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The sarcastic laments of Béla TarrPosted By bordwellblog On September 19, 2007 @ 10:12 pm In Art cinema,Directors: Tarr,Filmcomments,Film technique,Film technique: Cinematography,Film technique: Editing,Narrativestrategies | Comments Disabled

Werckmeister Harmonies.

DB here:

Last weekend, Facets MultiMedia [1] in Chicago held a tribute to Béla Tarr. Milos Stehlik and hiscolleagues have been long­time champions of Tarr’s work, holding retrospectives and releasingnearly all his features on DVD [2] (with Sátántangó soon to come). Tarr arrived on Saturday,but an emergency sent him back to Hungary sooner than he expected. So instead of discussinghis work with a panel, he could only introduce the screening of Werckmeister Harmonies beforerunning off to the airport.

The panel went ahead, with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Scott Foundas, and me chatting with SusanDoll of Facets. It wasn’t as pungent a session as it would have been with Tarr there, but Ithought it was still pretty interesting. Jonathan, Scott, and Susan had thoughtful comments,and the questions from the audience were exceptionally good. The whole session was recordedfor an online broadcast at some point, so you might want to watch out for that. And I haveearlier blog entries on Sátántangó here [3] and here [4].

In preparation for the panel I spent last week reconsidering Tarr’s work, so I offer a few notionsabout his films and how we might place them in the history of cinematic form and style. Someof these remarks build on things I said at the session.

Up close and personal

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Some directors accommodate critics, accepting or at leasttolerating writers’ efforts to probe the work. Not Tarr. Askabout his plots and characters, and he claims that hedoesn’t tell stories. Point out what seem allegorical orsymbolic touches, and he protests that he doesn’t makeallegories and he hates symbols. Mention contemporarycinema, and the reply [5] is abrupt: “For me, when I seesomething at the cinema it is always full of shit.” And ifyou tell him that his early films seem quite different fromhis more recent ones, he vehemently disagrees.

As Scott pointed out in our panel, though, it can beplausible to apply the concept of “period” to filmmakers’work as we do to painters’ careers. Lars von Trier has beenfairly explicit that after mastering a polished style for hiswork up through Zentropa/ Europa he wanted to trysomething new, and with The Kingdom he shifted toward alooser, on­the­fly style that pointed toward Dogme 95. Anyviewer can be forgiven for thinking that Tarr has moved inthe opposite direction of von Trier, from a pseudo­documentary approach toward something much moregrave and majestic.

The first three theatrical features focus on the urbanworking class and their struggles to improve their lot. In

Family Nest (1979), a family who can’t afford a flat of their own squeezes in with thehusband’s parents. The tight quarters, the ceaseless complaints of the father­in­law, and thehusband’s inertia force his wife and child to flee to the streets. The Outsider (1981) follows ayoung violinist as he drifts among jobs and into a passive marriage before being called up formilitary service. The family in The Prefab People (1982) has a flat and a decent job, but thewife finds the husband indifferent to her boring routines, and he looks for an escape in a job inanother town. The concentration on ordinary people’s lives and the search for drama in theeveryday dissatisfactions of city life put the films in the neorealist line of succession.

Stylistically, the films are stripped down in ways that also owe debts to modern traditions. Shotmostly handheld, adjusting the framing to the actors’ performances, they belong to a strain offilms from the 1960s on that sought to suggest the immediacy of cinéma­vérité documentary.Unlike many such films, however, Tarr’s buy into a long­take aesthetic. Perhaps surprisingly,these movies’ shots run abnormally long: an average shot length of 32 seconds for FamilyNest, 33.5 for The Outsider, 47 seconds for Prefab People. By comparison, Hollywood films ofthese years were consistently running between 4 and 8 seconds per shot, and comparativelyfew European and Asian films rely on shots as lengthy as Tarr’s.

Most scenes in these three films are dialogues, and the camera holds intently, if shakily, onfaces. This concentration is enhanced by the general absence of establishing shots. A sceneopens more or less in the middle of a conversation, and we get a character already challenginganother. The visual pattern is that of shot/ reverse­shot, and in most scenes the first face iscounterposed to a second one by either a cut or a pan. Shooting on location in cramped rooms,Tarr makes his framings tight; in Family Nest, the jammed frames give us and the charactersalmost no breathing space.

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By relying on more or less isolated faces in close­ups, Tarr can absorb us in the intimate dramawhile sometimes catching us off guard. For instance, when we get a single character withoutan establishing shot, there is often a momentary uncertainty about where we are, or when theaction is taking place. We also can’t be sure of who’s present besides the speaker, so the closeview of him or her leaves us hanging: To whom is s/he talking? We’re pushed to pay closeattention to what the character is saying, looking for any clues to the dramatic context. Tarr’stactic also delays the reaction of the listener; he may withhold sight of the conversationalpartner until s/he speaks. The effect, heightened by the lengthy takes, is to turn many of thesescenes into monologues, in which a character pours out his or her reaction to a situation, andwe’re forced to take that in more or less pure form.

By the end of Family Nest, Tarr is shooting entire scenes concentrated on a single face, andbecause we don’t know if there is anyone else present, we have to take the talk as virtually asoliloquy.

It’s as if Tarr invoked the stylistic schema of shot/ reverse shot and simply postponed orsuppressed the reverse shot, leaving only an inexpressive shoulder in the foreground, if that.I’ve discussed the delayed reverse­shot as a convention of European cinema in an earlier blog[6], and Tarr makes ingenious use of it.

Tarr builds these films out of conversational blocks, punctuated by undramatic routines. Theresult is that often major plot actions take place offscreen, or rather in between the dialogues.Exposition that other filmmakers would give us up front is long delayed, with bits of informationsprinkled through the entire film. In Family Nest, the father claims that he’s seen Iren havingan affair with another man. We can’t be sure he’s lying because we haven’t strayed enoughout of the household to judge her activities. In The Outsider, one scene ends with the drifterAndras telling Kata, a woman he has recently met, that he has a child by another woman. Thescene ends with him smiling in indifference, leaving his sentence unfinished. In the next scene,a band strikes up a tune: Andras and Kata are celebrating their marriage.

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Most filmmakers would show us more of the courtship and a scene of proposal, but Tarr movesdirectly to the next block, suggesting Andras’ laid­back heedlessness. Agreeing to get married isno big deal. Further, by skipping over the most obviously dramatic incidents, Tarr’s storytellingjoins that tradition of ellipsis celebrated by André Bazin in his essays on neorealism. No longerdoes the filmmaker have to show us every link in the causal chain, and no longer are somescenes peaks and others valleys. By deleting the obviously dramatic moments, the filmmakerforces us to concentrate on more mundane preambles and consequences.

This block construction yields an unusually objective narration. These films lack voice­overs,subjective flashbacks, dreams, and other tactics of psychological penetration. We have to watchthe people from the outside, appraising them by what they say and do. It is a behavioralcinema. True, Prefab People opens with a flashback: The husband is packing to leave his wife,and the plot moves back to an anniversary dinner that ends badly. But the flashback to theearlier phase of the marriage isn’t framed as the wife’s memory. When the plot’s chronologybrings us back to the moment of the husband’s departure, the replay of the opening allows usto watch the characters with more knowledge of what is driving them apart. Unsurprisingly ifyou know Tarr’s earlier films, that replay is followed by a long monologue showing the wifeexpressing her sorrow at his departure, without any visual cues about who, if anyone, islistening.

Then, without preparation, we see the couple back together, shopping in an appliance store.How did they reconcile? Have their attitudes changed, or are they simply reconciled to their oldlife? Like Antonioni and many other modern filmmakers, Tarr doesn’t tell us such things. Hesimply ends his film on a long take of husband and wife riding expressionless in the back of atruck, as much pieces of cargo as the washing machine beside them.

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After the Fall

The second­phase films do look and feel rather different. Almanac of Fall (1984), a story ofduplicity and spite among people sponging off a well­to­do older woman, offers a wholly elegantmise­en­scene. Characters are often framed from far back, surroundings take on much moreimportance, the framing is stable—often with windows, doors, and furnishings impeding ourview of the action—and the camera moves smoothly, often in arcs around stationary figures.The takes are even longer, averaging just under a minute. The rococo lighting (patches of colorseem to follow actors around) and atmosphere of strained upper­class narcissism seem likequite a break from the working­class films. If I had to find an analogy to Almanac of Fall, itwould be Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (1976), with its camera arabesques and slightlydecadent ostentation.

The overripe shots of Almanac of Fall signaled a shift toward a self­consciously formal cinema,but then Tarr stripped his settings and cinematography down. From Damnation (1988)onward, his films feature ruined exteriors, shabby interiors, elaborate chiaroscuro, rhythmiccamera movement, and very long takes. (Damnation has an ASL of 2 minutes; Sátántangó, 2minutes 33 seconds; Werckmeister Harmonies, 3 minutes 48 seconds).

Tarr insisted in conversation with me that there isn’t a sharp break between early and latestyles. For one thing, his video piece Macbeth (1982) consists of only two shots across 63minutes. It was made before The Prefab People, so his shift toward the ambulatory long takewas already in the works. Moreover, The Outsider ends with a strained restaurant encounter

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captured in a virtuoso handheld shot running nearly seven minutes. A nightclub scene in ThePrefab People likewise features some sidewinding long takes around a dance floor that wouldn’tbe out of place, at least in their repetitive geometry, in Damnation.

If we’re inclined to look for other continuities, we can find them. In the films from Damnationonward, the deferred reverse shot has been put at the service of attached point of view, so thatoften when Tarr’s protagonists peer around a corner or out of a window, instead of optical povcutting we have an over­the­shoulder view that conceals their facial reaction. One scene inDamnation starts as a typically Tarrian scrutiny of texture, with the wrinkling wall echoingKarrer’s topcoat. But then the camera arcs and refocuses, showing what Karrer is watching butnot how he responds.

The blocklike construction of scenes in the early films carries on in the later work, but now Tarrminimizes the cuts within a scene, so that it becomes an even more massive hunk of spaceand time. Tarr refuses as well to use crosscutting, which would show us various characterspursuing their activities at roughly the same time—another strategy that keeps us fastened toone relentlessly unfolding chain of actions and, usually, one character’s range of knowledge.The avoidance of crosscutting will have major structural implications in Sátántangó, whichoverlaps characters’ individual points of view by replaying certain events and stretches of time.

The long­held facial shots of the early films don’t create a natural arc; the shot will go on aslong as the character wants to talk. Similarly, many long takes in the later films don’t present abeginning­middle­end structure. We simply follow a character walking toward or away from us,pushing into a stretch of time whose end isn’t signaled in any way. This becomes especiallyclear in those extended long shots in which a character walks away toward the horizon and thecamera stays put. Traditionally, that signals an end to the scene, but Tarr holds the image,forcing us to watch the character shrink in the distance, until you think that you’ll be waitingforever. Likewise, the diabolical dance shots of Sátántangó, built on a wheezing accordionmelody that seems to loop endlessly, are exhausting because no visual rhetoric, such as a trackin or out, signals how and when they might conclude. Early and late, Tarr won’t hold out thepromise of a visual climax to the shot, as Angelopoulos does; time need not have a stop.

Nonetheless, I do agree with my fellow panelists that the later films have a significantlydifferent look and feel, and it’s on them that Tarr’s place in world film history will chiefly rest. AsI indicated at the end of Figures Traced in Light, he stands out as a distinctive creator in acontemporary tradition of ensemble staging. Like Tarkovsky, he shifts our attention fromhuman action toward the touch and smells of the physical world. Like Antonioni andAngelopoulos, he employs “dead time” and landscapes to create a palpable sense of durationand distance. Like Sokurov in Whispering Pages (1993), he takes us into an eerie,Dostoevskian realm where characters are cruel, possessed, mesmerized, humiliated, and preyto false prophets.

Ties to tradition

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Tarr, however, maintains that his work, early or late, owes little to cinema. He claims not tohave been influenced by other directors, and he asserts that he gets his ideas from life, notfrom films. When pressed, he admits [7] that he knew the films of Miklós Jancsó “and I likedthem very much. But I think what he does is absolutely different from what we do.”

It’s not uncommon for strong creators to reject the idea of influence, and many feel that theymay sap their originality if they’re exposed to other work. Still, nothing comes from nothing.Any artwork is linked to others through an expanding network of affinity and obligation. Ofteninfluence is like influenza; you catch it unawares, despite your efforts to ward it off. Andsometimes artists on their own find strategies that other artists have already or simultaneouslyhit upon.

Whether or not Tarr consciously joined a tradition, his practices do link him to several trends.Tarr has rejected the idea, floated by Jonathan, that his early films are indebted to Cassavetes,but there seems little doubt that by 1979, when Family Nest was released, it contributed tothe fictional­vérité tradition, regardless of his intent. Likewise, his late films’ reliance on longtakes is part of a broader tendency in European cinema after World War II. The neorealiststaught us that you could make a film about a character walking through a city (The BicycleThieves, Germany Year Zero), and other directors, such as Resnais in the second half ofHiroshima mon Amour, developed this device. With Antonioni, Dwight Macdonald noted, “thetalkies became the walkies.” Jancsó took Antonioni further (acknowledging the influence) in theendless striding and circling figures of The Round­Up, Silence and Cry, and The Red and theWhite. So even if there wasn’t any direct influence, Antonioni and Jancsó paved the way forTarr; they made such walkathons as Sátántangó and Werckmeister thinkable as legitimatecinema.

Still more broadly, as Hollywood cinema has become faster­paced, accelerating its action andcutting, art cinema in Asia and Europe has tended toward ever slower rhythms. Visit anyfestival today, as Scott mentioned in our panel, and you’ll see plenty of films with long takesand fairly static staging. I criticize this fashion a bit in Figures, but it’s undeniably a majoroption on today’s menu. It’s even been picked up in contemporary American indies, with GusVan Sant’s work from Elephant on offering prominent examples. He, of course, has beencrucially influenced by Tarr, but Hou, Tsai Ming­liang, Sokurov, and other directors haven’t. Weseem to have a case of stylistic convergence, with Tarr choosing to explore the long take at thesame time others were doing so.

Within recent Hungarian cinema, it would be fruitfulto examine Tarr’s relation to his contemporaries.Janós Szasz’s Woyzeck (1994) takes place in awasteland not unlike those of Damnation andSátántangó. Even closer to Tarr is the work ofGyörgy Fehér. I’ve seen only Passion (1998; right)and one scene from Twilight (1990). Here again weget very long takes with a supple camera, grungysettings, and down­at­heel characters wandering inrain and mist or dancing as if possessed by demons.Fehér has worked with Tarr as producer, dialoguewriter, and “consultant.” We could also explore Tarrand Fehér’s affinities with Benedek Flieghauf, the younger director of The Forest (2003) and

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Dealer (2004). Fleghauf builds these films around extensive long takes, and the remarkableForest carries the idea of the suppressed reverse­shot to an eerie extreme, as characters studymysterious offscreen objects that may never be shown us.

More generally, and more speculatively, we could look to a wider movement in late and post­Soviet art toward mournfulness and lamentation in response to cultural collapse. Tarkovsky’sNostalghia is one instance, but Larissa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1976) and Elem Klimov’s Comeand See (1985) point in this direction too. Vitaly Kanevsky’s Freeze, Die, Come to Life! (1989)offers a rusting, dilapidated world not far from Tarr’s. In the 1970s and 1980s, composers likeArvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, Giya Kancheli, Vyacheslav Artyomov, and Valentin Silvestrov createdaustere, threnodic music that sometimes evokes spirituality but just as often suggests a bleakend to everything. The very titles—Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Górecki), Symphony ofElegies (Artyomov), Postludium (Silvestrov)—evoke something more than the death rattle ofCommunism. The pieces can be heard as meditations on the ruins of modern history, askingwhat humankind has accomplished and what can come next. Tarr’s severe parables, grotesqueand sarcastic in the manner of Kafka, don’t exude the religiosity we can find in some of thismusic or filmmaking, but, at least for me, they share the impulse to lament humans’ inabilityto transcend their brutish ways. “I just think about the quality of human life,” he remarks,“and when I say ‘shit’ I think I’m very close to it.”

I have more ideas about Tarr, especially on Sátántangó and Werckmeister, but I have to stopsomewhere. I hope to see his new film The Man from London when I go to the VancouverInternational Film Festival next week, and of course I’ll report on it here.

The best piece of writing I know on Tarr’s cinema is András Bálint Kovács’ “The World Accordingto Tarr,” in the catalogue Béla Tarr (Budapest: Filmunio, 2001).

Béla mesmerizes Lola, Chicago 15 September 2007.

Thanks to Milos Stehlik, Susan Doll, Charles Coleman, and Megan Rafferty of Facets, to BélaTarr for generous conversation, and to András Kovács for enlightening discussions over theyears.

PS 20 September: The reports of Tarr’s earlier visit to Minneapolis are emerging; here’s [8] agood link.

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of­bela­tarr/

URLs in this post:

[1] Facets MultiMedia: http://www.facets.org/[2] DVD: http://www.facetsdvd.com/searchresults.asp?cat=852[3] here: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=31[4] here: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=33[5] the reply: http://www.kinoeye.org/04/02/ballard02.php[6] an earlier blog: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=744[7] admits: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/12/tarr.html[8] here’s: http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/?p=197

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