To watch a Béla Tarr film, you must ditch any expectations. He was a filmmaker I had known about for ages and seen films that were indirectly and directly influenced by him. One of these movies was his late protégé Hu Bo’s Chinese film An Elephant Sitting Still. Although I have not watched any of Tarr’s own works. These included the four highest-rated films of his second period, in which he transformed his style into what became some of the best movies made ever. These are slow cinema narratives par excellence that are unhurried and use their slow nature to highlight certain harsh realities about humanity.
Tarr is a film artist from Hungary who has been directing since 1979. He calls these opening nine years of his work “social cinema”. These films were shot in the vérité mode and told stories about ordinary people. By 1988, his taste had grown noticeably dark as well as the manner he perceived humanity. This was being fueled by the ongoing collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, making their respective societies fear what comes next would be worse than they are experiencing now. There had been talk of better life, but for those living on the edges of this industrial world, misery was all there was.
The first movie of this period was Damnation. At the local bar called Titanik, Karrer (Miklós B. Székely) falls in love with a torch singer (Vali Kerekes). She is wedded and breaks things up with Karrer because she thinks she’ll get famous one day but her small town is keeping her back. As a result of this sickness, which plunges him into deep depression, Karrer accepts a smuggling job offer from Willarsky (Gyula Pauer), an untrustworthy bartender. In order to make sure that her husband leaves town for a while our main character makes a wicked plan: he persuades him to take up that employment opportunity.
However, things never go according to plan and this leads to a mean betrayal as well as Karrer’s acceptance of his miserable life.
The world Tarr depicts in all his work from Damnation to the end seems like it is fresh from Armageddon. George Miller’s Australia after post-apocalypse is a high-speed, action-packed horror flick, while that of Tarr’s Hungary properly suits its slow, dull mood. And rather than roaming bands driving around on death machines, hordes of people in Tarr’s films just sit and watch as everything decays. There is no escape; everyone walks everywhere and this means long draining marches between places that all look alike except for a few special ones.
Except for what we see at its start, there are no connections between the location and any larger society. Over the community an elevated mining conveyor cuts through carrying big dumpster-sized containers of raw ore. The sound of clanking belts spells out one of the earliest things we hear as the movie begins. That reminds us that this place must once have been more alive but now it simply serves as another point for resource extraction by a more beautiful world beyond them which these individuals are not going to join at all. At some point, however, when it starts again with such image slowly pulling back until Karrer alone appears before a window looking outside while cargoes filled with mined materials float pass him silently and unseen with exception of their noise; seeming like they will traverse into infinity when captured on screen.
One main theme in most of Tarr’s films is how human spirituality fell apart during the latter half of last century.
A combination of beauty and ugliness is responsible for this. This comes through in his beautiful camera work, especially its movement. An example of this is the first scene in Titanic that employs mirror reflections and the space of the location to go around corners and trick our eyes until finally landing on Karrer as he listens to his obsession sing. Before we get to him, the camera moves through the club; her song can be heard, and we pause for a second or two on the other patrons. In each face one can read an entire life and story that will not be told in this film but which we can sense just beneath its surface.
In the middle of the movie, Karrer makes a damning admission about him. He considers small kids with cute innocent faces and bright eyes as being scary to him. They embody a lie which humans use to deceive themselves; hence, they doom generations up to eternity of suffering. Nevertheless, Karrer is one of those who make life so miserable. After wanting helplessly to tell his lover everything, he admits that it was he who made his late wife commit suicide by stating that she never loved her. He states that this was an experiment “to see if speaking at all had any point.” She had no idea whether or not what he was saying was true and he hoped that saying it would give him some insight on the matter. Thereafter, Karrer keeps mum about how he felt after this eventuality.
lot and this is what makes it interesting . The story is simple: one man wants someone else’s woman, deceives her husband and tries to take her from him but fails in doing so.. For centuries such narratives have been happening starting from David & Bathsheba and even before then.
The blog post is about how we have to experience being a live in a cold-hearted world. We always want what others possess, particularly things that we are told are out of our reach. In trying to grab these things for ourselves at the cost of dehumanizing ourselves and pulling away from other people hence plunging into self-pity and hatred, we lose significant parts of our being human the ultimate result of individualism.
Tarr’s world is like David Lynch’s films filthy, unattractive, industrial, with some background noise constantly buzzing. Talking about lighting and movement, Tarr’s work I think is more visually intricate than Lynch’s. The way the camera moves feels straightforward until it starts turning or moving away from the viewer and suddenly the scene opens up into something else you didn’t see before. In this way, these worlds pull us in because the director doesn’t just follow typical Western film pacing patterns. That’s why later on I’ll be talking about my trance-like state caused by this aspect while reviewing them. This was not as apparent when I watched Damnation; however, there are some movies that made me feel really alienated from my material reality which essentially means a lot to me as far as filmmaking goes.
Tarr sees the world as a horrifying zombie. This is a theme that will be developed in all our other three films, which take it further and build on each other. Tarr’s most ambitious project yet, Satantango, stretches for more than seven hours.
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