Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

imeo video_id="110168157" width="1000" height="563“] Some thoughts on Jacques Tati's film Playtime. Playtime, Jacques Tati's fourth film, bankrupted him. He built an enormous set just outside Paris employing hundreds of construction workers. It cost 17 million francs in 1967. To save money, many of the buildings in his film are, in fact, giant photographs — as are the 'extras' who populate background scenes. Tati's comic protagonist (Monsieur Hulot) passes through this constructed world — and his helplessness highlights this new world's absurdity. Playtime mocks concepts which director Tati disliked: work, efficiency, hurry, and organisation. Idleness in Tati’s films is not an absence of work, but a positive form of social behaviour, and a clear pole of value in the world of the film. Tragedy and comedy both deal in errors of perception and their unveiling. In Playtime there are no neat resolutions to close off Tati’s gags, no punchlines, no conclusions. Structurally perfect though they are, Tati’s comedy does not drive plots or make stories. Like John Baldessari, Tati employs humour for its ability to make the ordinary seem absurd and the absurd seem ordinary. A typical Tati gag structure becomes funny... through repetition and incremental exaggeration. Tati believed that if art isn’t playful, it’s nothing. He thought of play as being incredibly important and deeply serious. Unusually for a film-maker, Tati sought to use sound as a comic device. This required him to unravel the rules of natural sound, and to turn them upside down. He knew what the rules were and he learnt to play games with them. Sound in Tati’s films is material and materialistic. Each one of his films teaches us that the only way to get somewhere, anywhere, is by going astray. Playtime was a financial flop. In the original plan for Playtime silhouettes of the film’s characters would have been projected onto the walls of the auditorium, mingling the imaginary with the real, mixing viewers with the film itself. The last 15 minutes of Playtime immerse each spectator in a personal solitude. Then it asks that the audience walk out of the cinema back into reality. It is possible that such an ending is responsible for the film’s failure to connect with the public. Jacques Tati is David Lynch's favourite film-maker.