Seeing-Eye Gods: CCTV and Surveillance in Tati's and Kubrick's 1960s Space Odysseys

Jacques Tati's 1967 and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 cinema-altering journeys through time and space were, in and of themselves, lengthy, sprawling odysseys. Both wide-format (65mm; 70mm) shoots ran nearly two years (April 1965 October 1966; December 1965 September 1967) and both finished films ran more than two hours long; they opened four months apart, in Paris and in Washington respectively. The former choreographs Chaplinesque, near-wordless physical comedy of human bodies in interior spaces of a coolly modern office-tower block until punctuality and architectural order are ruptured; latter orchestrates balletic dance of anthropological past (hominids on earth) and sci-fi future (astronauts in space) in its eons-spanning tale of humans developing technology until technology threatens master them. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, in a 2010 essay published just before Toronto's Bell Lightbox screened restorations of two films, points out not only one director's appreciation for other, but films' twin impact on cineastes: himself, who admired Kubrick immensely for his craft, was a big fan of 2001, but I have no idea what Kubrick thought of Playtime. By then many of my friends were squaring off by regarding either 2001 or Playtime as great film of modern era. (1) Rosenbaum discusses some of films' visual similarities, in particular the contrast in each between straight lines and circles, as well as between various stiff human interactions and more playful and dancelike movements of both people and objects (including vehicles). (2) Rosenbaum notes elsewhere that both Tati's and Kubrick's films try to reeducate us by disrupting some of our basic habits in organizing visual and spatial data. (3) But both films are among first emphasize contained, cubicle space, as if humans are trapped inside TV-like boxes (even as '60s cinema was trying fight rise of television). Both films also eerily echo each other in their profound preoccupation, signalled by similar shots, with kind of screen-surveillance culture that we now take for granted in cubicle-dominated urban spaces of our technologically-developed world. Tati's film startlingly predicts Kubrick's use of a computer's red eye (the cyclopean HAL) in a scene that also offers a Kubrick-esque corridor shot; Tati goes on merge cubicle-space with camera-space, predicting West's fascination with closed-circuit television surveillance, which reappears (as videophones and security cameras) throughout spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In their individually distinctive ways, these cinematic auteurs force us re-examine how we organize space as screens, both dividing us from chaotic outside world and allowing us watch it from within a sanitized interior. In these two late '60s masterpieces, screen-space becomes a kind of insulating, cold, cerebral design for non-life or a detached, dispassionate life, keeping us from a larger, more playful natural environment. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Play Time begins in public, free space of outdoors, its title appearing among puffs of cloud in open blue sky. But that space is then cut off by glass barriers and screens, both revealing yet keeping us from posing female figures, until men and women alike are contained within large, cubicle-like screens. The next shot is of a looming black tower, like monolith in Kubrick's film, blotting out much of blue sky (exact reproductions of a similar tower appear later at a travel agency, on advertisements for different cities around world); metallic grays, jet blacks, and light-box whites will dominate film. From glass of that office tower, Tati cuts a shot of glass separating us from two nuns, walking down a hall, their cornettes bouncing slightly, like wings of a plane--we are in an airport, but it is unclear if we have just seen these aeronuns (4) through glass or in reflection of glass. …

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