On the one hand, Jacques Tati’s “Playtime” belongs with Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” Keaton’s “The General,” the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup,” and Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” as the full expression of a great comedian’s genius. On the other hand, it joins the rarefied category of supreme masterpieces that rethink the art of motion pictures from the ground up: Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” “Playtime” may be the most challenging of these radical masterpieces. It is one of the most unusual, demanding, exhausting movies ever made.

The Walter Reade Theater is screening a new 70 mm print of Tati’s masterwork. If you’ve seen “Playtime” on video or a 35 mm print, you haven’t really seen it. But then some would say that even if you’ve seen it multiple times on 70 mm, you’ve still only begun to take it in.

As film theoretician Noel Burch has memorably written, “Playtime” is “the first film in the history of cinema that not only must be seen several times, but also must be viewed from several different distances from the screen.” To an extent unrivaled by any other movie I can think of, “Playtime” embodies the essential formal innovation of modern art: the collapse of foreground and background. Like an Abstract Expressionist canvas, it is an “allover” visual field where the eye is free to wander as it chooses.

From scene to scene, there is rarely a single focus of attention: The entire frame is a playground for synchronous games, gags, and miniplots. Although Tati himself is a recurrent figure in the film, there is no main character. Rather than follow an overarching narrative, the movie weaves a mesh of incident, a collection of “giddy encounters between people and things,” as critic Kent Jones has described it.

The characters include a group of tourists visiting Paris; a pack of nuns; various businessmen; bureaucrats, and secretaries; and – in the climactic set piece – a room full of diners at a restaurant that gradually, hilariously begins to fall apart. What they encounter is the stuff of everyday life in the modern city: escalators, traffic jams, skyscrapers, consumer gizmos. Tati scouted all over Europe to find the right location for his project before realizing he’d just have to build it himself.

Constructed on the outskirts of Paris, the gargantuan set that came to be called “Tativille” was made out of 11,700 square feet of glass, 38,700 square feet of plastic, 31,500 square feet of timber, and 486,000 square feet of concrete. There’s not a single square inch that wasn’t worth the time and trouble – and there was a whole lot of trouble during the filming of “Playtime.” Wind blew over a large portion of the set, which had to be rebuilt. Production difficulties over the endless shoot required Tati to take out loans that effectively bankrupted him.

“Playtime” was released in December 1967, to the general bafflement of the public, although a number of critics at the time realized they were in the presence of a revolutionary achievement. Tati would go on to make two more films, “Traffic” and “Parade,” but his career never quite recovered from “Playtime.”

However, the film’s reputation has grown, and it is now widely considered Tati’s masterpiece. The term “Tatiesque” has come to designate certain formal and tonal affinities with the maker of “Playtime”: the preference for long takes; the meticulous attention to the space of the frame; the wry and restrained sense of humor; and what might be called metaphysical whimsy. Tsai Mingliang’s “The Hole,” for example, is full of Tatiesque moments, as when a character drops his leg through the hole in an apartment floor and the dangling limb seems to enter the top of the frame as if from outside the movie itself.

This kind of gentle joking with the spectator is everywhere in “Playtime.” The magic of the film stems from how thoroughly it invites and rewards your participation. Tati’s great gift is to turn the viewer into the author of his own experience. To watch “Playtime” is to create “Playtime” – and what a wondrous creation it is.

Until January 5 (Lincoln Center, 212-875-5600).