Jacques Tati

This paper examines the relation between the concept of alienation and modern architecture by way of the interaction in architecture and cinema. Jacques Tati's three films which predominantly focus on urban and architectural issues, are the subject of this paper. Architecture is one of the representative that strongly determines and directs the way of life in modern times, so the concept of alienation can dominate discussions of modern architecture. This paper also aims to discuss the inhabitant's position in modern architecture and focus on it's perception in everyday life practices.

The paper explores Tati's use of new film media in 'Playtime' in ways that reveal more fundamental modes of social, mimetic and situational mediation as performed in the film by architects, and architect-like characters, and by the architectural settings which Jacques Tati devised.

Un estudio sobre la arquitectura en tres directores cinematográficos: Orson Welles, Jacques Tati y Wim Wenders, incidiendo en dos películas de cada director. Seguido de un artículo sobre las relaciones entre el espacio arquitectónico y el cinematográfico.

Play Time (Frankreich 1965-67) ist das Meisterwerk des französischen Regisseurs und Komi-kers Jacques Tati. Thema ist die Krise des technisierten und mediatisierten Alltags des 20. Jahrhunderts und der modernen Urbanität. Das Paris des Films, in dem man sich beständig findet und wieder verliert, ist ein typischer Nicht-Ort, bestehend aus modernsten Gebäuden, deren Zweck nie greifbar ersichtlich wird, Durchgangsstationen zu undefinierten Zielen, die letztlich auf anarchische Weise zerstört und definiert werden. Playtime ist ein Film mit viel-fältigen intermedialen Bezügen, ein ironischer Ausblick auf eine Zukunft, in der Individualität und Konsum-Uniformität einander gegenüberstehen, um sich im Glanz des neuen Designs zu versöhnen.
All dies macht den Film zu einem exemplarischen Gegenstand für eine multiperspektivische Herangehensweise. Die einzelnen Beiträge interpretieren und analysieren den Film auf dem Hintergrund ihres jeweiligen Faches: Kunstwissenschaft, Filmwissenschaft, Philosophie, Mu-sikwissenschaft, Industrial Design, Transportation Design und Design-Geschichte. Wissen-schaft und gestalterische Praxis treten in einen Dialog.
Mit Beiträgen von: Brice d’Antras, Design-Geschichte; Johannes Böhringer, Philosophie; Frieder Butzmann, Musikwissenschaft; Michael Glasmeier, Kunstwissenschaft; Heike Klip-pel, Filmwissenschaft; Erich Kruse, Industrie-Design; Stefan Rammler, Transportation Design; Katharina Sykora, Kunstwissenschaft.

In this article I show how the revolving restaurant view can be investigated media archeologically as an optical device. As a methodology media archeology enables me to “discover” or unpack hidden connections between architectural structures, mobile mechanical observation units and information technology, allowing the concept of the cinematic to be a concern also of the architectural. This preliminary comment is part of a bigger project where I show how a media archeologically motivated analysis of the parallel development of kinetic structures, aerial rides and new imaging technologies have the potential to confront and open up new perspectives on the increasing aero-visual predominance in our culture and society.

(Post-Print allowed by Publisher uploaded OR ask for a copy) Godard’s films prior to 1968 are usually received as pure experimentations of style, as if these films were little more than art-historical examples of a certain kind of avant-garde cinema. The author argues instead that Godard’s often frenzied cinematic experimentations in his early movies may be understood as reflections on the political, cultural and historical issues of France in the 1950s and 60s. In his early films, Godard engages the political and aesthetic strategy of much of French philosophy and avant-garde: the playful and often self-contradictory project of resisting the spectacles of modernity, while transforming the everyday. The author contends that this project constitutes what Jameson calls the political unconscious of Godard’s early work. To sketch this unconscious, the author refers to the larger context in which philosophers, cultural critics and filmmakers take issue with notions of the everyday, spectacle, style, resistance, festivity, consumerism, as well as with the signs of postwar modernity such as cars, modern households, traffic, polls and movies.

Smart homes in speculative fiction (SF) range from the ominously sinister to the strategically life-saving, revealing our hopes and fears for science: possibilities we envision for artificial intelligence (AI), yet also dangers of such technology. Within these narratives, we can also see the cracks in our conceptions, where it may be time to rethink our assumptions about intelligence, ethics, motives.

This pic is an education. It took an American showman to demonstrate to the French, on their home plate, that a picture could be made here on a $30,000 budget and gross $12,000 in its first week’s simultaneous release in four small Paris first-run houses headed by the Champs-Elysees’ Balzac. This is a constructive answer to local producers’ gripes that Hollywood opposition kills their industry. Borrah Minevitch, who has been in Paris a couple of years, put together the money, story, star and, above all, the knowhow.1

Cet article explore, à travers le paradigme de la traduction, la mise en scène des interactions sociales dans Playtime de Jacques Tati (1967), Kontakthof de Pina Bausch (1978-2000-2008) et Reconstitutions d’Édouard Levé (1998-2003). Chacune de ces œuvres témoigne du désir de traduire le social en esthétique : il s’agit de dire l’ordinaire des jeux de distance et de proximité entre les corps, par le cinéma, la danse ou la photographie. Ce geste de traduction emprunte à la logique de la re-présentation qui réifie le social, mais il ne peut s’y réduire. Car la traduction vise aussi à reconduire, sur la scène de l’art, la dynamique du lien en tant qu’adresse faite à l’autre, au risque de son échec. Penser le geste artistique comme traduction permet d’être sensible au devenir chorégraphique des situations sociales, autant qu’à la socialité qui anime des oeuvres qui nous émeuvent ou nous indiffèrent.

Jacques Tati is widely regarded as one of the greatest postwar European filmmakers. He made innovative and challenging comedies while achieving international box office success and attaining a devoted following. In Play Time, Malcolm Turvey examines Tati’s unique comedic style and evaluates its significance for the history of film and modernism.

Turvey argues that Tati captured elite and general audiences alike by combining a modernist aesthetic with slapstick routines, gag structures, and other established traditions of mainstream film comedy. Considering films such as Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Play Time (1967), and Trafic (1971), Turvey shows how Tati drew on the rich legacy of comic silent film while modernizing its conventions in order to encourage his viewers to adopt a playful attitude toward the modern world. Turvey also analyzes Tati’s sardonic view of the bourgeoisie and his complex and multifaceted satire of modern life. Tati's singular and enduring achievement, Turvey concludes, was to translate the democratic ideals of the postwar avant-garde into mainstream film comedy, crafting a genuinely popular modernism. Richly illustrated with images from the director’s films, Play Time offers an illuminating and original understanding of Tati’s work.

The article deals with the work of the director and actor Jacques Tati. It tries to explain why Jacques Tati fails at the end of his career, particularly because of his perfectionism which lead him to poverty and the inability to make other films he wanted to. Finally, the author mentions the influence of Tati’s work on his followers. So far, his influence has been stronger abroad than in France, but we can already observe slight changes.

French filmmaker Jacques Tati made two feature-length comedies - Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) - which lampooned the ostensibly rational modernist movement in architecture, interior design, and consumer products as a threat to traditional models of domestic life. Although these films have been the subject of several arching critical histories, scholars have not addressed Tati's vision of interiority through the contrasting contexts of industrial modernity and bourgeois domesticity. I argue that Tati was himself a designer of peculiarly dysfunctional interiors, furnishings, and gadgets that only seemed to meet the needs of their users. Tati examined the works of architects like Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson as exempla of monumental modernism. For each film, Tati spent months in pre-production perfecting his own derivative buildings and imaginary appliances. Yet the purpose of these designs was to appear perfectly devised, when, in fact, they were physically frail, conceptually brittle, and vain. Tati's bumbling alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, served as the director's foil and agent, through whose frolics both the material and practical defects of the modern home environment were revealed. Of course, Tati's vision is a hyperbolic one, and it would be a mistake to judge the ultimate success of the modernist experiment by the disintegration of an artist's sham creations. Tati's films do, however, offer compelling insights into the guising of uncomfortable and impractical designs with the sheen of modernism, and should, therefore, be added to the core historiography of postwar modernism and interior design.