Approach to suspended rotating structures in the cinema of Jacques Tati

Abstract

This text comes from the examination of the work of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati, and proposes a bridge between his films Jour de fête (1949) and Playtime (1967).

This review will address part of the activity of an artist who participates in cinema both on and off the screen. This approach to his comic aesthetics considers two views. The first one has to do with his acting performance, whose transit within the filmic space could be understood as the opening of a body box that unfolds by the action of a particular gravitational force, in a temporary echo whose repetitions cover the territory of an extensive depth of field. The other that falls on the film space and a cinematography that proposes an open gaze to the viewer, in complex general shots full of information where everything happens simultaneously.

In this link between two films that maintain a distance of eighteen years from each other, a point of coincidence is proposed from which a particular filmic world in Tati’s work could be understood and that is related to his particular interest in the city, the automobile and the bike.

Certain specific elements can be glimpsed from this approach, from which a display of audiovisual strategies used in the spatial construction of the film world could appear and that are related to Tati’s particular comic aesthetics. These mirror-like links between the two films could establish a parallelism between suspended rotating structures that support.