Julian Gerace

Ammended Introduction to Playtime at PFS

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 00:10:15 -0500

In November 2023, I was invited (after asking months in advance) to provide an introduction for Jacques Tati's 1967 film, Playtime for the Philadelphia Film Society. The movie alone, as well as Tati's entire catalogue, has been an integral piece to my development as a filmmaker. I present here a written version that approximates my comments that day.

Hello,

I’m Julian Gerace, I’m a filmmaker here in Philly and I help run the Philm Club newsletter. I’m so excited to be introducing my favorite film, “Playtime” by the master, Jacques Tati. I’ve long studied this film and can talk about it for hours, so for the sake of brevity, I hope you’ll allow me to present some prepared words.

Jacques was nearly 60 when “Playtime” was released in 1967. He was fiercely independent, he put 9 years of his life and most of his own money (and many others) into this film and it bankrupted him — the critical success didn’t outpace the commercial failure. He lost his house, all the rights to his films, and access to the resources required to make a film of this scale ever again.

Just one year later, the youth and workers of France would revolt in May 68, calling for the dismantling of the old world and all of its power structures, a world whose slow demise had served as a backdrop for all of Tati’s films to that point. Jacques was in no rush to accelerate the replacement of cobbled neighborhood streets with car-crowded highways lined with glass and steel and it is in this sense that he is a conservative filmmaker. Not for bigotry, or a love for the ruling class, but a recognition of change and joyful mourning for what France was leaving behind.

He started his career performing physical comedy for sports league buddies at dinners and in French dancehalls. He wasn’t particularly intelligent, not skilled or inspired in typical work, a little shy, and wasn’t fond of expressing himself in language. He develops this style of solo mime that eventually evolves into his iconic character, Monsieur Hulot. Opposed to Charlie Chaplin’s famous American Tramp, who gets into trouble and finds himself the center of attention, the equally silent. Hulot, in his hiked up pants, hat and pipe, causes the trouble in the background through his bumbling curiosity, setting off a chain of errors and gags. Whether he’s a bicycling postman in provincial France, a voyeuristic beachgoer, or the fun, but irresponsible uncle in a modernizing city, Tati’s cinema focuses less on us gaining access to Hulot’s inner mind and feeling, and more on using that character to show us how he himself sees the world.

In Playtime, there is a democratization of Hulot, an expansion of who Hulot is or could be. Previous films followed him almost exclusively; in Playtime, Tati gives a little Hulot charm and quirk to a number of characters. There are long stretches of film where he doesn’t appear at all. The main “other Hulot” you’ll see is Barbara, a young American woman on a tour of France and it’s through her we might get the biggest gift of Playtime: the crash course in how to see the banal, the absurd, the loss in every day life with a hint of humor if you can just get the right angle. The second half of the film is dedicated to a large sequence at a very newly-opened restaurant. You’ll see the middle-aged crowd of the travel tour go out for dinner, the ladies have flowered headpieces for a night on the town. They pass the elderly group on the escalator, coming in for an early night, tired from a long day and those ladies’ flower headpieces are wilted, hanging off their hats. Later on at the restaurant, the waiter comes to fill their champagne glasses and Tati shoots in such a way as to make it look as though he’s watering these flowers. If you stood in that restaurant 5 steps to the side, you’d get nothing, but by being AND seeing in that exact place, you get enough for a smile. As you leave the theater, I’m sure you’ll have at least one opportunity to see the world as Tati.

Keep your ears open during the film — Tati turns noise into sound, the jumbled mess of environmental noise is featured rather than cancelled out to focus on actors delivering plot information or character background. Much like Robert Altman’s signature overlapping speech, the fact that characters are talking is more important than what they say. Whether it’s the buzz of a neon sign or a door that can close silently, noise forms the basis for a number of gags. A film like this is either a joy or a terror for anyone doing the captions.

We see Tati’s visual legacy across cinema to this day, but maybe most noticeably in the bleak, Norwegian, single-frame cinema of Roy Andersson. Cinema is a visual art form. The picture on the screen is not an illustration of a story, nor a hieroglyph meant to be read as we read words. The image is more immediate and gives us more than can be strung together in language. When you look at how Tati made his movies, there wasn’t a script, barely a plot, instead a “scenario” laying out some players with a characteristic or two and how they relate to the physical space. Tati hated close ups so his scenes are wide and slow and appear more like a chaotic Bruegel the Elder painting that lends itself to repeated rewatching just so you can look at a different part of the scene. Playtime is screening tomorrow as well, so I hope to see you there again.

There is a story told by all major Tati scholars, as well as the man himself, of when he was a schoolchild and brought up to the front of the class for an exercise: The students are to act out a sentence the teacher says while they repeat it. When Tati’s turn arrives, the teacher says “I open the door. I close the door.” He walks to the door, says the “I open the door.” and as he says “I close the door”, he walks to the other side and closes it from the outside. He notes he had a realization in that moment, a glimpse of the potential of comedy. How does he go back in the classroom, big smile, sheepish grin, funny stinger? He ended up going home and leaving school for the rest of the day. As noted by many before me, here is the earliest recollection of what would become his signature style. A gag with no punchline, a half-told knock-knock joke. Tati is all setup. Rather than building to a big laugh, you’re left smiling as subtle gags stack on top of each other at a blistering pace that never feels faster than afternoon stroll.

I’ll close with this: I first saw Playtime by accident, at a time when I felt as though there weren’t any more movies for me to make — all had been already done and it was too late to catch up. The joy and humor, and imaginative power in this film brought me passion. There is so much more to say, but these are just a few words to describe how I love Playtime, and how I hope you’ll love it too. I’m so excited to join you in the audience.

The Book Store Chair

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:10:15 -0500

Squint. I will attempt to conjure an impression, a sketch. The best used bookstores will frequently feature at least one chair tucked in a corner or at the end of a back row; often wooden and creaky, always old, and splitting the hair-width boundary of “scattered haphazardly” and “placed just so”. Sometimes a street-rescued couch, sometimes a dining set orphan, sometimes an icon of craftsman pride.

There is no catalog, online or in a salesperson’s desk drawer, that will show you the full variety of these chairs, photographed from five angles in flat light, assigned a barcode and MSRP, stored in a fluorescent warehouse, packaged in plastic and aromatic styrofoam, awaiting purchase and shipment (free for orders above $50). There is no shared source, only a shared destination among yellowing paper and oxidizing ink for this type of chair. Like a retired racehorse grazing the fields of an animal sanctuary or an aging ballerina processing payroll, these chairs have already seen their second act.

The idea of a non-specific chair quietly taking up space across a large swath of stores is intriguing. There is no unoccupied, unpurposed space in retail. If you see a chair in a store, there will be a commercial reason for it. To hear a sales pitch, to sample merchandise, to fill out financing forms — though it will usually be a chair for waiting, in a specifically configured area for waiting. Folding metal in a mechanic’s garage, spill-proof plush in a pediatrician’s office, ass-sanded maple in a train station. Is that what the book store chairs are for — waiting? Why not assume that the formally designated waiting area in a bookstore, if it should possess one, is only located about one specific chair near the front or a strip of carpet laid down over well-trodden wood by the register. What then remains? Simply that these are non-waiting chairs; a non-answer. Would you be satisfied with “bookstore chairs are for sitting?” Let us take the long way around and slide our attention to the backdrop.

Used bookstores differ from those that sell new books in many, but only a few important, ways. For our purposes, let me construct a short and simple opposition between generalizations. The common used book store is curated and indeterminate, the common new book store is stocked and accounted. So much is left to chance within the used bookstore — the owners have had to come across previously purchased paper and deem it desirable, and one must browse the loosely categorized shelves before another with your taste in books and cash in their pocket scurries out of their stinking lair and snatches away the most desirable stuff. A new bookstore may order you an unheld book vaguely identical to many others, but there is only one worn copy of Unamuno’s “Tragic Sense of Life”, held together with beige masking tape along the spine, bearing a cursive pencil signature from 1963. The used bookstore is a breathing entity: always in flux, never duplicatable; always ephemeral, never exact. The configuration is always new, the contents are always old — now and then dancing together. Within the bookstore experience, our motley chairs are more than just stage decoration, they are props, purposed.

The stage is set. Enter the players.

A passionate reader may tell you of the experience of being found by a book, connecting, in some way, with the text, the author, the storyteller. Like a hurried foot catching on concrete raised by a thirsty tree root or the death of a still-young friend, this textual encounter moves through you with the undeniable force of Now. The swift punch of a kind of knowledge that breaks apart the long-tailed image of your Self, acting out melodramas within a personal narrative. You and your sense of “I am” are knocked off the isolated and isolating foundation of surity and purity you rest upon. As with Orpheus’ backward glance, the right book has the ability to undo, unravel your understanding of where you were, are, will go. If this sense can be contained in a word, let it be the terrible and exalted experience of “belatedness”. Being already known. Finding someone already in your hiding spot. It is as though your reflection is a moment ahead of you, like seeing your eyes already closed while you are just starting to blink. Belatedness, for the active mind, is the realization, or rerealization, that in thought or experience, “One has tread here before Me” in all of its horror and wonder. Your uniqueness, conscious or unconscious, is called into question by the opened book. Whether you follow within the furrowed footsteps or walk observantly alongside them, the leafy mud in front of you holds the imprint of another.

The book store chair, then, is a sign and site of a winking suggestion, an invitation to intimacy, available and apprehensible to a reader caught within an intertemporal encounter. An encounter involving the simultaneous speaking and hearing of a voice brought forth by the power of written language. Is it your voice? The author’s? The conjured voice of something in between? Passing through this house of mirrors, the distinction between reflection and source disappears. As you read a text that lay dormant for 5 seconds, years, centuries, the recovered and reactivated word is made flesh in the womb of your own mind. Reading takes for fuel your wills, your memories, your feelings, and places you at once firmly within your own body and without it in fluid conversation with your spectrum of selves. There are many texts that can claim greatness, transcendence, ecstasy, but it is not the mere words, printed and bound, that hold the most-disarming power, but the reading of them. The saying that burns up the source for fertile ash. The experience of everything that is not on the page.

Is it the summary, a footnote, the third chapter, page 294, a dedication that wakes you up? Try as you might to resist, the writing burning linguistic form into the noisy void of your unthought thoughts will enflame you as the page starts to read you back. This connection is the catalyst for the unforgetting of unremembered memories and reinterpretations of unassailable truths. Everything is called into question, is tossed up in the air to be caught again. All is opened up. You are simultaneously outside of time, experiencing the communion of past selves (yours and other’s), and right Now, falling off the always advancing edge of time, the realm of unreflected experience where all is necessarily new. The “not yet Then”. Against such an experience raging within the depths of inner being, it is tempting to think the body is there only to pump blood. No. I offer not a dualism of a mind and a body, but two modes of being — taking in and making sense. Much like the mutual necessity of mind and body (for those that believe it), experience and reflection contain and require each other.

There is a chance that in your final moments of life, in full awareness of the apparent and decisive inevitability of your own death, you will straddle this divide. One foot perpetually moving on the semi-solid bank of experience that shifts in sync with the fourth dimension’s flow to meet your step, the most authentic form of being present; the other foot caught in the downflow of a waterfall of reflection, tracking in vain a droplet of thought back to a source, a reason, a meaning, always pulled down into the homogeneous pool of everything time leaves behind in us to hold and shape. Everything you are existing at this moment; with no access to the future and the past reduced to whispered ghosts. Everything you were, a soft imprint on your perception and understanding of your self, every passing second weathering the shape and overlapping a new muddled mark.

When this divide is but a crack inside your stride, and the well-worn words of a used book force your gaze down to the ever-growing gorge, take a seat. Sit in the book store chair, feel the weight come off your feet and press into the solid base. Your sudden unity of experience and reflection is safeguarded. You, searcher, are not lost in the book, but by chance are found by it. The chair is a resting place that allows you to float between times, thoughts, to try on a new face or give a closer look to your current one. In this room, full with secondhand books and an unmatched chair or two, all curated from a fraction of the surviving past, the field of possible thoughts and thoughtful possibilities is opened to you. If through your squinting eyes you see the outline of something compelling in these words, walk out with a searching heart. You may try and wait and try again, fruitless each time. I urge you to persist. Read widely and deeply. Chase down a beautiful cover, a funny name, an interestingly damaged page. Look under covers and in the margins. Who knows who will find you?

How I Built This Site (and run it for free)

Tue, 31 May 2022 01:10:15 -0400

Tech

This is a static website. I edit HTML and markdown files, Jekyll builds and compiles a site, and Netlify pulls the latest build from my Github and serves it out to my domain name. I've relied on the work of Agus Makmun's Jekyll template that I've edited, and a very helpful StackOverflow comment giving me the automatic post tag generation code.

With this configuration, I am not tied down to any platform. The least-stable link is Netlify, only because it is off-machine and they could start charging in the future. I'm looking at becoming more independent and simplify the code — there are a lot of scotch tape solutions.

Color

I wanted a simple design, but still some personality beyond just black and white. Instead of choosing a single color, I have a javascript snippet that holds the hex codes of colors I enjoy. I then have a variety of classes that all pull the same random value on page load and color the site together.

$(document).ready(function () {
  var back = ["#703030", "#1F3663", "#355485", "#E3B480", "#705D8F"];
  var rand = back[Math.floor(Math.random() * back.length)];
$('.colorBlock').css('background', rand);
$('.colorFoot').css('background', rand);
$('.colorStyle').css('background', rand);
$('.colorBorder').css('border-color', rand);
$('.colorBorder:hover').css('border-color', rand);
})

Bookshelf

This is my own creation, coming out of a passion for used books and perhaps some vanity. This is a Jekyll collection with some custom front matter and custom photography. It has the capabilities to do quite a bit, however for now I just list the books and link out to goodreads or leave some comments on individual pages.