Running Commentary

…from Adam Paolozza’s blog, Running Commentary (adampaolozza.blogspot.com )

The Complete China Blogs: Entries 1-3

In 2007 I traveled to China with Theatre Smith-Gilmour to develop a new show in collaboration with the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. I kept a blog about my time there…here it is!

Entry One: En Route

April 7, 2007
…above the Pacific Ocean…

I’ve said it before but it holds true everytime: traveling is a very calming experience. Whether it is a train, plane, boat, it doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter if the journey is comfortable, luxurious or dreadful. It is about being between two fixed points, having a definite trajectory. And one that is taken care of for you. It lets you relax and feel you can take a pause from the great struggle that is your life. Because for this time, this traveling time, you’ve done everything you can. There must be a similar calm in defeat, a total relaxation of the muscular and psychic apparatus.

Your day begins at 4am. You have precisely 4 hours sleep. Quick shower and shave and wake your family. You’re accompanied by Mother, Father and Sister on the drive to the airport. You seem to be seeing good omens in different places. 1st good omen: you stop at Tim Horton’s before getting on the highway. The woman at the drive-through window is Asian and very energetic for 5:30am (you remark her cultural heritage merely as a fact and as one of the good omens, though you admit to making racist remarks from time to time. You hope they will be tempered with your biting criticism of your own racial heritage). Your dad says she’s been working there for at least five years.
They forget one of the coffees but quickly make it up. As you’re driving some way down the highway your mom complains that her tea isn’t tea but coffee. She keeps smelling it. You all say, No, it must be tea, why don’t you try it? Then your dad says, It isn’t coffee it’s just really bad tea. Your mom replies with a laugh, It’s coffee and it’s going to be all over you if you don’t shut up (typical barby banter for the Paolozzas). She takes a sip and yes, it is coffee…with a tea bag in it. Strange. Your mom says she’s going to take it back on the way home and demand her money back.
You prefer to take the whole fiasco as good luck. Like a plate breaking at a wedding. The first auspicious sign of what you hope will be a fortunate journey.

At Pearson you say good-bye to your parents almost at the same time that Dean and Mimi are meeting them. Dean tells you later on the plane, “Your mother touched my arm and said, “Take care of my baby”-that’s just like Chekhov…”
you’re a little embarassed by your parent’s affection but in a pleasant way. You remark how sometimes when you go home to visit your parents even your voice seems to change, to revert to an adolescent timbre. You regret losing your temper and yelling at your mother when she criticised the way your father parked the car at the airport…

On the plane approaching Vancouver…

…you travel often and you’ve come to realise that longing and heartache are actually quite comforting companions and so you always make an effort to enjoy their comraderie. You seem to always need to love the people and place where you’re at more as you’re leaving them. It is very cliche but you enjoy indulging in this. You’ve travelled enough now that your rational side won’t let the heart strings pull too hard and you’ll remain open to enjoy the rest of your trip.
As you are lulled into half sleep by the din of the jet engine she keeps reappearing in your thoughts. You won’t deny that you were happy when she called you the night before you left to say good-bye. And you’re tired of saying that you’re over her and don’t desire her anymore and you admit the fact that you still do. You don’t feel bad admitting that anymore, you don’t feel unhealthy about it. And in fact it is this frankness with yourself that tells you that it has begun to be really over, finally over. But you won’t deny that you were happy when she called you the night before to say good-bye.
…the CBC news on the plane keeps playing a story about the cruise ship that sank in Greece near Santorini. And this reminds you of her, as well, because you think of the mediteranean cruise she took with her family last year. In fact, you were just remembering when you were still together how she showed you the very classy, art deco-style bathing suit that she bought especially for that trip. Were you remembering that days ago while packing, thinking of your own bathing trunks? Or while speaking to her the night before? Or was it seeing the news on the plane that brought it back?
You take all these images referring to the past and pointing to the future as good signs for a good voyage. All these correspondences between memory, coincidence and desire thrust your life into focus a little more. Or rather they give you a little change of context with which to view the same old situations. And don’t forget you’re on a plane heading for the future and you know how traveling calms you.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Entry Two: Arrival and first night

…in bed at the Shanghai dramatic arts centre room 102…

The best thing about traveling is that you can wake up and not know where you are.
And in China appearances are not always as they seem…
You spend 12 hours on the flight from Vancouver to Shanghai Pudong airport. You watch four movies (The Prestige-which you’ve already seen and is surprisingly much worse the second time around, Dreamgirls-not the sweeping epic everyone says it is and not even a satisfying bio-pic, Some Chinese film which you don’t watch and finally One Good Year by Ridley Scott featuring Russell Crowe, whose bad attitude can’t even save this film from being obvious and boring), you eat countless helpings of airplane food (always cleverly avoiding the fish as you’ve recently re-seen the movie Airplane again), you start a great novel by Gunter Grass, nearly finish off a New Yorker and jot down some travel notes. When you arrive in Shanghai it is 12 hours earlier than Toronto and so you feel you haven’t missed any time. Jet lag is the first symptom of imbalance between the inner and outer.
You disembark. You only realise hours later that you forgot your brand new $20 travel pillow on board. Customs is swarming with people but somehow it doesn’t take very long to get through. Your luggage also comes out very quickly. You are greeted by four people from the Shanghai Arts Centre: Mr. Ma, a young female translator and a young man with an floppy faux-hawk haircut. Later you learn he may be a directing student. He seem to have no scruples about wearing a dark denim jacket with light denim jeans and so you forgive him it.
Mr. Ma speaks not a lick of English but it is still heartwarming to arrive in a strange land to a smiling face. Your new entourage quickly scoop up your luggage and you’re off.
So far it seems you are in a normal international airport. Dean calls your attention to the formation of the workers waiting to get on a plane to clean it. They stand in two neatly formed rows. “They’re always at attention like that, like the military.” Dean says. Well, you think, not so out of the ordinary. Where are the signs of communism? you ask yourself. Is it something you can see? Smell? You’re told one of the greatest things about China right now is that you can’t see the line where old world communism ends and new world capitalism begins. The old world creeps up on you in the form of an armed military person who yells at you to keep moving once you exit customs amongst a noisy throng, carry-ons trailing behind them. One cannot stop moving in China, motion is survival.
And then the new world creeps up on you quite suddenly. You’re to be taken out to dinner by one of the actresses from the Chinese theatre called Zhen Ping. You knew she was wealthy when she was in Toronto working on the show last year. Now when you learn that you’re going to Her restaurant and that it is located in a gorgeous new highrise hotel called the Renaissance (as apt a symbol as any for what’s happening in China) you really see just how rich she is. Zhen Ping orders the compliant valets to let her park her new Jeep right in front and the doormen bow and say, Welcome home! as you enter the Renaissance via a huge automatic revolving door. On the door it says in English, Please do not push the door. You needn’t lift a finger. The lobby is incredibly opulent, even more so as it’s juxtaposed against the dirty, palm tree-lined streets just outside. Streets swarming with cyclists and near collisions between drivers who obviously don’t consider signalling part of either a defensive or offensive driving technique. The restaurant is on the 2nd or 3rd floor and you’re rushed passed countless young women wearing black suits and ear pieces who smile and bow. One doesn’t realize you’re with Zhen Ping, La Patron, and tries to stop you. She quickly apologizes for her mistake. You’re led past the gorgeous dining room (which reminds you of the opening sequence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) into a private room. In the centre is the standard large round table with the lazy susan in the middle. There is a private bar and mini team of servers who quickly take away all superfluous chairs, plates and cutlery and leave only covers for You, Dean, Mimi and Zhen Ping. China is famous for its service and this experience only reinforces the stereotype. Course after course is brought out, served and then quickly (almost forcefully) cleared for the next. You have a shredded salad with coriander and jelly fish, Peking Duck, a delicious Cantonese soup with Chicken, mussels and papaya, fish heads cooked in garlic and onions, a delicious soft rib steak in a peppery gravy, eggplant in an anchovy sauce, a soup of chopped greens and finally fried rice noodles with sliced beef. All this is accompanied by a delicious red wine whose label you don’t read and followed with a lovely Chinese tea. Zhen Ping, who seemed very naive and childlike in Toronto is now a formidable figure commanding the small cadre of servers in her new shiny black pumps (she says she bought four other new pairs for the spring).
You doze-off as she drives you all home in her new 4 x 4 but not before stopping at her newly renovated and decorated apartment. In a city of countless millions the last place you expect is to end up is a palatial condominium complete with a calm, nearly silent (where are all the cars?) outdoor garden. The condo is almost as opulent as the hotel you ate at. White marble floor, 30ft ceiling with a raised, lit section for the chandelier (you found the same design at the restaurant-Zhen Ping says its the same designer but she doesn’t like it. It feels like living in a hotel.). The white leather couch is from Germany and the stereo is from Denmark. There are around 6 bathrooms and including one for the live-in maid. Zhen Ping (pronounced Junn Pying) puts on some cool latin samba music that you think may be Gal Costa. She shows you her best acting award for a film she did in 2005 and then shows you the wine cellar. When you go back to the German couch to smoke an American cigarette you find out that the singer is not Gal Costa but a Japanese woman instead with an incredibly authentic latin accent. The band has the Brazilian sound down pat even to the arrangement of the harmonies in the horn section. It’s pure Bossa. Only where are you now? You’re dozing, well fed, dizzy from the nicotene and in some gaudy nouveau riche Chinese actress’ living room, listening to her tell stories about how she gave the stewardesses on an Air Canada flight a hard time because they wouldn’t let her put her feet where she liked. And all the while this Japanese woman is singing better Astrud Gilberto than Astrud herself. Where is the China that you’ve read about? The sleeping giant? You don’t see Chairman Mao’s face peeking out of any of the wide screen tv’s that line the walls. There’s no Red Guard hiding in the bursting shoe closet either…
…but, in China appearances are not always as they seem…
You get a drive back to the hotel, buy some water to use (as you can’t drink the tap water) and finally sink into bed after a refreshing glass of Chinese Tsingtao beer with Dean. You text message your mother to let her know you’re still alive. Now you’re ready for sleep, ape of death, that wonderful abyss into which you’re about to fall in for what you hope will be at least eight hours. And where will you be when you wake? Which China will be waiting for you in the morning outside your tiny room? What will happen when the China of your imagination meets the China out there, on the street?

Entry Three: en Chine, finalement…

Monday April 8, 2007
Je suis en Chine, finalement…

You spend the day walking around Shanghai in the quarter near the Theatre. You eat brunch at a restaurant called Ginger. Pumpkin/spinach fritatta with a light salad that has a delicious orange flavoured vinagrette. To drink a delicious cafe au lait. Very shi shi resto. The servers all recognise Dean and Mimi. Very good food and very cheap, too! The resto is in an area that used to be owned by the French and there are many French speaking customers eating all around you.
After you walk around and go into shops to look at shoes and clothes. Apparently it is a good shopping district. It is true what they say that everything here is cheaper.
While walking you are harassed by people trying to get you to go to a market to buy cheap watches and bags. They are very persistent. Amusing, but annoying after a while.
Later you go to a store that sells embroidery from areas of China that contain ethnic minorites-the Miao people, the Han people etc. Very beautiful and delicate fabrics. You consider getting small a wall hanging for yourself or your mother.
Then off to tea at the Hilton. The best green tea youve ever had (although it costs about $9 CDN for a small pot-that’s the Hilton for you). Over tea Dean and Mimi talk about the best way to start rehearsals tomorrow, what stories, what tactics to use to help bridge the language gap.
Then back at the Theattre you meet Nick, the boss of the actors here. You’re not sure what his official position is. He mentions that a small theatre festival in the mountains in Japan has invited the Lu Xun show to play! My god…where else is this project going to take you? What other adventures are in store? nick says the festival is run by a famous Japanese director (could it be Yoshi Oida?).
Outside the theatre there is a marquee poster for the show which is called Lu Xun Blossoms. How strange to arrive in a country on the other side of the world and see your name on a poster for a show that doesn’t even exist yet!
You find it ironic that the first time you ever see your name on a Marquee poster it is on the other side of the planet written in letters that the people there cannot even understand. This is all in keeping with the complex you have about not being recognised in your own country. First you played in France, then Edinburgh, South Carolina, Seattle…when will Toronto embrace this prodigal sun?
You get back to your room and it is cleaned and tidied by the concierge who will clean it everyday. How spoiled you shall be! You aslo have an internet connection already set up in the room. In China you shall want for nothing.

Tuesday apil 10, 2007

The 1st day of rehearsal, the problems dealt with and your conversation with Dean over dinner…
First off you admit that you feel very peaceful here. You don’t know if it is a symptom of being in Shanghai or if it is the sensation of confronting a great unknown and coming to terms with adapting to living in a new environment. Perhaps it is merely the sensation of being okay and knowing that all your basic needs are met that gives you this calm. Your room is great. You have a space to write, read, smoke and a sanctuary. This, too, puts you at ease. You have begun to know your immediate surroundings around the theatre. You haven’t really experienced Shanghai yet but now you feel ready to begin. The beginning is an exciting time of being in any new country.
For breakfast you an almond croissant from the Hilton and oatmeal that your roommate gave me from Canada. For Lunch a delicious bowl of noodle soup with assorted veggies at a vegetarian restau called Godley. The whole meal cost about $2 or $3 dollars Canadian-incredible! Dinner is at Ginger again, a half chicken in a dijon cream sauce with rosemary potato medallions and a shredded carrot vinaigrette.

It is always nerve racking and a relief to get over the first day of rehearsal. It is a long day but productive.
Rehearsal begins with a speech by Mr. Ma, the stage manager (though not in the Western sense) of the company. What he says isn’t translated. You all sit in a circle and Dean and Mimi talk about what you achieved last November and the possible directions the show can take. It seem that the stories all deal with certain dualities: young/old, death/life, the object/it’s shadow. This idea came from work done in November between Dean and Guo Hongbo in finding ways to switch between the narrator as old Lu Xun and young Lu Xun. At one point Hongbo actually played Dean’s shadow and there began this whole line of thinking.
The two major problems arise that you classify as cultural: the language barrier and the rigid formality the Chinese adhere to in the rehearsal hall. These problems aren’t necessarily intrinsic to the Chinese culture but that is the filter through which the problems pass. Both problems stem from an attitude of passivity the Chinese actors adopt both due to the lack of communication and in reaction to the rigid formal hierarchy the Chinese company works in.
The show will be in English and Chinese and most of the Chinese actors don’t speak English. So there is a translator. The major problem with the translator is not her lack of skill, in fact she’s very talented, it is the process of translation itself that stalls the work. When the Chinese actors are improvising by themselves they are free and just go for it. When you start to nail things down and work on details and get into discussions the time it takes to translate the ideas can sometimes give the actors an excuse to sit back and wait for direction. This is deadly for this type of creative process which calls for everyone to remain alert and to participate in the debate around the dramaturgy and mis en scene. Dean and Mimi work in such a way that the actors has great freedom and great responsibility-the actor must stay present to the process at every step to be able to find their place in it. Once Dean and Mimi are put in a position of telling the Chinese actors what to do then they creatively disengage. Couple that with the fact that traditionally the Chinese actors are not used to having any say with the director, in fact their having their own ideas about things is even frown upon, and you have a process that stalls, becomes heavy. The process is such that it is constantly putting ideas and choices into question-something fantastic discovered one day can be cut the next-and the actor’s place in the process is never secure until the piece has organically grow into its own entity and the actor realises how they must function individually as part of the whole. If the actors are sitting back passively waiting for instruction nothing can advance.
But Dean and Mimi anticipate this and so after the brief discussion at the beginning of the rehearsal you jump right in and start working on a new story. Hongbo begins and almost immediately the rest of you jump in to improvise with him. You start to naturally find ways of storytelling together, images form and you progress rapidly. This is great.
There are still some minor problems that Dean may come down hard on tomorrow. The assistant to Dean and Mimi, Joe, continually smokes in the space and talks on his cell phone during the process. The other actors are constantly running to the bathroom in the middle of work (something you, too, are guilty of) and Mr.Ma is being very strict about adhering to the time schedule. This is particularly stressful for Mimi (and for the rest of you) because she needs to feel that she and Dean are setting the pace, as they should. She is also jet lagged and needs to ease in a little, at least on the first day.
Your major problem is that the other Chinese actors not really playing with you during improvs. This was also a problem in November. You understand their timidity as you don’t speak Chinese but the whole point of the work is to find a common theatrical language. They have to start by at least watching what you are doing and giving you a space to play. Sometimes you feel they exclude you. They laugh and joke in Chinese, which is fine in and of itself, but when the group needs to discover things together everyone must make an effort to let people understand then. This gets better by the end of the day. You work through your frustration and keep insisting on your presence, not in an egotistical way but in order to contribute to the story telling. Later Mimi will ask you how you feel and reassure you that she, too, notices how they exclude you sometimes. Her understanding also helps relieve the frustration. Thank you Ms.Mimi!
All that being said you have lots of fun. This very important. It is often in the moments of joy, of sheer delight in playing with someone on stage where you find an image or a gesture that is really fantastic and opens up a whole new way of telling the story. These discoveries separate the great work from the merely perfunctory. You should also add that it is hard to find these moments even when everyone is speaking the same language.

You and Dean go out for dinner (Mimi is very jet lagged and stays home to sleep) and start off talking about the day. Eventually you get talking about the general state of theatre in Canada and among young people of your generation.
You see a lot of yourself in Dean. You don’t say this because he is your director and you look up to him, although this too is true, but because you really share a similar temperament. You are both Aquarians. You were both unsatisfied with your initial actor training and place in the theatre community and looked to Lecoq as another way.
You talk about there being an excessive amount of irony in Canadian theatre. All this irony leaves no space for naivite, without which there can be no room for the Clown to exist. In fact, you would say that not only is the spirit of Clown play stifled by too much irony but most theatrical play is: Bouffon, Melodrama, Commedia Dell’Arte and even “straight” theatre (whatever the hell that means). For most jeu you need to be receptive to others and open to discovery. Irony closes you off from the world, distances you, comments on itself. This is death for an actor. One can always play an ironic character or a situation that is itself ironic and this can be a joy to play. Everything in its proper measure. Having irony as the dominant motif in all work is like cooking a dish and substituting salt for all other spices.
This discussion then went onto Lecoq (as is usually the case with you and Dean) and how he really was looking at the nature of the role of performer and theatre in history. Lecoq’s great genius lay in how he did it by forgetting history really focusing on the mechanics of why certain theatrical styles operate the way they do. By experimenting with different styles, by doing first, one can then pass into a phase of thinking, reflecting, putting things in the context of history. In the bible the beginning was the word-in theatre it is always the gesture.
You talk about an ongoing discussion that the faculty at Lecoq has with the students about how certain performance styles seem to come and go out of fashion throughout the years. For example, clown was really popular in the late 1960′s at Lecoq. By the time Dean went there it had already lost some of it’s favour with the public. When you were there people couldn’t stand watching melodrama. When you performed one for you first soiree the audience laughed at the moments of high drama (to be fair some of the actors in the piece really were ridiculous). They felt uncomfortable with the actors really going for playing big, over the top emotions. But now, even five years later, you really feel melodrama coming back in vogue. You see it all the time in choice of material and you’ve worked with writers and actors who are naturally drawn to it to express their imaginary worlds. Look at Theatre Colombus doing Ibsen, the huge popularity of Chekhov in the last ten years-both of these writers are considered the fathers of naturalism but they were reacting to melodrama the conventions of which permeate their work. And you would go so far as to say that it is precisely the melodrama in these great writers that fascinates the modern audience and not the realism-people are becoming fed up with TV acting on the stage and long for the big, theatrical emotions. If anyone saw Mabou Mines’ Doll House earlier this year at World Stage they cannot deny the sheer force of the melodrama in the show. All the emotions and passions were stretched out as on a rack, exploding into opera in the end-opera being the sophisticated musical cousin of melodrama.
Primitive mythology, poetic, metaphor,
All this reminds you of Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Italian philosopher who was hailed as an intellectual martyr when he refused to change his ideas about religion and science and was burned at the stake. You tell Dean about his cyclical theory of history. This idea had a huge influence on James Joyce’s and Ulysses and on Samuel Beckett’s writing. In it Bruno states that history is not teleological but repeats itself in three dominant cycles. Each cycle is characterised by a dominant literary trope. You’re fascinated by this way of looking at history and how Bruno describes man’s sense of identity as intimately linked with language. How we tell our stories in a sense defines what the stories are. You and Dean chat about how this relates to Lecoq’s discovering how different epoques favour certain theatrical styles over others. Why is this? What was happening in the 1960′s that made it such a receptive time for clown, for example? Was it the sense of naivite that the world was feeling? The same feeling that inspired the civil rights movement, women’s lib etc? And on the flip side, what was the theatrical style that replaced this openness and naivite? This darker underbelly of the 60′s-Is this feeling behind Weiss’ Marat/Sade? Behind Peter Brooks’ exploration of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty in the 70′s? Behind Vietnam and the student uprising in Paris in 68? Perhaps this explains why you have great tragedies being written in the 80′s by Charles Mee and Howard Barker? You suppose that during the Reagan administration people had no choice but to feel this tragic sense of life.
But now you feel tired. It is 10pm and the theatre, which is down the hall from where you’re sleeping, has just begun the nightly ritual of playing Only The Lonely as the curtain falls on the British farce Out Of Order playing in Mandarin. It’s time for bed.

 

Tati’s Playtime

Two nights ago I watched one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen. Playtime by Jacques Tati. For those of you who have never heard of him Tati is the French equivalent of a Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Tati was a music hall clown who made the shift to film and went on to become a great director in his own right.

Like Chaplin’s tramp and Keaton’s everyman Tati, too, has an alter-ego: M.Hulot. Hulot can be distinguished by his ever present pipe, brown raincoat, the hesitant rush to his stride, his silent egregiousness and his hapless predilection for causing accidents and worsening them trough an ever present desire to help.

In Playtime, however, the focus is not so much on Tati as on the world that he creates. This is the genius of the film. In an interview once Tati explained the difference between his approach to comedy with Hulot and Chaplin’s with the Tramp: there is a scene in Les Vacances de M.Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Vacation) where Hulot pulls over in a cemetery to fix a flat tire. He places the inflated flat on the leafy ground and some foliage sticks to it. When Hulot picks it up one of the funeral attendants thinks it is a wreath for the funeral that is happening and thanking him solemnly he takes the wreath from Hulot’s hands. The difference between Tati and Chaplin is that Hulot is passive, the situation happens to him and we laugh at the workings of fortune whereas Chaplin is active. With Hulot the comedy happens by accident, Hulot does not initiate the gag. With Chaplin the Tramp would presumably attempt to regain the wreath using his cane and any number of gags could ensue. Chaplin is a great gag man, focusing the comedy on the virtuosity of the performer whereas Tati focuses the comedy on the virtuosity of the situation. Tati takes this re-shifting of focus to extremes hitherto unimagined in Playtime.

Tati calls this shift of comedic focus from the active virtuoso performer to the fertile situation a “democratization of the comedy”.

Tati was always fascinated by observing people. He tells a great story about when he was touring with his music hall routine and playing at posh hotels in England. He was expected to play the 9am show. The manager told him to get out there and be funny. After the show Tati was very depressed and went for a walk on the streets of London. He said that he stumbled upon an outdoor market. He saw people cutting meat, packing vegetables, haggling over prices and crying out to hawk their wares. He said he recalled thinking that here, if he looked at anyone long enough they were all funny, except him! It was real life that was interesting if you knew how to capture it on film.

His fascination with observation is what makes Playtime so extraordinary. M.Hulot only has a minor role in the film. He arrives in Paris at a clinical-looking modern airport and we follow him as he attempts all day to find the man he has come to see about getting a job and into the night where he runs into some old war buddies and eventually goes to a swanky Parisian nightclub.

But this through-line for Hulot is only there to give the film a semblance of plot and a small spark of forward moving activity. The real hero of the film are the people and the situations. The American tourists who arrive at the airport (including the curious young woman named Barbara who Hulot will cross paths with at random throughout the film), the labyrinthine modern office building with it’s grid-like row of cubicles where Hulot searches in vain for the man he has come to see about a job, Hulot’s war buddies’ modern apartment with it’s huge glass window facade that resembles a department store window, displaying the inhabitants as if they were shop displays meant to be watched (there is an eery premonition of reality tv here as two apartments side by side have their television placed in the same spot in the joining wall-there is a great comic situation where both families are watching the television but from the audience’s perspective it is as if they are watching eachother), and finally the swanky nightclub that is literally being worked on by construction workers as the first guests arrive. I think that this is the most sustainedly brilliant sequence of the film. As the guests arrive the wait staff works to get the work staff off the dining room floor and conceal all the tools and unfinished bits of architecture. They are all concerned with the appearance of the nightclub. Tiles get stuck to shoes, the chairs create marks on peoples’ backs, the group of American tourists arrive and they have no room to seat them, the French discreetly comment on the Americans lack of style, and there’s a loud American throwing his money and mirth around. The air-conditioning malfunctions, the large glass front door shatters and eventually there’s a circuit malfunction and Hulot actually brings the ceiling down-much to the delight of the rich American loud mouth, constantly shouting “I want to buy the place!”, who now pretends that the section demarcated by the collapsed ceiling is the new “vip” section of the club, only those bearing the special mark (i.e. the mark from the unfinished chairs on their back) are allowed in.

But in Tati’s vision it is this breakdown in technology and in culturally orthodox rules and manners of the environment that allows for real human warmth in the film. The people come together in spite of the disaster at the restaurant and dance, sing and genuinely make merry. In many of Tati’s films, both before and after Playtime, he is concerned with the effect of the modern world and industrial progress on our lives. This vision of the world, at times very bleak and comic, is what makes Playtime such a moving film. The first half is sterile-all sky scrapers and glass, modern gadgets and everyone moving at an extremely fast pace marching towards the mechanized future. But what is colder and more disconcerting is watching all the people adapt to this environment and the pace that it demands. It is only a catastrophe, albeit a comic one, that causes a rupture in the rhythm of the modern world Tati has created and allows the people to stop and make real connections with each other.

And this , I think, is the real genius of Tati’s vision in Playtime. The comic spirit of Hulot and of the entire film is destructive but also life-affirming and ultimately positive. The laughter in the film is the laughter of the people, it is a laughter that exposes all dogmatic truths, the “truth” of progress for example, to the destructive power of time and of becoming. All of the truths of this modern age and all of it’s culturally orthodox ideals and morals will pass but it is the people, who laughing fearlessly, will continue to live, to laugh, to love and to hope for a better future. There is something akin to the spirit of Carnival in the end of Playtime where there is no difference between actor and spectator, all the people in the film are caught up in the reality of the situation and until the morning, when they must resume their normal roles in life, they are allowed a certain license to eat, drink and be merry in a quasi-utopian society behind which the driving principle is festive, destructive, human laughter.

Many of the ideas in this blog are borrowed from Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World which is a fascinating study of laughter and the carnivalesque spirit of the renaissance in the novels of Rabelais. Bakhtin is concerned with the quality of folk humour as an eternally organic force of “unofficial” culture that by it’s very character always remains outside of official culture and opposed to it. He examines in detail the forms and quality of laughter and humour during Carnival in Medieval and Renaissance Europe and describes this type of humour as both grotesque and destructive. But the destruction is also linked to regeneration, as the old King (symbol of the old year) is uncrowned (and dies) and the new King (new year) is crowned (born), or as the village fool is temporarily crowned King of the Carnival and all social orders are flipped upside down. The laughter regenerates where it destroys and so is more philosophic and optimistic in character than mere satire or cynicism. And I feel this spirit of Carnivalesque humour has come down even into our times through the circus, music hall and through clowns. And thanks to director like Keaton, Chaplin and Tati it has even been preserved in film. And this film, Playtime, is one of the most delightfully eccentric and specific observations and celebrations of what it is to be human as you are likely to find in 20th century cinema.