Tati, Playtime

These walls are paper thin,
And everyone hears every little sound.
Everyone’s a voyeur, their watching me,
Watch them, watch me right now.

I saw bits of Jacques Tati’s Playtime last night. It is a very interesting film. Actually, I loathe to use ‘interesting’; there should be an embargo on that word. I hate it. No, the film made me think. ‘Interesting’ is something that operates as a kind of seduction, or what amounts to the same thing, a mind fuck. You are subsumed by the intentional complicatedness of the text and interpellated into being a constituent part of the block of space-time (or ‘assemblage’) that envelopes the unthinking, docile and just-right relation. Most of the time I think such complicated texts are constructed by people who lack confidence in their thinking. And they are described as ‘interesting’ by people who do not think, but simply recognise the complicatedness.

Playtime is a relatively simple text, but it forces me to think, or, that is, forced me to thought. Something was produced on the surface of the film, a new Earth. The production of a new territory. From the couch to the television, around the Glen… So the formation of a plane of consistency, organised around thought. Hmmm, it forced me to remember some of what I had forgetton I had forgot. Like the inverse of the Elvis Presley song. So. It was a good film. Perhaps a bit boring in some places (i.e. I could watch it without thinking). Other times it was hilarious. Especially the bus scene where the dude gets on the bus and holds onto a lamp stand thinking it is a pole built into the bus interior… yeah, I guess you had to be there.

According to the IMDb ‘trivia‘ for the film:

Production took place from October 1964 to October 1967. Filming began in April 1965 primarily on a set dubbed “Tativille”, where 100 construction workers built two buildings using 11,700 square feet of glass, 38,700 square feet of plastic, 31,500 square feet of timber, and 486,000 square feet of concrete.

Fuck, I am going back to bed.

EDIT, May 19: undercurrent (aka Robin) of dread, walking fame has a short piece on Tati ghosted through Google cache here.