Playtime - Jacques Tati

By watching the film by Jacques Tati, Playtime, we can see how people around the late modernism period are responding the international style at that time. At the time period where the film was created, modernism was playing a big role in the society and the egos and confident of the architects were almost at its top form. These architects were becoming like perfectionist where everything have to be done the way they wished when it comes to using the buildings as if the people were one of the controlled characters in "The Sims". We can analyze this behavior by watching many of the scenes in the movie. For example, in the opening scene, we start off with an airport. The exterior is non-ornamented, pure glass facades and metal framing, a direct translation of the modernism manifesto. Inside the airport, there were several groups of people displaying different behaviors, but explaining the same meaning. A couple was sitting at the waiting area and the wife would keep asking and ordering her husband, a cleaning person is always trying to find something to clean, and there was a group of nun walking around. These are different personifications of perfectionism which was the main theme of architecture at that time. Then, the director seems to try to point out how modernism is affecting our lives, or the lives of people at that time. He does this by displaying an adventure of one character. This particular character wonders off in the big city and into many modernist buildings. In these adventure, the character always confuses himself with other people since they dress up similarly, walks similarly, and does thing similarly. By doing this, the director seems to be saying that by having modernist set up manifestos on how form should follow function, form is starting to become one aesthetics. He is saying that there is no uniqueness or individual characters within the buildings. I believed that this topic was clearly pointed out in the movie. By watching and analyzing this movie, I understand architecture as writing or as symbol of history further. Architecture does not only become a habitat for human, but it is a writing, a story, a film, and a viewpoint for society to dwell upon.