JACQUES TATI AND A SUSTAINABLE NATURE:
THE HUMAN FIGURE IN MODERN SPACE
AESTHETICS, MODERNITY AND AN EVERYDAY BODILY EXPERIENCE OF
ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY
This project started life as an essay here with this exhibition I went off on a few tangents.
Melbourne International Fringe Festival 2011
In
this work I wanted to look at, in part, how the change in the meaning of
aesthetics may have played a role in the way we designed modern space…
Did
a disconnection between the body and its environment(s) allow us to design in
compartmentalized ways?
If
we reconnect our design process with an everyday bodily experience(reestablishing
the relationships) between the body and its environments _ both built and
natural _ will we make steps towards an ‘entire design process’?
This
is a term used by Juhani Pallasmaa he suggests “sustainable architecture” needs
to consider the body and mind of the humans who will occupy the spaces.
“Sustainable architecture” he suggests can not be understood only through “technical” terms.
Susan
Buck-Morss in her essay ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’ explores the original
meaning of aesthetics, as it referred to apprehending our environment through
the senses and how this meaning changed during the upheaval of the modern
experience in the 19th Century to a term that was more associated with the
rationalized
experience
of the mind…
Buck-Morss states where
once aesthetics was meant to understand reality through the body (taste, touch,
smell, sound, sight) the meaning of aesthetics changed to become something that
is only understood rationally through the mind-
an engagement with art (and life) became something to be contemplated
rationally – removed from all the emotional, irrational, unpredictable,
imperfect, untidiness of the human being
Lorraine
Mortimer in her book Joy and Terror: The films of Dusan Makavejev in using the work Buck-Morss and Alla Efimova’s
on aesthetics, argues that our bodies have often been left out when it comes to
our attempts in understanding the world and ourselves.Mortimer
writes, the rationalization of the understanding life lead to theories of
abstracted humans. She argues that to understand life and ourselves we require
these sometimes messy sensory parts of life things that we understand through
our bodies, however irrational.
Marshall
Berman in All that is Solid Melts to Air
suggests what is significant in urban design in the twentieth century,
especially since the World War Two, is the space that has been made available
for the car in our modern cities. He
writes that the streets have been re-designed for the traffic to the exclusion
of all else which differs greatly from Haussmann’s and Baudelaire's Boulevards
of an earlier modernism in the 19th Century (165).
The photo above is a still from Tati’s 1958 film Mon Oncle. Below is a photo taken
of the same church in 2009. Mon Oncle is in part a comparison between the old
Paris, of Tati’s youth, and a Modern Paris of, perhaps, Le Corbusier. Old Paris
is represented by St Maur, a suburb of Paris to the east. The modern parts of
the film are sets, Play Time is
entirely a set.
I like to think of Tati, in some ways, as an
ethnographic film maker.
This is a still, a picture of the square in Mon Oncle at St Maur, which Tati
suggests, allows for a community engagement, if you like, it has a public space
with no motor cars, everything happens here from grocery shopping, to parties,
street fetes…
Above is recreation of the party scene in the Royal Garden Night Club at the end of Play Time
Tati
suggests that the modern architecture of Play Time has drained the life out of
the city. A vibrancy has been lost,
something vital.
Only
when the modern architecture comes apart do people start to move freely and
have fun.
Whereas
before they where abstracted and disconnected from their environment Tati
suggests they are now engaged bodily…
Louise Mackenzie_COPYRIGHT_2011
