Can Cinema Teach Us How to Pay Attention? — What Playtime, Ikiru & After Hours Asks Of Us

We’re constantly told to slow down and be present, but what does it actually mean to pay attention when so much of modern life is designed to scatter it?

This summer, French auteur Jacques Tati returns to LAB111 in six newly restored 4K classics, including his magnum opus PlayTime. Few filmmakers have looked at modern life with Tati’s comic precision: traffic becomes choreography, bureaucracy becomes absurd theatre and the city itself becomes a machine for distraction.

Producer Elliot Bloom and filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus explore attention, bureaucracy and urban life through Tati’s PlayTime, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Scorsese’s After Hours, looking at what happens when the structures of modern life become so consuming that we stop noticing the lives we’re actually living.

But if paying attention has become something we increasingly struggle to do, what should we make of films that turn it into a virtue? In Perfect Days, is noticing the world a genuine alternative to modern life — or are we fetishising attention itself?

Get tickets to It’s Cinema! The Films of Jacques Tati @ LAB111

Get tickets to After Hours @ LAB111

Get tickets to ⁠Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men⁠ @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.