Tativille 1: “Le monde entier devient une clinique”
(the whole world becomes a clinic)
May 10th, 2012
Jacques Tati launching into the construction of "Tativille". Ph. André Dino. All pictures © Les Films de Mon Oncle.
Assuming it is well made enough that the handle won’t slip off during use, a knife will only be dangerous when employed dangerously. Likewise, under similar assumptions, architecture and technology will be as good or bad as the uses to which they are put. Le Corbusier wanted his houses to be machines for living in and, whatever you may think of his grand urbanising designs (I, for one, am glad he couldn’t convince the French authorities to raze half of the Rive Droite to the ground), a walk through the full scale model of one of his unités d’habitation at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine should convince you that these present no inherent danger to the soul, just the opposite. (Better yet, it is possible to visit the real thing at the Cité Radieuse in Marseille.) Le Corbusier (as Walter Gropius before him, and Otto Wagner, and others) intended to benefit the population above all else; budget was always a concern, yes, but only after human needs (as he saw them) were attended to. In less idealistic hands, this order was reversed and the idea was soon being reproduced randomly, thoughtlessly, but most of all cheaply, a bit everywhere; neglecting elements as varied and vital as the proportions of the apartments (based on the Modulor anthropometric scale of proportions he devised); the careful inclusion of well-cared, well-landscaped green areas (not just stretches of lawn), as well as commercial and service units; the enlivening use of colour and material. In the end, the machines for living in often turned into human crating by misapplication (wilful or not) of cost-effectiveness. This resulted in the sort of buildings that actually merits the Prince of Wales’s quips. [1]
Jacques Tati never finished explaining that Play time (1967) was not a manifesto against modern architecture or modernity in general. (“I’m not very intelligent but I am not going to tell you that we should build small schools with tiny windows so that the pupils won’t see the sun, and that hospitals with dirty sinks, where one was badly looked after, were brilliant.”) By then, he was schooled in such charges: they had been levelled against his previous film, Mon oncle (1958), which covered a miniature of the same ground as Play time, from a more sentimental, less ambiguous angle. Objections notwithstanding, Mon oncle was an international triumph among critics and public; won multiple awards; was hailed as his masterpiece. As it happened, Tati disagreed. He felt he had relied too much on traditional narrative, taken a step back from the nearly plot-free Les vacances de M. Hulot (1953), and in doing so, lost his way, been distracted from what he really wanted to do.
