Arquitectura en modo de distracción: ocho tomas sobre Playtime de Jacques Tati Architecture in a Mode of Distraction: Eight Takes on Jacques Tati’s Playtime..

The dark, disquieting, and dislocating quality of the relationship between film and architecture is revealed in its opposite light, amusingly teased out, in Jacques Tati’s opening sequence to the film Playtime, in which hospital and an airport are seen as architecturally synonymous. The city that this airport-cum-hospital serves is itself, in the periphery of Paris that now substitutes for the real experience of Paris. The overlay of seeming differences only serves to point out their amusing, if unsettling, similarities gathered in this essay.