The Turin Horse (2011) A Film by Bela Tarr

Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse would seem like The End even if the director himself hadn't boldly declared it his final feature. Brooding, angry, apocalyptic, and bathed in the kind of deadly seriousness that only accompanies major artistic statements, the film is a lugubrious retreat from civilization, narrative, perhaps even existence and - in its final moments as gas lamps fail to ignite in the darkness - illumination, the stuff of cinema itself. This is a massive, earth-shaking film, even as its geographical specificity and narrative simplicity seems to imply something smaller and humbler than anything Tarr has done before. Taking the episode that allegedly launched Nietzsche's prolonged madness and near-comatose state in 1889 as its starting point, the film then builds a world around the horseman who the famous philosopher witnessed beating his stubborn animal. In a career filled with subtle Breughelian moves, it's Tarr's most overt yet, a deliberately withholding maneuver that hearkens back to the painter's Fall of Icarus, where the more historically notable, titular scene was similarly disregarded. It's also an immediate reminder of Tarr's fundamental concern: the overlooked, the misunderstood, and the seemingly unimportant people, whom he always proves to be irrevocably human in one way or another.

The horseman, named Ohlsdorfer and played by Tarr regular János Derzsi, sustains a meager livelihood in a harsh, arid Hungarian plain with his loyal and hard-working daughter (the familiar Erika Bók). A torrential windstorm presses on day and night, never ceasing, picking up vicious tornadoes of dirt and leaves and making it so that any trip outside is an epic pilgrimage. Their stone cottage, practically crumbling from the incessant beating it takes from the weather, is dark and grimy. The dirt caked on its every surface is paid vivid attention by Tarr's camera, and painterly shafts of light slip in through the house's few tiny windows, creating a cavernous space of deep blacks and ethereal whites. Within this tactile yet otherworldly location, the father and daughter enact and reenact the same domestic routines day after day, their lives consumed by the labor required to maintain even the slightest sustenance. This work demands so much of them that they have nearly ceased verbal communication entirely, save for the occasional unintelligible grunt from the father and curt declarative statement from the daughter ("It's ready," referring to the two boiled potatoes that comprise their every meal, is a common one).

Tarr, more faithful to the chronological flow of daily life than ever before here, molds these endlessly repeated routines into a linear six-day structure with title cards indicating each new day. It's one of the two structural decisions that allows the film to somewhat closely resemble Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman - the other being his decision to vary the camera's relationship to these routines throughout. Like Akerman, Tarr has discovered brilliantly simple ways to induce a kind of quotidian hypnosis and lend the film an unlikely sense of propulsion. In The Turin Horse as well as in Jeanne Dielman, a curious tension is maintained between predictability and unpredictability; while the narrative rhythms and repetitions make perfectly clear what the actors will perform in the next scene and roughly how they will perform it, there is never any way to guess how those actions will be composed, and the subtle distinctions in the cinematographic design dredge up emotional depth and complexity beneath the seemingly mundane flow of everyday life. (For instance, the first meal portrays the father as animalistic, the second conveys the calm subservience of the daughter, and the third detects a kind of harmonious intimacy between them in two-shot). Furthermore, any disruption to the actual content of the repetitions is doubly unnerving, because audience awareness has been heightened by the relative redundancy therein.



In this light, The Turin Horse establishes a set of narrative patterns to be performed roughly in order: 1) the daughter wakes, only to be followed shortly after by her father; 2) the daughter, after adding fire to the hearth, heads outside to retrieve water from their well and returns to help dress her father in his day clothing; 3) they both take a swig of palinka, the father's preferred hard liquor; 4) she prepares two boiled potatoes for them to eat; 5) he heads out to the barn, where he takes the horse out of its stable for a ride into town to fetch amenities; 6) upon return, she helps him back inside and dresses him into his night clothing; 7) they sleep. These activities are broken up by portions of rest and sizable chunks of time sitting and looking out the window at the featureless Hungarian landscape, as if in a church pew. They occur over and over, passionlessly and without blemishes, yet there's something too lived-in about their movements, too ancient about their behaviors, to compare them to robots programmed for work. These are people who are fully aware of their destitute situation and who despise every minute of it, yet they are at a loss to change it. Like the stubborn drunks from Damnation, the poor and gullible small-town farmers from Satantango, or the brooding bay watchmen from The Man from London, their lives are victim to a brutal fate machine that they are forced to either endure or be defeated by.

Yet there are always signs of change for better or worse, little hiccups in the drudgery of existence that suggest a reversal, or at least a slight turn, of fate. In Tarr's work, these instances often stand in metaphorically for misleading forces of authority, false promises that lead only to greater misery. Other times, they merely reinforce a vision of the contemporary world as disharmonious, chaotic, and cosmically imbalanced. In The Turin Horse, they act as gradual reminders of mortality, the notion that none of our consistent routines can last forever and we are all bound to die. First, a strange guest (Mihály Kormos) arrives, at first seeking to refill his supply of palinka and then launching into a vague, extended rant on the rotten state of existence that seems to mirror some of Tarr's recent, only-slightly-more-specific musings on the "shitty" current state of society. (Few directors can pull off allegorical dialogue that is this generalized and open-ended, but Tarr lets it absorb fluidly into the vaguely unreal mood of his cinematic world.) Second, a band of hysterical America-bound gypsies raid the well that provides the father and daughter their only source of water. Ohlsdorfer shoos them away with wicked verbal aggression, but not before they steal some of the water, drop a curious quasi(anti?)-Bible in the daughter's hands, and potentially cast a spell on them that is the cause of their dry well the following day. Finally, in the throes of all this, and likely inspired by the never-ending gale outside, their horse refuses to take the father into town and accept food and water.

Each of these domestic interruptions points towards the film's blackly comic absurdity. Tarr's always had a nasty sense of humor, but here it reaches its darkest and most biting. At the end of Kormos' speech, the longest stretch of dialogue in the film, Ohlsdorfer unleashes a sharp brush-off that instantly puts into question the integrity of the man's ideas: "Come off of it. That's rubbish." Later, when the father and daughter choose to leave their home, Tarr holds a long, long shot of the nearby hill and lonely tree over which they passed, only to watch as they slowly return after a minute or more from an empty, static frame. It's a gag that wouldn't be out of place in a Monty Python film. That being said, there's nothing funny about the horse's slow, assertive abstinence from activity, which seems as much an active rebuttal to her owner's often harsh ways as it is an act of resignation to the unforgiving grimness of her life. She stares her own mortality in the face, which supplies additional poignancy to the existential perseverance of the father and daughter. Who comes away with a better scenario in the end is one of the most intriguing questions Tarr leaves on the table.



Whatever the case, The Turin Horse undoubtedly creates a world that is perpetually on the brink of finality and asks its characters to allow civilization to fail or push it onwards. Every one of the film's major aesthetic contributions underlines this idea. The single musical piece by the always impressive Mihály Víg is relentlessly churning and circular, its minor-key organ arpeggios and wheezing violins insistent reminders of the redundancy of quotidian life, and its dark, intense forward motion a hurdle towards an impending doom. So constant and menacing is this triplet dirge that it underscores the banalities of daily life with a throbbing dramatic pulse. Fred Keleman's cinematography, meanwhile, finds expressive ways to outline every dimension of the film's limited chamber space with elaborate camera moves - often on a steadicam, a device that is used more consistently here than in any Tarr film, but which is wholly necessary given the drastic single-shot trips from hushed interiors to blustery exteriors - that draw attention to the feebleness of the human body and the weight of time. László Krasznahorkai, the writer of every Tarr film since Damnation, supplies the film's enigmatic monologues and narrations (including the Nietzsche anecdote that opens the film), as well as the fictional sacred text that Bók reads, phoneme by phoneme, in a haunting scene on the fifth day. Tarr's wife/editor Agnes Hranitzky, always finding the perfect beat in her husband's majestic tracking shots to cut to the next, is also credited as co-director.

That this is reportedly the last time this visionary team will collaborate seems to have nudged them all to the top of their game, with each distilling his/her own special talents to cohere with the tantalizingly bare-bones texture of Tarr's film. The Turin Horse, despite its repetitiousness, its tiny ensemble, and its utter narrative void, is an unfailingly evocative and affecting achievement, a film that possesses a raw, wordless power. It bears the sense of a single individual expressing his deepest, most sincere thoughts about existence and the state of our world, which he perceives to be tarnished by authority and political manipulation, corrupted by capitalism, and exhausted by poor quality of living. This is, for sure, Tarr's bleak worldview, but it's not without a beacon of gleaming optimism, a permanent love for even the most destitute people and a belief in their essential dignity.

Almanac of Fall (1984) A Film by Bela Tarr

Just before Bela Tarr finally settled on the characteristic black-and-white, long-take formalism that he's become widely respected for in his later work, he made Almanac of Fall, a jarring transitional piece that attempts to suddenly marry the freewheeling social realism of his early career to a sophisticated and rigorous visual style. It's a social drama perched uneasily between down-to-earth sympathy and the more cosmic observation of films like Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, and as a result it's never fully satisfying as narrative or as allegory. When placed within the context of Tarr's artistic progression, however, it's a compelling work, flirting as it does with all of the cinematic staples the director would eventually fully embrace. Set entirely in an old apartment that feels at once cramped and labyrinthine, the film navigates the conniving power struggles of an aging woman (Hédi Temessy), her greedy and immoral son, his former teacher (Pál Hetényi), a housemaid who tends to the woman's health (Erika Bodnár), and her discontented partner (Tarr regular Miklós Székely B.). Tarr sticks rigidly to the simplicity of this scenario, never leaving the apartment and mostly unveiling the drama through long two-character exchanges. For the modesty alone, not to mention the implicit challenge of keeping things lively and interesting in such a limiting set-up, Almanac of Fall is an admirable exercise.

The flip side of the coin is that as much as Tarr's ingenuity in framing the central drama is praiseworthy, the content frequently cannot hold its own. Despite the ubiquity of dialogue and character, the film is oddly one of Tarr's least propulsive, searching desperately for quite a while to find some semblance of narrative momentum in the lives of these downtrodden and unhappy individuals. Eventually that kick does arrive when the maid sleeps with the teacher who is boarding at the apartment in the event of severe economic hardship, a mostly offscreen sexual encounter that slowly unleashes bitterness and jealousy in her partner, distrust from her client, and heightened sexual desire from the woman's son. Before this point, however, the film is frustratingly stagnant, reducible to a series of one-sided conversations in which one character muses about anything from his or her existential crises to simple day-to-day money issues. This is a very specific milieu of post-Communist Hungary that Tarr is zeroing in on here, the same context he would go on to symbolically deconstruct later in his career, and as such we get an up-close-and-personal understanding of the tepid and confused social atmosphere. The early dialogues often go unanswered by the listening party, a suggestion that the struggles of an individual in this climate cannot be solved or soothed by anyone else. Everyone is on their own, fighting their own battles, be it economic, political, social, or sexual.

To express this unrest, Tarr uses a garish color palette of hot reds and murky bluish-greens. Dictated less, as far as I can tell, by specific symbolical purposes and more by a general air of heightened emotion, these colors emanate from room to room with seemingly no domestic logic; a splash of green will glow in a backroom as if an obscure scientific experiment is going on while a face in the foreground is smacked by an orange light that seems to be shooting from the floor. At several points, the black boots of the teacher appear malicious as they trudge through the living room of chiaroscuro red and black. (Already, it's clear that Tarr is establishing a potent shorthand for black boots and pitch-black pea coats, a wardrobe pulled from noir that nonetheless has its own distinct flavor in Tarr's oeuvre.) Other times, the light is less harsh, almost as soft as the colors in Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, particularly in an early scene of rare camaraderie between the woman and her nurse where the two laugh and discuss the nurse's romantic endeavors. Still, Tarr's continued use of lurid, unreal shades manages to extract the buried sense of anger that Temessy is able to so thinly veil towards the nurse until later in the film.



In fact, the film's best scenes are marked by these exchanges where an emotional subtext boils beneath the mostly calm dispositions of the two characters speaking. When the nurse's partner shaves the face of the teacher - whose sexual behavior with the nurse he is only vaguely aware of - Tarr's camera slowly circles the two, capturing the illicit bloodlust of the scene, the fact that he could dig right into the teacher's face at any time. Furthermore, Tarr's uncomfortably intimate sound design lays bare all the quiet breathing, grunting, and scraping, which uncovers an implicitly homoerotic tension as well. Yet later, Tarr's clever mise-en-scene can't fully justify the more one-dimensional realization of the bitter emotional undercurrent between the two: a startling shot from beneath a glass (or plastic?) floor watching as the nurse's partner violently beats the teacher into it. It's a moment that's more exciting for the unexpected way Tarr shoots it than for the actual act of violence onscreen. More effective are the instances when the outbursts explode to the fore after long and tense discussions, such as the one between the woman's son and the teacher in which the son interrogates the teacher about the presence of his mother's valuable piece of jewelry in the interest of selling it and running away with the nurse, eventually holding a broken glass up to his neck in ugly greed. The whole affair turns into a game of violent and scheming one-upmanship, with each of the characters pulling their own selfish pranks to achieve money or sex.

If Bergman's heated chamber dramas were marked by their firm establishment of a single space to highlight the insanity of monotony, then Tarr's is notable for its stubborn refusal to make the stage remotely recognizable from one moment to the next. The old woman's apartment is seemingly medium-sized and traditionally laid-out, but Tarr's searching camera makes it so that every room feels new, some serpentine diversion from the central plot of the house. Much of the scenes are shot in roving telephoto from behind indistinct foreground objects, focusing on the haggard faces yet never losing sight of the larger space in which they speak. One can sense Tarr beginning to distance himself from his characters until finally deciding to settle on an almost cosmic perspective in later films; one such clue comes early on when mother and son argue and the camera slithers back and forth from behind an indoor gate, occasionally sliding behind total blackness in a way that recalls the opening scene of voyeurism in The Man From London. Still, the ultimate sensibility of Almanac of Fall is not nearly as complex or open as those later masterworks. A final scene of atonal celebration in which all the characters' frustrations with each other seem to have been extinguished cements the bleak message Tarr is conveying; set to a pop song whose thesis is the inevitability of fate, the suggestion is that these people will remain deadlocked in mutual tension no matter how hard they try to break free from their dour situation, as if only an outside force can pave the way to happiness and stability. As Tarr's career continued, that force would become abstracted and untrustworthy, and his desperate search for the dignity of individuals would become increasingly nuanced and hopeful.

Satantango: Take 2

Bela Tarr puts me into a trance. If you haven't been able to infer from my numerous appreciations of his films in the past, I can't help but be drawn to his work. I also can't help but feel the overwhelming desire to write anew about individual films each time I rewatch them, to revise my own sloppy thoughts, to expand upon something only hinted at, or to express something entirely new that came out of a viewing. I don't want to give the impression that I think Tarr can do no wrong, or that I would kiss his feet if ever in his presence, because I will readily admit that his films certainly have their moments - however rare - of tedium, moments where I just wish he would get on with it. Yet at the same time, I feel something extremely special when I watch his films. Something tells me he is a savior of the cinema, a sign of clairvoyance whose importance will most likely not be fully recognized until after it's too late. In a sense, he is the messiah that the ill-fated characters in Satantango only hoped the ominous Irimias would be, a man who could lift them from their mundane existence towards a more comfortable and sustainable future. So it is with this outlandish enthusiasm that I return to his films, even at their most taxing, which is certainly the case with Satantango.

And yet, despite all of the analytical chops I like to think I have acquired throughout my years of film viewing, Tarr's glorious hunker of celluloid maintains a core of inscrutability, of cosmic cinematic feng shui that may never be understood logically, despite all of the director's steadfast denials of metaphysics. Something sacred is going on here, and perhaps it would take seven viewings (that is, one for every hour that the film runs) in order to grasp it or articulate it, but this lack of knowing precisely does not slacken the impact of the present experience. Quite the contrary, in fact. It seems that for every plot thread that is either slightly underdeveloped or left deliberately ambiguous (and I mean deeply, deeply ambiguous; Tarr doesn't give much of anything to assist in interpreting some parts of the film), and for every blatant diversion from the ostensible "story" that Tarr unabashedly indulges in, Satantango grows more tantalizing, beckoning you further into its simultaneously prosaic and sinister atmosphere. Consider the IMDB-ready synopsis of the film: a dilapidated farm collective in post-Communist Hungary awaits their yearly wages while becoming anxious about the impending arrival of a prophetic figure named Irimias and his sidekick Petrina, whom they know could potentially destroy their well-being or enhance it. Ultimately, following tragic events in the village, Irimias lures the rural folk into his convoluted plan, ending up with all of their treasured wages in his coat pocket.

This straightforward aggregation tells you everything and nothing about the film. It's true that it covers the major narrative action in it, and it would suffice if you were to ever to be put in the situation of informing someone of what the hell a seven hour movie could be about, but it would almost have to be followed by an acknowledgment of the scant importance the story plays in the overall cinematic experience. Instead, the events that take place are more a vehicle for exploring Tarr's characteristic concerns, for putting characters - or more fittingly, real people, given his affinity for using the same non-professional actors time and again - into situations that test their dignity and moral certitude, but even more for simply immersing us in a powerfully concrete space and time. Before trying to decide what the film is about, Tarr would prefer you to shut down all interpretive frameworks and give yourself over to the visceral presence of the film, to literally live alongside the characters for the duration, if not physically then pretty damn close to it. The in-your-face tactility of Satantango may explain why it is so difficult at times to grapple with on a narrative level, for the purely experiential dimension of it supersedes the dramatic details. After all, this is not a Lisandro Alonso film we're talking about, where the physical weight of the film is the be-all and end-all, but rather a film that is equal parts physically immersive and substance-driven.

An episode of Satantango that would be instructive in this regard - that is, it embodies the balance the film tries to maintain between these two viewing apparatuses - is the first sequences with the doctor (Peter Berling), the third chapter of the film (out of twelve, a number rooted in Laszlo Krasznahorkai's novel of the same name). The episode is possibly the film's most intimate, and therefore most penetrating and direct, in terms of its relation to the audience. The silently pirouetting camera observes the obese doctor sitting before a messy gathering of papers and such at his desk, peering out at the comings-and-goings of the local villagers and recording their actions in his notebook, the image alternating focal trajectory several times over the course of one unbroken take, an amazingly unfussy act of technical wizardry. Nothing much occurs in this sequence other than the repetitious heavy breathing of the doctor interspersed by his periodic swings of Fruit Brandy and his dispassionate murmurs while jotting down notes. Yet because of Tarr's extremely tight observation in claustrophobic, grimy quarters, we are completely, even uncomfortably submerged in the physical moment. The near silence further accentuates this intimacy, because such quietude in films is usually reciprocated by something unexpected, something to jolt you out of your seat, but when that moment is prolonged further and further, a strange tension is born out of the interplay between the verisimilitude and the expected change of pace.



With all of these simple surface preoccupations that accompany the viewing experience of this individual scene, it's easy to miss the narrative and thematic undercurrents that it establishes. For instance, the episode is introduced by a classic binocular effect assuming the doctor's point-of-view as he focuses out his window on the rainy, muddy streets. We see this before we even see who is using these binoculars. The voyeuristic nature of the scene is a self-reflexive device used by Tarr; by first supplying us the subjective experience of looking through the binoculars, he is aligning us, the audience, with the doctor as his surrogate. We too are observing the disjointed events that take place in the village, gathering hard evidence and making overall assumptions based on it. This stance acquires added significance in the final scene when the doctor, in a striking bit of cynicism, boards up his windows for good, blocking off his view from the outside world, and by extension ours. The film ends, and we can no longer see what happens. What also occurs in the scene is the fascinating, potentially multivalent line that is drawn from the doctor to the police investigators who are seen throughout the film seemingly in cahoots with Irimias, because of the doctor's propensity to oversee everything and make judgments at face value. Perhaps it is significant that Tarr makes him a retired doctor, a profession meant to singlehandedly help people rather than punish them. Social critique seems to inadvertently attach itself to this equalization of the law, the doctor, and the moviegoer.

Like the doctor, it is frequently difficult to refrain from judging the characters based upon their actions. Tarr however, separates himself from a director like Terrence Malick (at least in a film like Badlands), who supplies the audience no inkling of a backstory to help understand a character's motivations, leaving us only with their physical behavior and surroundings. Granted, you're unlikely to ever get any explicit mention of motivations in Satantango, and storytelling devices such as flashbacks or foreshadowing are basically extinct from Tarr's cinematic vernacular, but at the very least he discovers a way to weave in some assistance. The infamous cat torture scene, when a young, mentally challenged girl named Estike (Erika Bók) scurries into a loft and disturbingly asserts her power over a stray cat, attests to this. Earlier in the film, her older brother Sanyi (András Bodnár) informs the approaching Irimias and Petrina of the conditions in the village, even telling them what a headcase Estike is and how she is beaten by her mother as punishment. Prior to the cat scene, Estike is forcefully instructed by her mother to remain seated outside their house on a dirty chair, and directly before this, we watch Sanyi trick her into believing that she can plant a money tree. She is clearly a lonely, neglected girl, and her spontaneous desire to express her dominance over the innocent cat is a displacement of that angst, a way of mirroring her own mother's actions towards her.

What follows is one of the most devastatingly sublime scenes in the film. First, she watches the cat's slow demise after force-feeding it rat poison. Then, after wandering into the rainy night and being viciously ignored by the doctor (a moment witnessed earlier in the film from the doctor's point of view), she escapes into the remains of a wooded church (a location that has all the spiritual dissolution of a similar spot in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev) and consumes the rat poison herself. Resting the cat lovingly in her bosom, she lies down to face her passing and Tarr introduces an excerpt from Krasznahorkai's novel about her peaceful death. It's a beautiful, forgiving moment that urges us to reconsider any automatic judgments we made based on her treatment of the animal. Though Tarr's a decidedly earthbound auteur, the scene is effortlessly transcendent. The most curious part about it though is her clinician's approach toward putting the finishing touches of both her and the cat's life, acts that feel as calculated and premeditated as the vile, selfish acts that they inspire. With all the deftness of a frighteningly precise dictator, Irimias twists what starts as an eloquent elegy to Estike's life as well as an acknowledgment of the collective blame required into a discussion of his own plan for the villagers, which involves them shamefully handing their wages over to him.



If Tarr's primary goal is to not judge his characters, thereby implying the audience should not judge his characters either, he certainly pushes more buttons with Irimias, albeit in a more ambiguous manner when placed aside the directness of the cat episode. Satantango's most continuously probing question, at least on a narrative level, is this: is Irimias truly interested in helping the villagers or is he a selfish conman, focused primarily on squeezing the most money out of the situation for himself at the expense of a group of people? Being mindful of Tarr's preference of "real people" - meaning rural peasants - over bureaucratic organizations, it seems inevitable that his sympathies would lie with the villagers, even though they are often presented as conniving and greedy, such as in an early scene when Schmidt (László feLugossy), Mrs. Schmidt (Éva Almássy Albert), and Futaki (Miklós Székely B.) plan on ditching the town with all of the wages. Yet at the same time, there are moments that suggest that Irimias is not so bad after all, like when he sends the group to an abandoned manor, leaves them thinking he will not reconvene with them (he has the money at this point anyways), but eventually shows up with new plans and unerring dedication. Is this only a move that will set him up for more monetary gain later?

Of course, Tarr ultimately does not reveal the final result of this supposed plan, ending the film on the most enigmatic note possible instead. He simply shows us the last exchange between Irimias and the villagers, which involves him providing them directions in town as to how to acquire the jobs he has set up for them. This, he tells them, is a necessary step to take on the way to achieving the prosperous farm they hope for. They vanish into town and we never hear about how it worked out, if there were even jobs at all. The telling scene occurs afterward, when two police officials transcribe a report written to them from Irimias speaking negatively, and very harshly, about the state of the villagers. This prolonged, dispassionate jibber-jabber between the two cops (one of those rare scenes I was talking about when Tarr really pushes it) persuasively suggests that Irimias sold them down the river for good, but simultaneously they could be lies off his pen. After all, what exactly is the link between Irimias and the policemen throughout the film? Is he a loyal spy for them, or is he like the figure in Pickpocket, as resistant to the law as he is devoted to true freedom?

Questions like these pile up throughout the experience of watching Satantango, in every one of the film's carefully orchestrated scenes. They're enticing questions that propel the film forward even during its more static stretches. I see this essay as part of what may become an ongoing series, perhaps to be expanded upon every time I rewatch the film, perhaps even as a fitting seven-part series. It's nearly impossible to fully address the sprawling majesty of the work in one all-encompassing essay; rather, it's something that would warrant an entire book. For instance, I haven't even begun to hammer away at what this all means, although I do have my theories. I can't imagine though that I'll ever truly have this masterpiece fully figured out. Still, that won't stop me from trying.

The Man From London (A londoni férfi) A Film by Bela Tarr (2007)

When writing about Bela Tarr's cinema, starting with the opening shots of his films is nearly unavoidable. He places so much emphasis on his extraordinarily long, spellbinding first impressions. Seven years after Werckmeister Harmonies, the greatest film of the 21st century thus far in my opinion, he has somehow managed to match the brilliance of its opening shot with The Man From London's, a feat which seemed unimaginable. Beginning on a rope dangling in water as it anchors a boat to shore and concluding with a train leaving its station seen through the wooden supports of a watchtower, the mind-bendingly complex shot tells an entire slow burner of a story that makes up a great chunk of the film's plot: Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), the gloomy watchtower attendant, paces back and forth in his roost and witnesses a classic bit of noirish tomfoolery involving a cloaked man with an ominous suitcase evading the boat guards. The shot is delivered in one swooping motion, first upward and eventually repetitively horizontal, and is far more abstract than the cow trudge of Satantango or the bar dance of Werckmeister Harmonies. A few times, it seems possible that Tarr has actually cut, but what really happens is the frame is variably interrupted by pitch black surfaces, the floor of the watchtower or the thick window frames. We also never get a solid view of the interior of the room from which Maloin is voyeuristically peering, or of Maloin himself in fact; the camera instead crawls in and out of focus directly behind his gaping back, interchanging this with his panoramic view of the pier. After approximately twelve demanding minutes, Tarr has infuriated fans of "getting to the point" and left others, like myself, in mesmerized awe.

The impact of The Man from London can therefore be likened to the striking of a chord on the piano which is subsequently left to sustain. This is not to suggest that it declines considerably, because the final ring of the piano strings can be just as beautiful as that initial contact. However, as much as the film establishes what may seem like a plot-heavy noir, Tarr loses a whole bunch of interest in his initial premise (which ultimately finds Maloin with the suitcase of money), instead meditating on the aftermath. He lets the brooding mood of the film's initial minutes simmer over tangentially into the rest of the film. Mihaly Vig's deep, vibrating score continues to underpin, but does so at briefer interjections. A police investigator (István Lénárt) arrives in the small town Maloin inhabits, determined to solve the murder that followed, but goes about his business in a routine manner, only existing in the film through Maloin's immediate awareness and being nearly immaterial due to the fact that the bulk of his discussions are spoken in English, which the French Maloin does not comprehend. So, yes, to an extent, the film is Tarr's most plot-driven piece (perhaps naturally, given its source material is a 1933 Georges Simenon novel), with classic elements such as murder and suitcases of money, but paradoxically continues to treat atmosphere with the same emphasis.



Tarr has stated that he intends on returning to simplicity for his declared "final film", The Turin House, because he felt he maxed out his capacity for technical bravura and narrative complexity with The Man from London. Of course, this comment is coming from the world's greatest arthouse practitioner, a filmmaker who is blind to current cinematic trends, so there is a bit of a knee-jerk response that accompanies it: "Huh? Complex?". Tarr's work is the holy grail of elusive cinematic excellence in the face of extremely modest material. I wouldn't say The Man from London is nearly pandering enough for Tarr to dive back to roots (even though it does have a surprising appearance from Tilda Swinton, an accomplished Hollywood name), but by the same token, he has pushed himself to the more conventional boundaries of his decidedly unconventional vision. Vig's music comes the closest it ever has to serving the classical function of a film score, showing up more frequently to bring mystery to the dullest of moments (Maloin purchasing his daughter Henriette (Erika Bók, the unforgettable little girl from Satantango) a fine scarf in attempt to detour his mind from the guilt of his silent possession of money). The use of Simenon's novel is also a choice that has raised eyebrows from Tarranites, considering it is quite orthodox indeed.

Nonetheless, Tarr's stylistic virtues remain intact. His work with cinematographer Fred Kelemen (a student of Tarr's) is characteristically marvelous. The film's look is a sterling example of chiaroscuro lighting, giving defined crispness to the world-weary wrinkles in his familiar character's faces (I say familiar because we have seen nearly every character in a Tarr film before and they essentially reprise their roles). At times, it was difficult to recall when a particular shot began, largely due to the fact that his stately camera movements travel anywhere and everywhere, showcasing an amazing ability to shift focal planes. As usual, Tarr does the majority of his sound work in post-production, which has admittedly become most noticeable here. The dubbing, while it does sometimes seem to be a choice meant to give a hypersensual quality to voices that succeeds frequently, can be aggravatingly disjointed. Still, Tarr's crystalline handling of the nuances of a bar room's ambiance proves to be one thing that never ceases to be singular; pool ball's rattle around with unimaginable amplification, accordions sound continuously, and the slurping of beer against the lips has wonderful clarity. That being said, the fact that Tarr returns so casually to an almost exact replica of the kind of pub that we saw in Damnation (1988) smacks of regression rather than artistic evolution.

I do believe that The Man From London was given an unfair glance by many critics at Cannes two years ago. The resounding verdict was that it was "good but not great Tarr". The film doesn't resonate with as much cosmic multivalence as Werckmeister Harmonies, but there is also an entirely different goal at hand. Tarr's more occupied by Maloin's passivity, a trait that eats away at him, and his desperate need to make something of his humdrum life, made known by the metronome-like rhythms that sometimes reverberate in his head. If the film were treated with the same kind of epic scope of its predecessor, it would have been off base. The Man From London is dealt with exactly as it should be, a reserved examination of the human condition with quiet intensity. It is different than any other Tarr film, and given his apparently impending retirement, it should be savored.

Werckmeister Harmonies: Some More Thoughts

(Note: I guarantee this post will contain several spoilers. It is primarily an analysis of Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, which I have previously reviewed, but in retrospect is a rather weak encapsulation. Therefore, if you haven't seen the film, well, that's quite unfortunate, because you'll get nothing out of this post. Or you could just scan the images, in which case you will likely want to see the film.)

After viewing Hungarian director Bela Tarr's 2000 release, Werckmeister Harmonies, I couldn’t shake the fact that it was a monolithic achievement; it was closer to reality than to a movie, and therefore I felt it had the uncommon capacity to alter my perceptions of art, the world, and ultimately of myself. The film is, in my opinion, Tarr's most enticing, for there is always a strong sense of menace lurking right around the corner, which is an emotion that is usually absent in Satantango and Damnation, in which the hell of their worlds has already erupted and is there to stay. Werckmeister Harmonies treats me to everything I find sublime about cinema: exceptional high contrast black and white cinematography, languid tracking shots, lack of conventional narrative, abstract symbols, gorgeously somber music, unique characters, dominant use of elements such as fog and fire, and thoughtful musings. Its rhythms are as eerily similar to a fever dream as those in David Lynch's Eraserhead, another film which I believe to be genuinely masterful. I have now returned to the atmosphere of Werckmeister Harmonies three times and feel its more than worthy of a closer look.

Instantly, Werckmeister Harmonies is substantially unconventional and anti-commercial. In fact, it’s in a league almost entirely on its own in current cinema (only paralleled by Tarr’s other work). It’s a methodical dreamscape of a film depicting a small town in Hungary that encounters an odd circus show amidst a prophetic time. Tarr puts paramount emphasis on atmosphere rather than plot. Each image cannot be taken at face value; considering most shots are supremely lengthy, one is forced to assess the connotation of each individual black and white composition. Every unbroken shot represents a single scene, of which there are a minimal 37. I was stunned by Tarr’s sophisticated bare bones technique, this being the first time I witnessed such a minimalistic style. The fact that the film is continually enticing is in itself enough of a mystery when placed aside modern media’s propensity to lasso the attention of viewers with rapid juxtapositions of often times technically manipulated images. I couldn’t help but associate these minimalistic visuals with unadulterated reality, because no one can dismiss the fact that life frequently moves slowly and mysteriously.

An indelible impression was also made on me due to the metaphysics of each scene. Granted, Tarr would deny the presence of any allegory in his work, but there’s no doubt that Werckmeister Harmonies is the most symbolically tempting film in his career. As a starting point, the film perhaps makes the suggestion at times - with ample references to the universe and landscapes - that nature is far more powerful than humanity. It is so powerful in fact that it can drastically shape the behaviors of people, a notion that is stunningly on display in the film’s bravura opening sequence, an approximately ten minute long waltz around a drunken display of the cosmos as directed by the protagonist Janos Valuska. If one views the circus as an obstruction to the natural flow of things, as is mirrored in the film through the pantomimic display of an eclipse and Uncle Eszter's microphone discussion of the natural tones that composer Andreas Werckmeister disrupted through his creation of a musical scale, nature’s effect on people is disastrous: violence, depression, reclusiveness, and angst all ensue because of it. (Also, as Eszter posits, the onset of harmonic dissonance and the lack of pure music.) The simple image of the massive circus truck entering the town through a barren roadway is a magnificently lucid portrayal of the coming of catastrophe; one hankering slab of metal signifies the moon beginning to cover the Sun, Werckmeister's orderly thought process setting in motion centuries back, and Hungarian Communism taking full stride.

Aside from a commentary on nature's powerful abilities, Werckmeister Harmonies can be read in a spiritual manner, or - given Tarr's willingness to deny the possibility of proving God's existence - lack thereof. Twice there are undertones of this sentiment. Janos raves about the whale being a creation of God's omnipotence, withholding a stirring sense of the great beyond. He determinedly tries to show it to Eszter but there is never an opportune moment. Angry circles of bearded men surround the whale in its metal tomb, a way of imprisoning good in evil. The whale can be viewed as God Himself, withering away unseen, owned by savage men and used for squalid entertainment. Tarr could be making the case that God has no impact on destitute situations, except perhaps to one soul (Janos) that can't seem to make his or her case known. Later on, in the masterful hospital sequence, the shocking exposé of a bare and fragile old man in a damaged hospital takes on a staunch religious connotation. A slice of incandescence is emitted on him, also giving him the implication of God, however, surrounded by a crowd of hostile men in a shadowy room, a deceased God. The sight of him turns the tides on the havoc being wreaked, but there is no hint of the man ever bettering himself upon their departure. Once the hospital has been ravaged, there's no hope for his survival. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, the dwarfish Prince is utter evil. He drags malevolence with him and contains the whale, suggesting him as Satan. He also speaks Slovakian, an enemy of Hungary during World War II, and his spurts of anger towards his co-employees sound only a notch or two away from Hitler. Although his size may impress upon him less power, his mysterious enigma attaches hordes of zealots to him. Tarr is depicting a classic clash of power - good and evil - which does not end in uplifting triumph, but rather an exertion of the evil so ruthless as to extinguish itself. What results is the optimistic soul of Janos being stuck in a bleak mental hospital with a loss of hearing, and the stately whale left worthless in the foggy market square.


In conclusion, I feel that Werckmeister Harmonies can be digested in three different ways, none of which are superior. The entire rise and fall structure of the film could owe itself to a projection of Hungarian history before, during, and after Communism, grounds that Tarr has showed interest in, most notably with Satantango. With this mindset, Tarr views each period as equally hellish, as one could imagine of pre-apocalypse, apocalypse, and post-apocalypse. The film also flirts with more cosmic terrain, resulting in a more profound religious interpretation. In this scenario, Earth as a whole is hopeless in its void attempt at finding help from a supernatural force. Thirdly, Werckmeister Harmonies could just be an indictment of the "ignorance of society", as my good friend put it, in which case we are simply viewing the fragility of a mass of people in the face of something new to a community (the circus). However, this hearkens right back to the political message: when times get confusing, people get violent. It is possible that Tarr was touching upon each of these, and it is also possible that he had none of this in mind, which would match his own words - "I just wanted to make a movie about this guy who is walking up and down the village and has seen this whale. And, you know when we are working we don't talk about any theoretical things." His vagueness suggests an artist truly concerned with the intriguing, multivalent integrity of his work. However you interpret the film, it is certainly an experience that washes over the viewer with the type of symphonic force that only tremendous art can offer.

Prologue (2004) A Short Film by Bela Tarr

If you ask Bela Tarr about his contribution to 2004's Visions of Europe, a collaboration from 25 pioneering European directors on, quite simply, their visions of Europe, he'll treat it no different than he would his mammoth seven-hour Satantango. Or any of his features for that matter. Prologue is approximately 445 minutes shorter than his magnum opus, but he approaches it in the same way. It involves one fluid tracking shot that watches rather closely the destitute faces of a seemingly endless line of mangily characters. The shot instantly reflects Tarr's remarkable string of recent (last two decades) works, with its interest in slow lateral movement and stark black-and-white cinematography. 1988's Damnation contains a shot that is very similar, although this time around the camera is moving to the left as opposed to the right, and there lacks a rhythmic exchange of dirty wall to dirty faces.

As usual, the models in Tarr's films appear to be waiting for something, and given their air of general pessimism, it is likely out of desperation. This notion is resolved once the camera reaches the end of the line and a smiling woman opens a sliding window on the brick wall to commence giving rations to the men. A mood of curiosity develops as the eager faces glide by the screen at a continuous rate, only revealing profiles and teasing frontal glances multiple times. There is something to be said of Tarr's views of gender roles; his outlook is quite classical, treating the men as hungry laborers devoted to the difficult inevitabilities of life (such as waiting in an expansive line), and the woman - who are nonetheless cut from the same cloth - as nourishers. Most of his work shares this sentiment, save in Werckmeister Harmonies, when Hannah Shuygulla emerges as an ambitious, independent thinker. Prologue, while being formally stunning paired with Mihály Vig's repetitious and mournful waltz, is a singular and far-reaching addition to Visions of Europe that once again cements Tarr's grim view of the working class in Hungary or elsewhere.

Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmoniak) A Film by Bela Tarr (2000)

I saw this film for the first time this weekend on April 5th, 2008. It is Hungarian director Bela Tarr's seventh feature film. By the end of the credits, I was absolutely speechless; it was one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen and certainly one of the most contemplative. Tarr has always had an unconventional approach to filmmaking, and a strong belief in the dreamlike possibilities in cinema. This film is proof of that. A master of slow-take cinema, the film involves only 37 shots over a span of 2 and a half hours. Most shots reflect his use of camera as a passive observer in the action, creeping slowly around the austere Hungarian setting that the film ostensibly takes place. An early film by Tarr, Macbeth, adapted from Shakespeare's play, is an hour and a half long and contains only 2 shots. Each shot does not come off as useless however, due to the fact that the composition is beautifully planned and symbolism is layered through each frame of film.

Although Tarr dismisses the fact that there is any allegorical meaning in his films, it is tough not to attempt to interpret the perfectly complex yet seemingly simplistic plot of Werckmeister Harmonies. The film revolves around a Hungarian town that is rumored to be on the verge of apocalypse. In the midst of this chaos there is Janos, who watches the events unfold through his wanderings in the frost-bitten town. A circus comes to town boasting to have the world's largest dead whale, and includes the mysterious "Prince". This is the basic plot-line but Tarr gives you loads of symbolic gum to chew on. The most astounding accomplishment of the film is the fact that Tarr finds beauty in such a nightmarish atmosphere. The music by Mihaly Vig is heartbreakingly gorgeous, as well as the cinematography. I recommend this film to anyone prepared for something demanding and unique.