The Time of the “Past-Present”

Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) is notorious for having bankrupted its director for many reasons, not the least of which includes the building of its elaborate set, affectionately known as “Tativille”. Tativille constitutes Tati's city-of-the-future, a Parisian cityscape comprised of high-rise modernist buildings decked in glass and in various shades of gray. This is the Paris that a group of American tourists in the film have apparently come to see. But Playtime situates the rise of generic urban architecture as a phenomenon that is, in fact, global in its orientation. Barbara, one of a group of these American tourists, enters a building that houses an airline ticket counter where she gazes at a series of advertisements on the wall. These advertisements promote destination locations such as the US, Hawaii, Mexico and Stockholm. Each poster contains nearly identical images of a gray high-rise building, so that cities and nations the world over seem to have fallen in step with Paris (Figure I.1) This is also true of London, as Barbara views a poster of the city earlier in the film pictured as a gray high-rise flanked by a double-decker red bus on one side, while an image of Big Ben peeks out from the other. Following on from anthropologist Marc Augé's observations that open this book, it is entirely possible to view these elements of the film as a nascent, largely satirical anticipation of the homogenizing effects of globalization as witnessed within the built form of the global cityscape, where the world is seemingly transformed into one large city and the city itself indexes the transformation of the world.

While the city that Barbara traverses in the film is unfamiliar, generic and the abode of all manner of technological gadgetry that Tati, in the guise of Monsieur Hulot, subjects to innumerable forms of playful subversion, there is more than one urban story to be found in the film.