RIP Béla Tarr

his later work ranked and reviewed

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has died at the age of 70. His career is cleanly split into an early period and a later period, and it is the latter that distinguished him as a cinematic genius of singular vision and devastating humanism. Tarr was the king of “slow cinema,” turning endless takes into meditations on time itself, the way we look, and the illusion of endings and beginnings. Tarr could look at a human face forever and still find it full of mystery and beauty. His films are somber, in rich black and white, topped with gorgeous but interminable folk music, steeped in post-communist ruin and existential inquiry. And yet they are compositions of sheer beauty. I cannot look away from their elemental spareness. To get a sense of this, watch his short film, Prologue, which you can find online. Below, his five later works ranked and reviewed by me.

1. Sátántangó

   There are a few films that exist as unassailable master achievements in the art form. They aren’t many, but I would certainly mention Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. and PlayTime as two that have not made it into my list of favorite movies but must be recognized as superior on a scale of greatness alone. It’s hard to explicate that word: greatness. It is not found in a list of criteria or acclaim or even beauty. These are films that are frankly astounding, both in ambition and the seemingly impossible task of meeting that ambition. In almost diametrically opposed ways, the two films I’ve mentioned have walked the tightrope between what we can imagine and what we can achieve: Dielman in the devastating effect of extreme minimalism to sharpen our perception of the world we live in, and PlayTime in the way it does the same with an absurd maximalism that would send any Excel user into cardiac arrest. Neither is easy to watch, but both deliver on their promises against unimaginable odds.

   
   I will now add a third film to this list: the nearly-seven-and-a-half-hour Hungarian tour-de-force, Sátántangó. I know I have no chance of adequately describing the grandeur of this film (and the way every word I pick – eg. “grandeur” – should be qualified with its opposite to correctly capture what I have seen), but I will bear witness as best I can.

   If the idea of a seven-hour movie detonates something in your brain stem, there is a very high chance that you would hate the film. This is the longest film I’ve yet to watch, and I admit that the running time almost scared me off. It would have if not for the effusive praise the film has received from almost all who have seen it. (One benefit of such a long film is that it may be the only adaptation of a novel to dramatize every part of the book.) It is especially interesting that I have set the movie in the company of the two films mentioned above because Sátántangó employs a sort of maxi-minimalism to create an experience that goes far beyond the concept of watching a movie.

   Director/screenwriter Béla Tarr seems to know exactly what I like...and exactly what will hit me in the gut with the right amount of force. Shot in a beautiful desaturated black and white, the film is a sort of magic realist parable out of the imagination of Bertolt Brecht or Samuel Beckett. (Already, we’ve checked off a good number of Brett’s Favorite Descriptors.) In a way that I don’t fully understand, the film is structured like a tango (the title basically means “Satan’s Tango”), in “six steps forward and six steps back.” While I don’t have the adequate ballroom knowledge to fully see this myself, it is indeed told in twelve chapters, and I believe those who assure me of the parallel. (Now we’ve added “intricate symbolic structure” to the ever-growing pile of tempting buzzwords.) The dialogue – and moreso the voiceover that ends the first six chapters – is highly poetic (ding!), and each shot from these seven hours is a pristine composition of beautiful decay (ding ding!). The closest experience to this that I have had is luxuriating in the rundown post-industrialism of Hamilton, Ontario.

   Sadly, I know little about Eastern European history, but it is clear that this film is set around the collapse of communism in Hungary. A remote, dessicated collective struggles through the vaguely portentous arrivals of their final year’s wages and their long-thought-dead Faustian Messiah figure, a man named Irimiás. In typical old-world anarchist chic, Irimiås is recognized as both a conman and a god by the few remaining residents, and the rumors of his imminent arrival drive them to a pitch of celebratory terror that culminates in the titular dance at the center of the film.

   Tarr has composed his magnum opus in seemingly endless shots (the longest of which is in reality only ten minutes) of inertia (both stillness and movement) and “plodding.” The most frequent mise-en-scene is one or more people walking down straight, muddy “roads,” either in conversation or silence. Sometimes people are arriving and sometimes departing, but each of these actions encapsulates the other. And while the actors may walk with an empty urgency throughout the movie, very little movement is achieved. As in the opening (eight-minute) shot of a meandering herd of cows, they move only to move (or, sometimes, to not stand still).

   Likewise, the camera does very little moving. I’ll spare you all my questions about where the camera was and how it was rigged and how long it took to practice each shot, but the way it can seem simultaneously motionless and in movement is amazing. When the camera does move or zoom, it is with such precise smoothness that it almost draws attention to the fact that it is not drawing your attention.

   Oh, and to circle back to that gut-punch I mentioned, there is a very long scene in which a young girl terrorizes and then poisons a cat. It is squirmingly uncomfortable (and has led to an enduring myth that the cat-ctor was literally abused and killed for the scene), but it is exactly what it needs to be. Most of the evil in Sátántangó is banal and small and insidious, but in at least this one scene, we see its very real manifestation in the youngest member of the community. As this is about the worst thing I can imagine having to watch, I warn you of it, but even I could see the director’s bold morality in showing us such a vile act in the way and context he did.

   I told you that I had few adequate words to describe this film, so let me borrow a few perfect descriptions from other reviews. The movie is constantly referred to as “entrancing,” “enthralling,” and “captivating,” and that is indeed the biggest takeaway I have: it was impossible to look away, but I never even wanted to. I cannot explain this phenomenon except to say that this is craftsmanship beyond anything you’ve seen. Another write-up introduced the film as “set in a post-apocalyptic landscape,” but that is only an attempt to conjure in the American mind this impoverished sector of Hungary in 1994. One reviewer described it as a film where time itself was the main character, and this is also extremely astute. Those reviews that say things like “there is no justification for the length of the film” misunderstand the piece on an essential level. Leave it to Eastern Europe to understand the endless muddy paths of the human condition.

   The one word I might venture to add to these is “sacred.” As in most magic realism, there is a profound sense of an immutable God, though he is only seen sometimes through his apparent absence. While I watched Sátántangó, every sound from the world around me seemed a desecration, and the interruption of the most mundane scene felt almost blasphemous. The film is so utterly transfixing. And that’s why it’s definitely entering my Top 200, though it may realistically rate with only a handful of other films when considering the monumental achievements of cinema.

   

2. The Turin Horse

   “Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.”

   — Eugene Ionesco

   Absurdism is often connected to humor, but if ever there were a filmmaker who mined the utterly unhumorous corners of absurdism, it is Béla Tarr. As with his hypnotizing Satantángó and the metaphysical Werckmeister Harmonies, his last film, The Turin Horse, takes place in Tarr’s trademark naturalistic/symbolic world. Tarr announced that this would be his last film in advance of making it because he knew that this was his final word on cinema. And there is no more fitting swan song for his 9-picture oeuvre than this dark parable of resignation.

   The film follows the rote days of a man who sometimes looks 50 and sometimes looks 70 and his daughter, who might be 17-20. But it is ridiculous to put ages to Tarr’s characters. Partially, that’s because they live in a terrain and lifestyle that ravages their bodies and faces, and partially that is because their ontological status is dubious. The Hungarian director’s films (at least this bleak trilogy of sorts) exist more in the realm of folkstory and fairytale, where the only descriptors necessary are “old,” “young,” and “child.” Characters are usually given some relational adjective as well, be it “husband,” “wife,” or “son.” And, finally, some characters are given types: “farmer,” “barman,” “doctor.” Therefore, it would be best for me to sum up the film thus:

   Once, there was an old man and his daughter who lived all alone with a dying horse in a land where a violent windstorm raged constantly. Every day, they would get up, get dressed, go to the well, feed the horse, and each eat a boiled potato. As the horse lost its usefulness, the two repeated their routines in endless repetition. But one day, their well dried up. They left for a new home, only to turn around inexplicably after ten minutes and return. The next day, complete darkness fell around noon, and even though their lamps were full of oil, they refused to light. Suddenly, the windstorm stopped, leaving the two peasants in the silence and dark, staring at their now-raw potatoes.

   This movie is 2 1/2 hours long, but there is very little dialogue, and only twice are other people briefly seen. Instead of a “story” (see Tarr’s quote in my review of Werckmeister Harmonies), the film follows the routine described above in what feels like real-time. (The film consists of a mere 30 very long shots.) Basically, it is “The Apocalypse of St. Jeanne Dielman”. Like Chantal Akerman’s title housewife, these two live in a flavorless loop, and the small disruptions in their routine build to a shockingly final conclusion.

   And yet, like all of Tarr’s work, it is mesmerizing. Gorgeous black and white images flow in impossible camera shots that capture the sublime in equal measure to the banal. Haunting music presages the grim inevitability of the end. It may be beautiful, but it is not a film you will find any hope in. This is basically told to us upfront, with a short recounting of an apocryphal incident in the life of Nietzsche that gives the film its title.

   The Turin Horse is told over 6 days, each of which is announced. On The Second Day, there is a brief burst of the human voice when a man stops by to spin dizzying theologies of doom and buy some brandy. This man’s speech, being by far the most language in the film, sets the tone for a world where vague end-of-times events are occurring in a mythical Somewhere Else. Of course, given the frame of the story, the Christian imagination immediately thinks of the days of creation, and there is something to that parallel. It is almost a story of un-creation, or inverse creation, where each day strips an element from the world, finally ending with the disappearance of light.

   I find Béla Tarr’s films intensely entrancing, but most people will feel their own slow un-creation watching them. Likewise, I find his films profound and beautiful, telling us something very true about life in a broken world, “stripped of [our] religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots.” Those who primarily see worldviews when they engage with art, though, will denounce this as nihilism and mourn for their lost 2 1/2 hours. Those seeking a plot will never make it even fifteen minutes into the film. But I think there is a worthwhile purpose in embodying Nietzsche’s philosophies in this way. It is crucial to explore what a human life without an active God would resemble. It is helpful just to hold up this example and ask, “is this really what you believe?” And it is a work of great empathy to examine the lives of ceaseless toil lived by many on this planet who have no time to spare on what Nietzsche thinks about life because they are too busy surviving it. I see all that in this film, and I see that it is good.

   

3. Werckmeister Harmonies

   “I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another ... All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine -- time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.”

   —Béla Tarr

   Hungarian director Béla Tarr is on my wavelength, as quotes like the above draw comfort and applause into my heart. He is the master poet of the slow apocalypse. His definitive style was developed over many years but fully displayed in (depending on whom you talk to) 4 or 5 films from around 1990-2010. Tarr is a director whose work you watch. Really, you watch his work. The work he has done — that is what you’re really watching. The camera is eerily still while almost floating slowly through very long shots (say, 7 minutes vs. Hollywood’s 3 seconds) that are so elaborately choreographed that my mind explodes as they hit mark after mark with minimal movement. These shots may follow characters down roads and through buildings while small shifts create close-ups, tracking shots, still shots of objects and people passing, and his clear favorite: filming characters from the front as they walk endlessly down empty roads. And every single image is perfectly composed and balanced and lit and focused! How has he achieved this work?

   And yet, with all the preparation such delicate and complex camerawork takes, Tarr prefers to throw the actors (or non-actors) into a scene with only a vague goal or arc in their mind. (Yes, all his films had scripts, but they were solely for securing funding and were never used on-set.)

   Visually, he shoots the beautiful desolation of post-Soviet Hungary in rich black and white that seems to verge on sepia. His characters are poor, reticent, and mysterious. Tarr films are mesmerizing enigmas. They are at once extremely naturalistic and mythically transcendent, sparse and bursting, depressing and uplifting…

   Werckmeister Harmonies (credited as being made 1997-2000) is not as long as the 7+ hours of Satantángó but still clocks in at two and a half hours. That will seem far too long for many because of Tarr’s complete embrace of the “slow cinema” movement. (From the opening quote I chose, you can see how he uses time – long shots, long takes, long films, long silences, long repetitive action scenes – in a way that makes it in many ways the films’ true subject.) I hate talking about plot in reviews (I, too, despise stories, in a way), but when I’m critiquing films such as this that so few of my readers will ever see, I try to push myself beyond my spoiler comfort zone.

   A film about eternal things, Werckmeister Harmonies begins with a bar scene that literally becomes the dance of the planets. (The incredible music, as always, is created before, during, and after shooting and treated as a character.) The elegant way in which music, dance, everyday life, and celestial motion are woven together in this first scene should have any viewer pondering “the music of the spheres.” Indeed, before too long (though longer than you might prefer), we hear a central musicologist character soliloquizing on the ways in which Baroque music theorist Andreas Werckmeister made a pivotal mistake in his tonal developments – a mistake that has sent all subsequent music astray and out of alignment with…the music of the spheres. He is interested in tuning instruments in a completely different way. (To prepare you for the film’s trajectory and tone, let me just say that the film ends with this character, who has just tuned his piano “normally” in a crushing spiritual defeat.) And that’s all we hear about the title or this theme, but it is clearly crucial for our understanding of the film. In fact, one of the first lines is the protagonist, János, announcing that he will explain the eternal in a way that even simple people can understand.

   The centerpiece of the film is something completely different, however. During the first half hour, we hear wild and unnatural gossip about a freakshow that is coming to town that night. No one seems to have any facts (“some say there are three hundred of them, and some say only two”), but they are convinced that nothing short of doom and anarchy is on its way (while, in typical human fashion, simply talking about it idly). Whole families – whole towns – have been left in ruins after this “circus” visits them. The attraction then drives its huge unmarked metal box into town ominously in the middle of the night (in an extremely simple but beautiful shot).

   But what is this freakshow? It has two centerpieces: a taxidermied whale and “The Prince”, a figure vaguely described to hold all physical and philosophical aberrance. In the morning, János visits the attraction and is awed by what he sees as the magnificence of God displayed in such an animal as the whale. It immediately takes on religious meaning for him (and us), but everyone else in town refuses to give it a glance. The Prince, on the other hand, is never shown except as a somewhat artificial human shadow, spouting sophist revolutionary rhetoric in Slovakian through a translator who seems to speak simultaneously as he does:

   “The Prince alone sees the whole. And the whole is nothing, completely in ruins. What they build and what they will build, what they do and what they will do, is delusions and lies… During construction, all is unfinished. In ruins all is complete.”

   The name of this unseen (possibly nonhuman, possibly supernatural) being brings to mind several important “princes,” from Machiavelli to The Prince of This World. In every case, the comparison is not flattering.

   So, we have a huge box arriving in the town square that holds reminders of both God and Satan. We see only the whale (God’s representative), but all the people (except János) only see The Prince (Satan’s embodiment). Already, it’s fascinating, and nothing has really happened yet!

   What does happen? Many confusing and overlapping things that bear ominous shadows of threat. All the town is buzzing about the destruction and death occurring in the square, but when we visit the place, with János, it is only a steadily growing number of men standing nearly motionless around fires. And yet, as you can foretell, the very rumors of war are enough to cause war to break out. At one point (presumably after seeing The Prince), this crowd becomes a mob and does indeed destroy, burn, kill, and rape their way through town. One rioter’s words explain that because they were angry but didn’t know what they were angry at, they attacked everything and everyone out of anger over their ignorance (about the source of their anger). It’s all too familiar circular outrage that leaves the town and its people in ruins. Finally, as they ransack the hospital, the mob comes upon a very old naked man, standing emaciated in the shower room. Seeing their impotence and shame in this image, the mob disperses, and the army rolls in to make the town a real warzone.

   In the end, the freakshow’s huge box destroyed, we see the whale lying abandoned in the ruined square after all have fled. How you interpret this final image will shape your opinion of the film. Is this nihilism, showing God to be the ultimate dead and impotent being at the middle of pointless wars? Or does God remain at the Center, discarded by men who are far more ready to heed the call of violence and evil over the evidence of an extravagant Creator?

   (The real question, for those of us still traumatized by Esti’s cat, is “What’s with Béla Tarr and animal corpses?”)

   

4. Damnation

   Call it “The Suicide Note of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

   I have heard the junkyard mongrels singing, each to each.
   I do not think they will sing to me.

   Clearly, we see Tarr exploring his voice and finding the beginnings of it here. As far as quality, it can’t stand up to the later masterpieces, but it’s still beautiful and strange.

   Too many pans. Too many cuts (for a Béla Tarr film...lol). Too heavy on the existentialist poetry. Too oblique. Too hopeless (honestly, even The Turin Horse gives me hope because of its sheer loveliness). But all the elements are there, just being colored in a bit too darkly. Typical of an artist finding his voice. So it’s hard to fault it (or Tarr), but it’s a stop on the way to somewhere else.

   

5. The Man from London

   Tarr Noir! I see why this film is largely ignored. The melding of Tarr’s signature style with a crime plot is a bit ill-considered. And the pervasive dubbing is annoying. But the genre (film noir) is a great match for Tarr’s style. And it’s certainly lovely. Is there any other place you would more expect to see Tilda Swinton? Just don’t believe the billing that suggests she has a large part.