most likely be inventing gags for the first part that involved mobile phones, and then would have to find ways of destroying or disempowering them to make way for the second part. (It’s hardly accidental that his most brilliantly and elaborately developed gag involves the shattering of glass, another social barrier.)” — Jonathan Rosenbaum
The screening will be introduced by Bill Cosford Cinema manager Rene Rodriguez. Tickets are $5 and available at link above. Students use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission. Cane card must be shown at the door.
