The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jacques Tati · a film · 1967 · the restored 70mm version, about 124 minutes · written with Jacques Lagrange · in French, English and German, with little dialogue in any
Mode
Comedy without a hero or a plot; city symphony, satire of modern building and carnival in one film
Mythos
The carnival, order turned over for one night and ended at dawn with the market and the fair; the labyrinth and its wanderer, the old city glimpsed as a world above
Phase
One day and one night in a modern Paris, from the arrival of a party of tourists at the airport to their coach leaving at dawn round a roundabout turned carousel
Presentation
Feature film in colour, shot on 65mm for 70mm projection with stereophonic sound; restored version of about 124 minutes; a city set the crew called Tativille; Jean Badal’s and Andréas Winding’s photography, Francis Lemarque’s music, the sound built after shooting
Register
From a silent man walking the length of a corridor to a ruined restaurant full of dancing; grey and steel blue by day, warming to colour by night
Scale
A city’s day: offices, a trade fair, flats, a restaurant, tourists, workers and guests, held by one law and seen from outside
Governing Proposition
A party of American tourists spends one day and one night in a Paris of glass and grids, where Monsieur Hulot, trying to keep an appointment, is lost among partitions and crowds, until a restaurant falls apart on its opening night and the city’s strangers become a party. The wager of the film is that a comedy without a hero, close-ups or a story, laid across a wide frame with many gags at once, can make the viewer do the looking the modern city deadens, and so show that life is in the contact between people and not in the plan.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film was built before it was shot. On open ground at the edge of Paris a city of glass was put up to be filmed, and the crew called it Tativille. Jacques Tati wrote the film with Jacques Lagrange and produced it through his own company, Specta Films. Jean Badal and Andréas Winding photographed it in colour on 65mm, for projection in 70mm with stereophonic sound, and Francis Lemarque wrote the music. The sound was built entire after shooting. It speaks French, English and German, and very little of any of them.
Behind it stood two comedies, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958), which had made Tati’s Monsieur Hulot a popular figure, and the second of which had already set him against the modern house. Tati plays Hulot again here, but Hulot is no longer the centre. He is one figure among hundreds, kept deliberately off centre, and the film multiplies him with false Hulots, so that the eye that goes looking for the star is sent back to the crowd. Barbara Dennek plays Barbara, a young American tourist; the rest of the cast are largely non-professionals.
There are almost no close-ups. The frame is wide and deep throughout, and often several gags run at once in different parts of it, so that no viewer sees them all at a single viewing. The film covers one day and one night in a modern Paris, in six movements: an airport, an office building, a trade exhibition, a row of glass-fronted flats at dusk, a restaurant on its opening night, and the dawn. It begins at the airport, with the arrival of a party of American tourists into a world of straight lines and grey glass, where nothing yet is warm.
Movement II
Hulot has an appointment in an office building, and tries to keep it. He waits in a glass box while a man walks the length of a corridor in silence, and the film lets the walk run its full length. Then he is lost among glass partitions, in a building whose every corridor looks like the last. The modern world is heard as it is seen, in small mechanical noises, the hiss of a cushion, the click of a heel, each placed after shooting as carefully as a note in a score.
Seen from above, the floor of the building is a grid of cubicles, and Hulot is a dot moving through the maze. It is the film’s first great image and its plainest: a building made to sort people into boxes, viewed from the height at which the plan makes sense, with the one man it cannot place wandering inside it. The appointment never happens.
Then comes a trade exhibition of modern products: a slamming door, a silent broom, lamp salesmen, each gadget a small comedy of its own. The tourists have come to Paris, and the Paris they came for, the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Cœur, appears in the film as reflections in the swing of glass doors, glimpsed and gone. The old city is a world above, seen in the glass of the new.
Movement III
At dusk the film stands in the street and looks into a row of glass-fronted flats, lit from within. Four lives are laid side by side like a frieze, or like a row of television screens. In each a family sits in its own glass box with its television, and from the street the families seem to watch one another, each one the next one’s programme, when each is alone in its own room.
Hulot meets an old army friend here. The film holds the view from the street, and nothing in it is pointed out. The eye goes where it likes, from one window to the next, and the comedy is in what it finds there and in what the people inside cannot see. It is the film’s method in its purest form. The viewer does the looking, and finds the comedy, and in finding it practises the attention that the city of boxes discourages.
By now the day’s colour has begun to change. The morning was grey and steel blue, straight lines and glass and near silence; the dusk brings light in the windows and the first warmth. The film’s curve is a curve of temperature, from the grid toward the circle, and the night ahead will finish it.
Movement IV
A restaurant called the Royal Garden opens that night, and it is not ready. It is the longest movement, by estimate about forty minutes. The chairs have crown-shaped backs, and the crowns print themselves on the guests who sit in them. The waiters, cooks and doorman struggle with a building that fails piece by piece as the night goes on. A glass door shatters, and the doorman goes on opening the handle in the air for every guest who arrives.
As the building fails, the guests begin to enjoy themselves. An American, a broad comic type, takes command of the revels. Part of the ceiling falls, and the party goes on beneath and around it. Rank and rule are suspended, and the guests, who came as strangers, become a crowd. The film is laid out as the carnival’s feast: one night in which the order of the day is turned over, to be set right at dawn.
The chaos is as precisely placed as the office’s order. Every one of the hundreds in the frame has a small action, timed so that the eye is led without being forced, and the comedy lies everywhere at once. By three in the morning the restaurant is a ruin full of dancing. What the city of glass could not do by design, put people in touch with one another, its failure does by accident.
Movement V
Dawn. The party spills out into a drugstore, and then into the streets where the market is setting up and the fair is coming. Hulot has a small gift for Barbara before she goes, and gives it. The morning brings what the carnival always brings, the return of the ordinary world, but the ordinary world has changed colour in the night.
The tourists’ coach leaves and joins the traffic round a roundabout, and the roundabout turns into a carousel. Cars go round like painted horses to Lemarque’s music. A window swung open catches the reflection of the coach’s passengers and lifts them into the sky. The day began in straight lines and ends in circles, and the city that boxed its people in has, for one morning, become a fairground.
The film failed in its own year. Tati shortened it himself soon after the premiere in Paris in December 1967, by about half an hour, and a 35mm version of about 108 minutes was later shown abroad, so that for two decades it was seen mostly in shortened prints, in 35mm and in mono. The restoration of 2002 returned it to 70mm and to the length of Tati’s own cut, about 124 minutes, and a further restoration followed in the 2010s. Since then it has been widely seen, and its way of filling a frame runs on in the tableau comedies of Roy Andersson, the deadpan of Elia Suleiman, the films of Otar Iosseliani, and Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, made from a Tati script.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The design is a curve, not a plot: a day in a city of straight lines and grey glass that warms, through the night’s collapse, into a dawn of circles and colour. The large parts are required: the office and the exhibition set the grid the Royal Garden breaks, the flats at dusk show the private life the restaurant throws together in public, and the dawn carousel answers the airport. But the method is accretive, and the subtractive test finds much that could go singly without loss: the exhibition’s slamming door and silent broom, the lamp salesmen, a run of business in the restaurant’s middle hour. Abundance is the point, which lightens the charge; still, the Royal Garden runs long even for its function.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the modern city, built of glass and grids to sort people into boxes, isolates them and puts them on display, and people undo it when they gather, because life is in the contact between them and not in the plan. The flats at dusk show families side by side behind glass, each seeming to watch the next. The tourists see the Paris they came for as a reflection in a swinging door. When the Royal Garden fails, the guests begin to enjoy themselves. And the form discloses that every person in the frame is equally worth attention. Held at the gate because the condition is lighter than a tragic one and leans on a mood of wonder; its cost is paid by no one in particular.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The elevation is comic, and frequent. Grandeur of scale: the grid of cubicles seen from above, a maze in which Hulot is a dot. Delight in pattern: the flats at dusk, four lives laid side by side like a frieze. The festive crescendo of the Royal Garden, where a ruined restaurant becomes a party and the night rises to a pitch of joy few films reach. And the last movement, the traffic turning round the roundabout like painted horses to Lemarque’s music, a window swung open lifting the reflection of the coach’s passengers into the sky: transport in both senses. What holds it down is that the opening hour is cool by design, the office and the exhibition admired more than felt, and the sublime here is of delight, rarely of depth; it does not reach terror or grief.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Two patterns are built. First the carnival: a world of order turned upside down for one night, rank and rule suspended, the feast that ends at dawn. The Royal Garden is structured as that feast: the building’s failure lets the guests become a crowd, an American takes command of the revels, and the morning brings the market and the fair. Second the labyrinth and its wanderer, Hulot lost in a city whose every corridor looks like the last, the old city glimpsed only in reflection, like a world above. Both bear load: the film’s curve from grid to circle is the carnival’s curve. Held below the gate because the archetype is general rather than deep. Hulot, the fool, is kept off centre and multiplied by false Hulots, and the myth is felt as structure, seldom as meaning.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is screen comedy built on a star and his gags, from Chaplin and Keaton to Tati’s own Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958), which had made Hulot a popular figure. The swerve is near total: a comedy that dissolves its star into the crowd, sets several gags at once in a wide frame with no close-up to direct the eye, has almost no plot and almost no dialogue, and asks the viewer to find the comedy for himself. The stake was the highest: years of production, a city built for the film, 70mm, and a failure in its own year that left the film cut and seen for decades in shortened prints. Held a step below the very top because Mon Oncle had already made the modern house the subject and set Hulot against it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that a city’s life is in its scattered people, and its form makes the viewer a citizen of that city: the wide 70mm frame, deep focus and absence of close-ups leave the eye free to wander, find a gag in a corner, miss another, and so practise the attention the film says the city deadens. The form’s own curve is the argument: straight lines, grey and blue, glass and silence by day; circles, colour and noise by night and dawn. The sound, built after shooting, is an instrument, the modern world heard in small mechanical noises. Make it a story with a hero and close-ups and it becomes a satire told to the viewer. The one cost: on a small screen much of the form is lost.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The film is made to yield on return, and has: the gags in the corners of the frame are not exhausted by three viewings. Formal depth is very high, in the colour scheme, the sound, the rhymes between the opening and the close, the reflections. The literature has grown since the restoration, with Jonathan Rosenbaum’s championing and David Bellos’s life of Tati. The readings differ less than for the darkest works: modernity satirised or embraced, the eye as citizen, the city as stage. Semantic depth is narrower than formal depth: the meaning, once seen, is seen, and what keeps yielding is perception. Held below the top for that, and for span: six decades, and for much of the first two the film was hard to see at all, so its demonstrated return is shorter than its age.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Released in 1967, so force and reach are scored together, and here they part. The field is the cinema of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is among the highest of that decade: a reorganisation of what film comedy and the wide frame could do, the gag made democratic and spatial, the viewer made the editor. Reach was delayed and narrow at first: the film failed in its own year, was cut, was seen in 35mm and mono for decades, and reached its standing only after the restoration. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Roy Andersson’s tableau comedies, Elia Suleiman’s deadpan, Otar Iosseliani’s films, and Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist (2010), made from a Tati script. Force stands near the top and reach well below it; the figure sits between them.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the version first shown in Paris ran about half an hour longer than the one in circulation, and whether it survives whole is not established. Tati made the cut himself, soon after the premiere, which lightens the charge, but a fifth of the film as first shown is not the film that is seen, and that is charged in proportion. Presence: for two decades the film was a famous failure, seen mostly in shortened 35mm prints that broke its form; since the restoration of 2002 it has been in wide and continuous circulation. That broken presence is the second charge. The surface, the modernism of 1967, is the subject and ages as history, and restoration has made good the fabric.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium is load-bearing everywhere. The set is the instrument: a city of glass built to be filmed, so that the frame could be composed in depth to the inch. The staging of crowds, hundreds of extras each given a small action in a wide frame, is timed so that the eye is led without being forced. The colour runs grey and steel blue by day and warms through the night. The sound was built entire after shooting, every hiss of a cushion and click of a heel placed. The costs hold it below the top: the opening hour is slow even for its design; the non-professionals are sometimes stiff where a line must be spoken; the restaurant’s middle runs past its timing. Below Anna Karenina (9.5) and a step under Tokyo Story (9.3).
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the grey office in the morning, Hulot waiting in a glass box while a man walks the length of a corridor in silence, and the Royal Garden at three in the morning, a ruin full of dancing. One law governs both: everyone in the frame is equal before the camera, nothing is pointed out, and comedy is found by looking, not delivered. The party’s chaos is as precisely placed as the office’s order. The range is wide, from cold satire to warm carnival, from silence to din, and the law holds across it; the change of temperature is itself planned. The one strain is the American who takes over the restaurant, a broad comic type given more emphasis than any other figure, and a middle hour that sometimes leans on the single gag.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The orders held: the city and its architecture, at the centre; work, in the office, the cubicle and the appointment that never happens; commerce, in the exhibition and the tourist trade; the private life, in the glass flats and their televisions; class, in the restaurant’s guests and its waiters, cooks and doorman; the international order, American and German visitors in a city that could be anywhere; technology, in every door, lamp and chair. One day and one law hold them in one structure. What holds the axis lowest is what the form refuses. Consciousness is not entered, by design: no one has an inner life the camera visits. The family appears only behind glass, history as the old city reflected; the sacred is absent, and the natural order is a flower seller’s stall and a potted plant.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Living Form at 9.2, then The Made and The Inner Law at 9.1. A comedy that dissolves its star into the crowd and stakes a built city on the turn; a wide frame without close-ups that makes the viewer do the looking the film says the city deadens; a command of crowds, colour and sound placed to the inch; and one law of equal attention holding from the grey office to the ruined restaurant.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: the city, work, commerce, the private life, class, the international order and technology are held in one day under one law, but consciousness is not entered, by design, the family appears only behind glass, history only as the old city reflected, and the sacred not at all. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.0: an accretive method in which gags could go singly without loss, and a restaurant that runs long; then The Archetypal Deep at 8.2: the carnival and the labyrinth are built but general, felt as structure more than as meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.2 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls short of it: the carnival and the labyrinth bear load but are general rather than deep, and Hulot, the fool, is kept deliberately off centre. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, which stands at 8.6, below the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Playtime in the restored 70mm version of 2002, about 124 minutes, the fullest version in circulation and the length of Tati’s own shortened cut, from the tourists’ arrival to the carousel at dawn: directed by Jacques Tati, written by Tati with Jacques Lagrange, produced by Specta Films, photographed by Jean Badal and Andréas Winding, with music by Francis Lemarque; with Tati as Monsieur Hulot and Barbara Dennek as Barbara. The film was first shown in Paris in December 1967 in a version about half an hour longer, which Tati shortened himself soon after; a 35mm version of about 108 minutes was later shown abroad, and a further restoration followed in the 2010s. The restored version is the work scored; the longer first version, whose survival is not established here, and the years of shortened prints bear on survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The film speaks French, English and German, sparsely and half heard by design; every axis is judged on the original, nothing is charged to any subtitle, and no line is quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them shot counts, shot lengths and the share of dialogue, are not given; the length of the Royal Garden is an estimate; the smaller parts and most of the crew are not named.