“The city is a huge monastery” – Erasmus

After a long shot of a blue sky and some clouds during the opening scene of Playtime (1967), we are introduced; with the camera perceptively looking upward, to a Lever House type building piercing that same blue sky, followed by another still shot of two nuns walking from left to right down an enclosed hallway made of glass and steel that separates an internal courtyard(1) from the rest of the interior. It may seem an awkward moment in a film such as Playtime that two nuns(2) are shown solely in the beginning of the film and not the rest, or even portrayed at all. However, this moment is fittingly appropriate to the introduction and is an indication of an ironic, satirical one-dimensional world where Mr. Hulot will take shape. As if Tati is already portraying and projecting an agglomeration of different types of people bound by a common belief strictly working for that belief or for the progression of that belief in a repetitive urban form, a monastery. Its rigid grid like organization, and uniformity represents this urban grouping of buildings that houses the domestic quarters, workplaces and leisure places of monastic attributes. The appropriation of the nuns as part of the city is only to proclaim the nature of that city: its monastic realm.

The usage of the term monastic realm does not refer to all of the literal meaning loaded with different religious connotations but to a metaphorical description and analysis of the film Playtime. This term will subsequently be utilized in a more generalized analysis when approaching the urban aspect of the movie to a more specific description of that term in the immediate urban environments of the film, to the sound applied in the scenes, and to the visual representation of the spatial qualities and its architectural tectonics.

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The Urban Aspect
Charles B. McClendon, in his book The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe A.D. 600-900, describes the ideal(3) monastery in the following statement:

If it can be done, the monastery should be so established that all the necessary things, such as water, mill, garden and various workshops may be within the enclosure, so that there is no [reason] for the monks to go about outside of it, since that is not at all profitable for their souls.

If the ideal is primarily formed of “the necessary things” then Jacques Tati has accomplished portraying the monastic realm in his Playtime. To describe in a more generalized manner the urban monastic environment of the movie is to look for the simplest element that created a seamless texture in the film, and that is the grid. It is simple yet dominant. It creates uniformity on all scalar levels, a kind of an autocratic tool enhanced and manipulated dynamically to increase the sense of power, obedience, stability and structure of an ordered, dictated life of work and “prayer”. The grid frames the new Parisians in all parts of their lives. Whether it was in their offices (work), their homes or their restaurants, the grid assumes control and does not differentiate. The grid becomes a tool of displaying the new Parisian in his new city(4), and maybe the only time it tries to differentiate is with symmetry. When Mr. Hulot visits one of his old friends in the new city house/apartment, we firstly notice that the home is almost like a store display.

Secondly as the camera moves parallel to the apartment, we see another apartment adjacent where everything is displayed in the same order but symmetrical. The line of symmetry, which obviously falls on the grid, is the only wall that separates the two store-like places. This wall at one point becomes the mediator between the movements of two(5) separate characters each inside their separate apartment. Their movement is masterly choreographed as if the two where engaging in a communal visual discussion. Tati is showing the fabric created by the grid of a despotic kind that affects both the physical and the metaphysical body of the new international city.

If Michel de Certeau remarked in The Practice of Everyday life that:

First, if it’s true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall all that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerges.

then Tati’s grid had an opposite effect on a certain non-resident (Mr. Hulot). Unlike the underlying interdictions that governed the organized movement of the rest of the characters in the film, the accumulation of options offered by the grid is only apparent when displaced(6) Hulot is within and interacting in that monastic grid. While everyone else is provided a way of conceiving and constructing their own space (un espace propre) on the “basis of [a] finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties” (Certeau de, 95), Mr. Hulot is manifesting that grid by his awkward body movement against that grid, his ironical drifting from one space to another and his constant misunderstandings of the functions of either places or objects in that urban dominion.

Mr. Hulot’s drifting through the film’s grid could be perceived as some sort of dancing movement. He is well balanced, and his long legs almost flow from one place to another. This “dancing” is perhaps an attempt to establish some sort of physical existence(7) of the character Mr. Hulot that resists the monastic city unlike its other more permanent inhabitants. At the same time this dancing is a general cinematic characteristic of the film: it is no coincidence that Hulot and Tati are one. One is resisting the fictional monastic realm, the grid, while the other is resisting the globalization of film, architecture and daily life. (As mentioned before, the beginning of the film brings about the notion of the city as a developing monastic place that is a metaphor to globalism and better way to introduce this globalism than through an airport where Americans are flooding the gates).

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The Immediate Urban Environments
The new Paris in Playtime is represented as a huge monastery and is always broken down into courtyard like spaces with perimeter buildings, and/or internal walkways. Whether it is a massive parking lot with hundreds of perfectly lined up cars or an actual courtyard in a building, the circulation seems always to be of a perimeter type. Another example of the monastery form and circulation is presented in the scene where Mr. Hulot, after navigating a patch of cars in aparking lot, enters a building and is directed by a concierge to sit down and wait while he calls the person whom he will meet. Then, after the old man dials some numbers on a huge, inflated and “computerized” board, we are again faced with an internal hallway with one side facing the exterior. The shot is divided into two spaces, one of Mr. Hulot: he is static, while waiting he can only hear the loud footsteps; the second is of the man he intends to meet: the passage is long, the person starts small on the screen then gradually grows taller and closer(8). The scene carries that authoritative and grandiose nature of the monastic realm.

In Playtime, characters are crisscrossing the screen as if they are being directed involuntary by the harsh and exact routes depicted by the grid, except one person who seems to be innocently(9) in defiance of such a system but very dependant on it for directions, but not direction. Direction implies mapping where one may describe a space in a way a map would (by its location). Mr. Hulot seems to be of the touring type, not the mapping type. Although Ockman implies that Hulot “comes off in earlier films as an innocent, bumbling eccentric, ‘a character’, in

Playtime he is no longer so much singular as a man of the crowd,” (177) this statement would seem true when Mr. Hulot is perceived as passive, differential due to his absentmindedness. He is, like said earlier, dependent on directions; but looking at the new city through a monastic kaleidoscope Mr. Hulot comes off as the true antagonist of the monastic realm. He is guided by the objects in the city and is always formally responding to the form of the city. It is a more fluid way of exploring the environment and a more spatially immediate approach than by a rigid mapping. It is hard to imagine Mr. Hulot describing verbally to someone the city without him being inclined to use his hands and body to try to show what he had encountered instead of saying “I went to an office building on Rue St. Michel next to an apartment complex”. Although Certeau describes the way to tour and to map as “oral descriptions of places, narrations concerning the home, stories about the streets”, as a representation of a “first and enormous corpus”, he does not confine these techniques only to a linguistic procedure. This form of description usually determines the whole style of the narration. But Tati is also conditioning the touring style with Mr. Hulot’s “natural”(10) dancing capability. “When [dancing] intervenes, it has the characteristic conditioning or presupposing by the first [the touring technique]” (Certeau). Like Kracauer once said “true, they are(11), but the performers are real-life Parisians who just cannot help executing dance movements when going about their love adventures and minor quarrels.” Again, Tati stresses the difference between the true Parisian from the new Parisian, the touring type (Mr. Hulot) and the mapping type (the others), the free spirited and the logical monk.

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The Visual Representation
There are five elements of visual representation that can be used to describe the film’s monastic characteristics. The specificity of the color palette, film set, movement of camera, immediate grid, and costume/props are instruments that Tati used to appropriate the sense of uniformity and monastery like spaces.

A uniform color palette eases its way through the film as colors that once were blue, green, and red are now de-saturated into shades of gray. The vibrant colors typically associated with Paris are lost in the new city. In this new city rare moments of color are perceived as distraction (Hulot’s socks, the red dots on the portraits, the red and yellow lights of the elevator).

In his history of modern visuality, Jonathan Crary has suggested that once the dynamics of modernity fatally undermined the authority of the senses as an instrument for apprehending reality, a permanent struggle was instigated between attention and distraction. As capitalism unleashed its unending flood of new product and information into the marketplace, culture had to develop new techniques of managing and regulating their reception.

The desaturation of the colors represents the canvas on which few and only important colors will either draw attention or even distract. As if the monochromatic attributes of the city form a way to regulate what should be perceived. Outside the monastery the world is full of color and temptations. The new city is trying to re-establish itself as a place of conformity for all. The shades of gray are the best expression of the mechanization of the masses. Also it’s suitable to mention that gray is a bi-product of “white and black”, the color of capitalism.

One of the early scenes in Playtime(12) begins when Hulot enters a waiting area. Portraits of men that apparently work in the building surround Hulot. Their pictures are black and white, large enough to imply an importance of those represented. It seems that however Hulot moves around the room the men on the posters have their eyes on him, watching. This is a more tangible example of the authoritative and monastic realm of the film. These men seem as portraits of saints hung on the wall looking almost scornfully at their subject. Moreover, the furniture in this room is sparsely placed, not on the wall, but floating, lonely out in the space. Separated from the wall and others Hulot tries every chair, in some sense trying to fill the space with four or five Hulots to make it more comfortable. Each seat is less comfortable than the last. Each chair as much as the last is seemingly not designed for human use. This forced discomfort is traditionally found in the monastery where monks are not supposed to enjoy comfort. Furthermore, most of the modernist of the early twentieth century has built monasteries where modern tectonics and elements were the most suitable for such a program.

When analyzing the visual of Playtime throughout an attempt to compare its spaces to a monastic realm, it is imperative to mention the role of the physical camera and its movement within the film. In almost all the shots, the camera is steady with subtle panning movement that follows the main character whenever they are nearing to leave the scene. The location of the camera is always in a corner like situation. With so much information getting through to the viewer, the camera becomes an extension of both the spaces of the film (like the role of a security camera when Mr. Hulot is in the waiting area, or when a crowd of people is trying to cross the road) and the viewer (when the camera becomes part of the crowd crossing the street). The camera in this film is a tool that magnifies even the smallest elements, and displays everything from the banal to the unique. The long shots could be decomposed into a multitude of devices that “exposes the paraphernalia of our former existence” (Kracauer 56). Tati’s interest in framing such detailed shot is to expose “the flood of new products and information” (Ockman 176) into the new capitalistic marketplace.

The visuality of the film is of extreme saturation due to the overall simplistic nature of Playtime. As mentioned in the beginning, the grid is simple but dominant. The simplicity of the grid with its inherent geometrical logic makes it such a repetitive and dynamic tool that it could be proliferated almost onto anything (from small object to buildings, to the overall urban aspect of the city). Tati saturates us with that grid intelligently and when needed. Although we can see the grid almost everywhere, there are special moments where the grid is more that just an architectural element that frames and composes good scenes. For example, while Mr. Hulot is looking everywhere for Mr. Giffard, he comes to be in the presence of working green cubicles. Besides the autocratic nature of these private spaces, we notice an intense grid on the perimeter of all cubicles in the space. This immediate grid is just a reflection of the embedded storage spaces within the cubicles. The displays of the cubicles with their respective perimeter fence like storage can only be perceived as a monastic place where humans have no control and are treated like storage, happily “brainwashed” on daily.

Another example of visual parity that the inhabitants of the city share with the occupants of a monastery is the wardrobe. Almost all of the men are wearing the overall black coats over their black or gray suits, while the working woman still have the same cloths of that of the air stewardess initially observed in the opening of the film. The notion of conformity and uniformity to certain fashionable standards is better expressed when the American tourist wears a green dress to the restaurant and is frowned upon by the rest of the woman who sees here as a rude outsider who has just disrupted their daily rituals and manners.

Almost every person in the movie, even Hulot, is an extra. The visual experience of the film is of the touring style conditioned by the mapping of the different visual characteristics, like the color, the grid, and the props…“Architecture was the vedette” after all (Ockman 181). Architecture in Playtime has the impression of the “ideal and the real” and is treated metaphorically like in a monastic world. Of course, here, there no house of worship, or a temple, but an urban organization and a social attitude that are of a monastic flavor, ironically exemplifying global capitalism. Tati resists but does not clash: he shows reflection of old Paris, and a solemn old lady selling flowers on the streets of the new city. Old Paris is only on the boundary of the new. It is far in the horizon, outside this new spatially reduced world. Tati’s soft clash is with the passive Hulot, his manners, and his displacement.

“Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crest of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem […] The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide – extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday’s buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today’s urban irruptions that block out space.” (Certeau 91)

Mazen Sakr –
Designer, Architect living in Boston with Nikki and Lilou.

Footnotes

1 When observing the shot, we cannot but deduce that the space on the left of the screen (the right side of the walking nuns) is an internal courtyard due to the visual organization of the spaces and their physical appropriation.

2 It is appropriate to mention that the background music of these two shots is of an “angelical” type and almost depicts a surreal imaginary landscape where the viewer expects a monastery steeple rising but instead is confronted by a large glass office building.

3 McClendon, Chapter 8: The Monastic Realm: Ideal and Reality. P 149.

4 Another example would be the displaying of workers in their saturated green like cubicles. The scene is framed when the camera pans down showing the displaced Hulot looking onto a large area where cubicles are placed perfectly on a grid.

5 Mr. Hulot’s friend and his anonymous neighbor.

6 It is crucial to mention the word “displaced” just before Hulot because that word describes in its entirety the personality of Mr. Hulot.

7 Kracauer, Siegfried in Theory of Film describes in General Characteristics: The Establishment of Physical Existence, the notion of dancing as the second type of cinematic movement, the chase being the first type.

8 He turns out to be a short man when Mr. Hulot meets him.

9 …And involuntary dependant on the grid as well. Mr. Hulot seems to be free of the overall bondage of the grid. He knows that his temporary status in the city and does not mind to go about the grid.

10 Kracauer. “The Establishment of Physical Existence”. Theory of Film.

11 They are refers to Rene Clair’s early sound films which have been called ballets.

12 Chapter 6

Works Cited

Certeau, Michel de. “Part III: Spatial Practices.” The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 91-111.

McClendon, B. Charles. “chapter 8, the monastic realm: ideal and reality.” The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600-900.

Ockman, Joan. “Architecture in a mode of distraction: Eight Takes on Jacques Tati’s Playtime.

Tati, Jacques. Playtime. The Criterion Collection, 1967.