Playtime (Tati, 1967) 50 years later: films as a record of the crisis of the Modern Movement

Abstract

This paper delves into the spatial, material and social conditions suggested by the urbanism and architecture of the Modern Movement, as well as in the effect that modernity has had on the habitat taking the film Playtime (Tati, 1967) as a source of analysis. The paper reviews the enthusiastic image of urban modernism presented by the cinema of the 1920s, the principles of CIAM and the International Style in the light of the systematic criticism the film exerted on a modernity that based its program on the abstraction of space and human activities. The paper situates the film and its author within the most radical criticism of positivism that denounced the transformation of architecture into an instrument of consumption. It can be concluded that fifty years after its premiere, Playtime remains a relevant cinematic document to think about the transformations of the city and the consolidation of new socio-spatial rationales that show the increasingly difficult adaptation between architecture and society in contemporary times too.