Großstadtvisionen

na du hast'st gut ... bei uns ist erst um 9.00 -1/2 10.00 schluss

Soviel Zeit kurz vor Feierabend hab ich auch net. Bitte nächstes ma lkürzer fassen.

Modern Times ........................ Bert Rebhandl on Jaques Tati's Urban Vision ......................................... As you leave L'Arlequin cinema and step out into the Odéon quarter of Paris, it is almost impossible not to catch a glimpse of the Tour Montparnasse skyscraper. Located at the end of the rue de Rennes, this classically Modernist monolith dominates a business district that has seen better days. No film could prepare you for this sight better than Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967), although on a hot Saturday night in August there were only a few visitors to watch one of the rare 70 mm projections of this long unrecognized masterpiece. ................................................ The richness of detail in the restored copy gives you an idea why Playtime was too overwhelming for its contemporary audience. Tati's vision of a radically advanced middle-class lifestyle went far beyond any of the satirical adventures in modern civilization that his alter ego Monsieur Hulot had to endure in earlier films. It was easy to laugh at tourism in Les vacances de M. Hulot (Mr Hulot's Holiday, 1953) and at the lifestyle of the nouveaux riches in Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958). But the aim of Playtime was to capture the entire gamut of urban experience: it was a space odyssey with such an extreme depth of field that it disorientated audiences. Hidden among the thronging tourists and businesspeople are jokes whose existence, like that of quantum particles, can only be perceived indirectly, through their interplay with other elements in the film. ..................................... In the footnotes to his piece 'Tati's Democracy' the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum relates an anecdote that makes clear Tati was playing a game with the threshold of perception: 'After we both saw Playtime for the first time in 70 mm at New York's Walter Reade Theater in September 1994, Dave Kehr pointed out a touching detail that neither of us had ever noticed over countless screenings in 35 and 16 mm prints: near the exit of the shop where he is to buy her [Barbara, an American tourist] a going-away present, Hulot briefly notices, with a barely discernible look of regret, that she's wearing a wedding or engagement ring.' ....................................... In this summer's exhibition at the Institut Français d'Architecture in Paris Playtime was the principal exhibit documenting a vision of the world entitled 'Tatirama'. 'La ville en Tatirama: Les Trentes glorieuses à travers l'objectif de Jacques Tati' (The City in Tatirama: The Glorious 30 Years through the Lens of Tati) featured architectural designs by Jacques Lagrange, Tati's most important colleague, as well as a model of the Villa Arpel from Mon Oncle. The son of an architect who built showrooms for Citroën and casinos in Cannes and Deauville, Lagrange grew up in post-war France, amid a culture succinctly described by the title of Kristin Ross' 1995 book on the period Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. ........................................ During these years mobility and hygiene were common themes in what was then a popular film genre, something between old-fashioned newsreel and straightforward commercial. These 'cultural films' celebrated advances such as technical innovations in Ford car production or the latest model of camper van. They were sitting targets for Tati's comedy, but until this exhibition they had been largely ignored. With their absurd attention to banal, day-to-day events, all these films lacked was a label, a hook to hang them on - a hook that has now been found in the concept of 'Tatirama'. .................................... This neologism represents more than simply an umbrella term to categorize the hallmarks of a great filmic comedian. It embraces everything that makes Tati worthy of his own chapter in media history - a chapter conceivably less important than the historic Panorama, but of greater significance than, say, Cinerama, one of the wide-screen techniques killed off by the arrival of Cinemascope. And the screening at L'Arlequin confirmed 'Tatirama' as a concept worthy of consideration. The 70 mm version of Playtime seems to belong to the tradition of the great 'Babylonian' costume pictures. The difference is that Tati's 'period picture' took as its subject its own era - the period the French called Les Trentes glorieuses, the glorious 30 years of economic growth that peaked in the mid-1960s. Production was soaring, there was full employment and French consumer culture was modelling itself on the American prototype. Tati tells the story of this time not as a succession of great events but as a highly disorienting mosaic of small simultaneous incidents, distributed evenly across the entire screen. ............................... Even France's icons, the cultural treasures of 'La Grande Nation', appear as nothing more than minor, short-lived cameos in a bigger picture. The historical Paris of the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre is only a reflection in the glass windows of 'Tativille', the satellite town built for the film and then later torn down. Some of the skyscrapers were actually on wheels. Later though, as if in revenge, Paris absorbed the terrain of Tativille - or so the curators of the exhibition argue, assuming a remarkable short circuit of imagination and reality. According to them, Tativille actually exists to the west of Paris, in the form of La Défense, the business district built during the Mitterand era to herald the next 30 glorious years. Tati thus becomes a vital link between two eras, and the idea of him as the paradigmatic filmmaker of the modern era is one the French have started to embrace. Tati is finally achieving the recognition he deserves and no longer constantly being confused with the comic character of Hulot, who is actually thoroughly conservative and not particularly pleasant. .................................... Now, in the exhibition at the Institut Français d'Architecture, the Tati of Playtime is being measured against Le Corbusier, with the comic coming out as the better urbanist. Le Corbusier's famous urban manifesto Le Charte d'Athènes (The Athens Charter, 1943) functions as a leitmotif in the show, but this curatorial approach runs the risk of being merely the inverse of the anti-modern prejudice against the functional living spaces supposedly mocked by Tati. The catch - the element of Tatirama, if you like - is precisely that there is neither an anti-modern nor a modern perspective left. The film rejects any supposedly superior viewpoint simply by showing too much all at once. Even a look behind the scenes does not suggest a straightforwardly supercilious approach. The image of the skyscrapers on wheels is so intensely unforgettable that the urban space becomes fundamentally deceptive. After seeing Playtime at L'Arlequin, you go straight to the Tour Montparnasse, hoping to regain a pivotal vista that will return Paris to its orderly, historic self - a self that appears only as a fleeting reflection in Tati's Playtime.

François Truffaut praised it as "a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently"

Playtime (1967), shot in 70mm, was Tati's most daring and most expensive work of his career; it took him nine years to complete and he was forced to borrow heavily from his own resources to complete the picture. For Playtime, Tati fabricated a set (dubbed 'Tativille') on the outskirts of Paris that emulated an entire modern city. In the film, Tati and a group of American tourists lose themselves in a futuristic glass-and-steel Paris, where only human nature and a few hints of an older France still emerge to breathe life into the city. Narratively, Playtime had even less of a plot than his earlier films, and Tati endeavored to make his characters, including Hulot, almost incidental to his portrayal of a modernist and robotic Paris.