In ch.2 of Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (U of California P, 1993), Anne Friedberg discusses the relationship between the city, modernism, film and architecture.
Ion P VSA1000 Essay 1 28/03/2004
In ch.2 of Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (U of California P, 1993), Anne Friedberg discusses the relationship between the city, modernism, film and architecture. How do her ideas of modernity, particularly her terms ‘machines of vision’ and ‘machines of mobility’, relate to 1 or 2 sequences in Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958)?
Anne Friedberg’s ideas of modernity – including the mobilization of the gaze amidst the modern city, consumerist self-gratification through fetishist agoraphilicism, and the dissolution of distinct psychological boundaries and functions separating public and private spaces, specifically encapsulated in the terms ‘machines of vision’ and ‘machines of mobility’ - can be inexorably applied to sequences in Jacque Tati’s Mon Oncle, and their interconnectibility can be realized as the epitome of this social machination is observed during the 20 minute sequence of the ‘garden party’ [54:28-75:00] at the Arpel residence. This leaves us ultimately with the melancholic realization that these ‘machines of vision’ and ‘machines of mobility’ which have manifested through the advent of modernization have irrevocably triggered the replacement of the impartial, non-materialistic genuinity of the traditional with the pretentious, consumerist superficiality of the modern.
The ‘garden party’ sequence begins with a visitor to the Arpel household, as the greengrocer’s aged, coughing pickup truck pulls up outside the front gate. We are exposed to an almost proportionately perfectionist shot – where we see a clean, grayscale, modern home occupying the top left of the frame, a dusty, colourful, old pickup truck the bottom right, and a fence the central barrier between them. The contrasting dissonance between the two areas of the frame is symbolic of the differences between modernity and traditionality, and maintains a fascinated gaze from the viewer. As Friedberg discussed, “the tourist simultaneously embodies both a position of presence and absence, or here and elsewhere, of avowing one’s curiosity and disavowing one’s daily life”, and “tourism provides an escape from boundaries… it legitimates the transgression of one’s static, stable or fixed location”, and although the greengrocer is only performing the obligatory daily functions of his profession, he is emphasized as a tourist in the Arpel residence, strangely curious to discover what lies behind the gates. As he rings the doorbell, water begins to spout from what can be deduced as a fountain in the front garden, and when Mme Arpel looks and realizes who it is, she turns the fountain off immediately. The greengrocer leans towards it with a bewildered, intrigued look on his face, and after he has received payment for his oranges and is walking out, we see him uncontrollably and yet cautiously gaze around – as if yearning for a more prolonged experience of this modern world, but afraid of what he might discover. The above is a palpable illustration of the mobilization of the gaze and the dissolution of the barrier and functions of private and public ways on many levels. Firstly, the greengrocer’s mode of transport – his automobile, plays an elemental role in enabling him to travel to deliver his goods, and hence on a purely physical level acts as both a machine of vision and a machine of mobility. It provides him with the physical mobility to travel faster, further, and view a wider variety of spectacles, than would have otherwise been possible. Secondly, we see by his hesitant body language that he does in no way feel ‘at home’ in the private Arpel residence, whereas his tension eases as he moves outside its boundaries - and this depicts to some extent the reversals of roles that public and private space has encountered with the advent of modernity. As Friedberg stated, “the once-private interior became a public realm, and the one-public exterior became privatized”, and as opposed to the romantic warmth of Mr Hulot’s ‘vieux Paris’, we see how the modern private home is no longer atmospherically convivial but instead superficially and competitively judgmental towards the visitor (even moreso as the sequence progresses). Public space, on the other hand, now seems to offer the freedom that the traditional private home did. It can be deduced that one’s psychological perceptions of the city must have significantly altered to elicit this sudden change, and hence that modernity as a whole has acted as a machine of vision by educing this perceptual change.