Coming Soon
PLAYTIME
1967
Director
Jacques Tati
Starring
Jacques Tati
Rita Maiden
Barbara Dennek
France Rumilly
Runtime
115 minutes
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THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: SOUND
Henri Langlois, founder and curator of La Cinematheque Francaise, claimed in the early ‘60s that Jean Vigo was the only filmmaker who had mastered the use of sound. Maybe he was right, maybe not – but what we know for certain is that he had not seen Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME yet.
As a painter adds the final flourishes on their masterpiece, Jacques Tati places dabs of sound in just the right places to amplify a gag. Tati famously recorded sound for his films in post, and with particular and exacting judgment. Yet, it is not dialogue, narrative, text or big explosions that motivate the sound design of PLAYTIME but humor. The sounds of footsteps, weird vinyl chairs, broken machines and background dialogue are what decorate and push forward our journey navigating the comedically uncomfortable spaces of a modern capitalist landscape.
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 his recurring protagonist, 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 super-wide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, PLAYTIME is a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
“All of Tati’s artfulness consists in destroying clarity with clarity. The dialogues are not at all incomprehensible; rather, they are insignificant, and their insignificance is revealed by this very clarity. Tati achieves this by deforming the intensity of the various levels of sound, sometimes going so far as to maintain the sound of an offscreen action over a scene shot silent. For the most part, his sound decor is made up of realistic elements: bits of conversations, cries, various kinds of remarks. None, however, is strictly located in a dramatic situation. In relation to this background noise, sudden noises take on an entirely false prominence.” -Andre Bazin
Henri Langlois, founder and curator of La Cinematheque Francaise, claimed in the early ‘60s that Jean Vigo was the only filmmaker who had mastered the use of sound. Maybe he was right, maybe not – but what we know for certain is that he had not seen Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME yet.
As a painter adds the final flourishes on their masterpiece, Jacques Tati places dabs of sound in just the right places to amplify a gag. Tati famously recorded sound for his films in post, and with particular and exacting judgment. Yet, it is not dialogue, narrative, text or big explosions that motivate the sound design of PLAYTIME but humor. The sounds of footsteps, weird vinyl chairs, broken machines and background dialogue are what decorate and push forward our journey navigating the comedically uncomfortable spaces of a modern capitalist landscape.
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 his recurring protagonist, 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 super-wide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, PLAYTIME is a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
“All of Tati’s artfulness consists in destroying clarity with clarity. The dialogues are not at all incomprehensible; rather, they are insignificant, and their insignificance is revealed by this very clarity. Tati achieves this by deforming the intensity of the various levels of sound, sometimes going so far as to maintain the sound of an offscreen action over a scene shot silent. For the most part, his sound decor is made up of realistic elements: bits of conversations, cries, various kinds of remarks. None, however, is strictly located in a dramatic situation. In relation to this background noise, sudden noises take on an entirely false prominence.” -Andre Bazin
Part of the program
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: CELEBRATING OUR FIFTH ANNIVERSARY