Recovering the human in the urban dystopia: Mobility as détournement in Playtime

Abstract

Abstract This project is a re-assessment of Jacques Tati’s Playtime that displaces the predominant view of Tati as a pantomime and comedian. Playtime instead reveals Tati’s profound engagement with modern urban design, spatial practices and critique. Tati’s film explores how the urban spaces of contemporary France represent a distinct challenge to understanding and experience. Through the singular trajectory of his famous protagonist Hulot, Tati articulates an urban wandering or flânerie that resembles what the Situationists termed as dérive, a kind of movement through the city capable of opening up new ways of seeing and experiencing urban spaces. Hulot’s dérive mobility comes to inform the way in which the camera moves as it captures Tativille. As Hulot drifts through the traffic-clogged streets, labyrinthine office buildings and glass-box apartments of Playtime’s Tativille, at stake is a mode of urban experience able to overcome urban dislocation, alienation and separation.