In Medias Res (Sep 2015)
Jacques Tati and Modern Times
Abstract
During the first half of the 20th century questions about relentless modernization of life were present in cinema of the West. At least since de Montaigne one of the basic questions for thinkers was whether the Modernity was worth the disruption and troubles it caused in people’s lives. Jacques Tati stands in a long line of tradition in French cinema, which probed these questions, but he is unique in a way in which he proposed and tried to provide an answer to it in literally all of his films. This paper explores how he did it, particularly in Playtime, where he probed what “culture of glass” brought to the life of globalized world. While sentimentally sticking to the values of the old, quickly disappearing way of life, Tati uses reflexivity of the medium with fascinating precision to make the viewers understand how they, and his characters, form in their consciousnesses networks of objects from their environment, and participate in the world dominated by modern technology.
