Our summer collaboration with the Knoxville Museum of Art kicks off with Jacques Tati’s staggering, career-derailing 1967 masterpiece of modernist critique and gentle visual comedy.

Tuesday’s special $5 screening (FREE for KMA members!) will feature a talk by Arrowmont artist-in-residence Sam van Strien, a visual artist who examines the relationship between architecture, finance, and capitalism, exploring how these forces shape urban space. In selecting PLAYTIME, Sam highlights the film’s playful yet critical take on modernism, technology, and architecture, themes present in both his artistic practice and the exhibition Electricity for All (May 16 – August 17 at the KMA.)

Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with PLAYTIME. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the lovably old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a baffling modern world, this time Paris. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, PLAYTIME is a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion. (Janus Films)

“My all-time favorite movie… almost certainly has the most intricately designed mise en scene in all of cinema.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum

“A peculiar, mysterious, magical film.” – Roger Ebert

“A bracing reminder in this all-too-lazy era that films can occasionally achieve the status of art.” – Vincent Canby

“A work of unparalleled genius.” – The Dissolve