In Paris, in May, I visited the Cinémathèque Française’s exhibition devoted to Jacques Tati. The partitions of the upstairs galleries had been removed to allow for unusually open spaces, which were filled with paraphernalia from Tati’s films, including furniture from “Mon Oncle,” from 1958, which I discuss in this clip. Tati satirizes the craze for advanced domestic technology and for cleanliness, and the industrial regimentation that results from attempts to satisfy it. I had the benefit of a guided tour by my friend Chloé Guerber-Cahuzac, who works there, and who made sure I didn’t miss some of the show’s salient touches—including the fact that some of the ridiculously unaccommodating furniture that was part of the set of the Villa Arpel, the futuristic home of the child whose uncle Tati plays, was actually manufactured and sold to consumers. Thus, subject and object converged.
Tati, born in 1907, was a bourgeois sportsman who achieved fame in Paris in the nineteen-thirties as a mime specializing in the imitation of athletic activities. (The Cinémathèque’s brochure includes a 1936 quote from Colette about “this astonishing artist who has invented something… Something that belongs to dance, sport, and the tableau vivant.”) He had also started to make films, and modernization and its discontents was his career-long theme. The comic extreme to which he raises it in “Mon Oncle” would be surpassed in his radical 1967 masterwork, “Playtime,” perhaps the most madly modernistic work of anti-modernism in the history of cinema. In “Playtime,” all of French society seems to exist under the subjection of technology; as a result, it is suffused with a sad, tender tolerance. In “Mon Oncle,” Tati is angry; he’s found enemies, and he goes after them gleefully.
