András Bálint Kovács - The World According to Béla Tarr

8/11/2019 Andrs Blint Kovcs - The World According to Bla Tarr

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The World According to Bla Tarr

By Andrs Blint Kovcs (National Audiovisual

Archive and Etvs Lornd University, Budapest)

The holistic vision and world view of great artists often easily confuses the beholder. In order for us toaccept the way great art sees the world in its entirety, we must surrender that part of our own limited lifeexperience, with which such an approach does not tally, for the world can hardly be described with onecompound sentence. We usually find that it is not things that force us to categorize them into a uniformsystem, but rather that we are the ones who try to rob things of their colorful , ambiguous, and accidentalnature in order to be able to name them. Minor artists, who say but little of the world, think small and aretherefore truer to the ultimate diversity inherent in everything. Great artists, by contrast, force their will andvision on the entire world. But it is just this arrogance that helps the recipient to discover in everything whata viewerstuck in diversity and everydaynesscannot see. Every single thing can be approached in aninfinite number of ways. From this infinity all we see is that we cannot unify it, for we are too small for it.The simplest and most useful approach for us is to categorize things according to their function. What weachieve in doing this is that a single thing suddenly seems interpretablebut from only a few viewpoints

since its other aspects seem unimportant. We tend not to notice what is of no use to us.Great artists, however, do not think functionally and do not categorize things based on their usefulness.Therefore, it is through the non-functional approach that they make us see the world the way we have neverseen it. All great artists exaggerate, yet it is not exaggeration that makes an artist great. What makes theartist great is that through this exaggeration and enlargement we still recognize the worlda stunningexperience. So exaggeration is no exaggeration after all. This is the paradox of great art. We cannot say howand when this experience is born, nor is it certain that it reaches all beholders (let us not forget that we aretalking about an exaggeration). Great art is the secret of a given era as well, not only of form. So it is

possible that in a particular era no great art is bornnot for lack of talent, but due perhaps to little faith,tiredness, or lack of susceptibility to universal vision in a given period.

Bla Tarr's road to great art is an example of how someone can rise above the unexaggerated correctness ofsmall masters submerged in diversity. Tarr saw the darkness of social reality, which for correct functionalitywas hopelessly impermeable. He started making films at the age of twenty-two in the very realistic andfunctional style of so-called documentary-feature films, which infused politics into cinema vrit anddeprived it of the reflexive nature Jean Rouch had added to it. When he madeFamily Nest (Csalditzfszek, 1979), he was immediately accepted as a member of this filmmaking group, whose work was

based on this style and who called themselves the Budapest School. Among them Tarr was considered to bethe most original talent. No one noticed back then, at the end of the 1970s, that Tarr had in fact little interestin documentary realism. One of the exciting features ofFamily Nest was that it followed a similar structural

pattern to that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films seven or eight years earlier, although Tarr did not see anyFassbinder film until 1982. This shows how filmmakers with similar concerns can find similar solutions indifferent parts of the world with no direct influence on each other. Both directors depicted the environment

naturalistically and theatrically at the same time; their characters were banal, but their impulses, passions,selfishness, and suffering made them extraordinary. Both condensed the dramatic nature of naturalisticsituations to the point of unreality. Tarr had an eye for the same thing as Fassbinder: to see the spiritualsource of the universal drama in the utterly banal figures determined by their environment. He was atheatrical talent, as well, just like Fassbinder, but he never worked in the theater .

His thesis film, however, was an adaptation of Shakespeare'sMacbeth (1982). Just as for Fassbinder, forTarr the precision of the actors' performance became increasingly important with time. Both used actors in asimilar way: they could only work with actors who had their own, independent personality and could beinspired to bring the deepest features of their character to the surface. Both made actors of amateurs, sincefor both, the authenticity of the human expression was the most important consideration. As Tarr put it:


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What we never trust is that we can make actors play the scene. Therefore we want it to happen really.We have to select actors who, if put together in a situation, really behave the way they would in reallife. So we can never trust ourselves to direct a film. We cannot make a film; I cannot even direct ascene; all I can do is put everything in a pot, and perhaps something will come out of it. When, inThe Marriage of Maria Braun [dir. Fassbinder, 1979], Schygulla hits the black man on the head, thenlooks at her husbandthis is a scene Fassbinder could never have directed. For this scene tohappen, they all had to be on the same wavelength of communication, which gave birth to this scene.Directing is not a profession; it is rather a kind of sensitivity. From other filmmakers' work, I like towatch thoseby Godard, Cassavetes, or Fassbinderwhere the film has personality. When I wasteaching in Berlin, this is what I always explained to the kids: you don't just write a film-script, thenthe dialogue, and then select the actors from a photo-album. I suggested the following: you do notwrite a script, you do not write dialogue. When you have a synopsis, the next step is to see if youhave the characters and the locations. And when you have all of that, you need to adjust the scriptanyway. So what they learned from me was to look for actors and locations as soon as they had asynopsis, and that only after having found them, should they start writing the dialogues and thescenes, knowing whether the camera would fit into the space and who would play the characters.

The big difference between Tarr and the German master is that Tarr almost never lost his interest in arealistic and social depiction of the environment, except perhaps in two filmsone of which for him was the

beginning of a new artistic period,Almanac of Fall (szi almanach, 1985); and the second, his most recent

film, The Man from London (A Londoni frfi, 2007), which may be the start of another new beginning. Forhim, the actor and the scenery were part of the same universe and always remained so. He inherited this wayof seeing through Michelangelo Antonioni from Mikls Jancs, from whom he also inherited the sensitivityfor ritual movementan element he elaborated in his later films. The Prefab People (Panelkapcsolat, 1982)was his first film where one could sense Fassbinder's structure clearly. He made a film about the bare andincreasingly hellish everyday life of a young couple in its most complete banality. Contrary to his usualmethod, though, he used professional actors, making them work the same way amateurs would back then:they had to improvise texts in given situations. He wanted the actors to experience their roles as their ownlife. Perhaps it was helpful that the two actors were husband and wife in real life.

The result was good, but little. The naturalistic and extensive depiction of the environment contradicted thedramatic condensation. Their world might have been relatively secluded, but the eventuality of the

environment and the real life situations continually decreased the dramatic tension. So Tarr took a steptowards the eclectic nature, the emotional heat, and the preference for the artificial within post-modern taste,which had bloomed in the fine arts and European films at the beginning of the1980s. InAlmanac of Fall ,Tarr created a perfectly artificial and closed world, emphatically different from naturalistic reality, and

placed his drama, prone to physical and spiritual sadism, into this context. Tarr's technique here was thesame as in his previous film: he put the actors into situations and made them improvise so that their impulsesand emotions surfaced from the depths of their souls. This artificial pseudo-world was necessary so thatnothing would distract attention from the human cruelty, pettiness, and evil that spread everywhere andconsumed everything. It was clear at this point that it was not Hungarian housing problems, politicalconditions, or a special existential state of life that Tarr wanted to speak of, but the entire world. He saw theworld surrounding him, as did Fassbinder, as best summarized by falsehood, cheating, intrigue, and hopelessemotional vulnerability, as well as the fatal existential void that follows from all of these. Representation of

financial distress is not a necessary property of this world-view; financial vulnerability, however, seemed tobe the best context, within which to depict the moral degradation of humankind. What made Tarr's first filmespecially powerful was the way he simultaneously presented social and spiritual distress and vulnerabilityas being utterly intertwined. He placed his story within a social layer where Hungarian people had the same

personal experience in their real lives. Except for The Outsider (Szabadgyalog, 1980), all his early films arebased on the same dramatic situation: people confined in a small space make life hell for each other. But thefact that these people had to share one room and had nowhere to flee from each other was not what madethem so horrid. On the contrary: being confined together was so unbearable because they were such horridtypes to begin with. They were all the guilty and victims at the same time.


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InAlmanac of Fall, however, Tarr was only interested in the mere spiritual mechanism of the same situation.Being confined or financially vulnerable are both conditions that lack concrete social motives, and all of thecharacters are more moral than social examples of desperate parasitism. Here, Tarr was already looking for aworld that can be generalized, one that can lend an authentic background to the spiritual drama with thesame elementary power as the concretely depicted misery of housing in his first film. Social realism,however, was not fit for this purpose. In the middle of the 1980s, all concrete social phenomena had losttheir authenticity and meaning. This very thing became the essence of Tarr's world view: nothing is what itseems, including the social source of human suffering. Underneath all of this lies a fraud that is not to berevealed. Therefore, the world of objects cannot be real either, in the naturalistic sense of the word. Tarrtried to create the semblance of reality in an intensified way, so that the spectator could not escape thefeeling that it is his/her own world, so that he/she would see exaggeration as natural and recognize whathe/she has failed to see, to which he/she has always closed his/her eyes; so that the spectator would seehis/her own world as being just as suffocating as the human relationships in the film.Almanac of Fall wasrather a starting point, an intermediary stop between the functional genre, documentary-feature films, and aworld-forming vision. This film sought the possibility to generalize, but in a mannerist way, feeling fordecorative abstraction. It was easy here to flee from a vision embracing the whole world, for he did notreally create a world, only a theatrical set.

No matter how differentAlmanac of Fall was from his earlier films, the road leading to it was no lessdifficult or painful than the one leading on. He had to learn the form, which turns the authenticity of

superficial depiction into something universal. AfterAlmanac of Fall it was not possible to see how Tarrwould find a way forward. Professional isolation, the perfectly hopeless political stagnation between 1985and 1987, the complete moral decadence in the country, and the deaths of Fassbinder, Gbor Bdy, MiklsErdly, and Andrei Tarkovskii added to his bad mood and depression. Although we had known each other

before, it was in this period that we became close friends. We had long conversations about the death ofmodern film and its possible successor. Our discussions always returned to the way Tarkovskii andFassbinder used travelling; we compared their long takes and whether or not there was a new waynot yettried by filmmakersto play with time. This was not just an empty helplessness. He was searching for thesolution to a very concrete problem: How can one create the feeling of reality in an artificially created

pseudo-world? It was clear for him that continuous composition and time had to play a key role in this. Butwhat was camera-movement to be like, what was the time that made the image universal while the worldremained very concrete? In other words: could one use Tarkovskii's time-management in a non-natural

world that was not artistically formed? It was clear that Tarr was looking for a style rather than a theme orstory. He knew he had to surpass the abstract set stylisation ofAlmanac of Fall and to return to a seeminglyrealistic portrayal of the world while keeping the feeling of universality and the speech of the entire world,and not let it fall back to the eventuality of social problems.

It was at this time that he read Lszl Krasznahorkai's Stntangoand met the author. It was clear rightaway that this novel was meant to solve Tarr's problem. Human situations in it were very similar to those inTarr's earlier films. He found the social environment (worn down characters on the verge of misery andcorruption) very close to his heart, while the structure of the book was based on a time-game withcomposition. It seemed that Krasznahorkai answered Tarr's problem of how to treat time. The answer was:eternal return. Monotonous repetition, infinitely slow and ruthless seclusion could raise even the mostearthly, most worn down, most extreme, and most unique-seeming world from its uniqueness, from its

concrete historical and social facts, and create a whole other world of it. And so it became possible for Tarrto bring back his naturalistic world-portrayal while standing on the borderline between artificiality andreality. This was the most important characteristic of the human world he portrayed. Krasznahorkai saw thesame thing as Tarr did in the world: endless destruction and misery disguised as redemption and elevation.

In his early films Tarr reduced this process to a concrete social environment or to the evil nature of thehuman soul; but the fact that cheating was inherent in the world itself, in its pseudo-nature had never

become a central theme, except forAlmanac of Fall, where the emphatically artificial set alluded to it. Tarrfelt that now he could cross the Rubicon. Without leaving his realistic portrayal of the world too far behind,without having to give up portraying real misery and ruins, he could now show that this misery and ruinswere the reality of a pseudo-world, a result of cheating and conning. The way the world is made makes


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people believe in redemption and love. Trust is a way to redemption. And when people believe this and,therefore, leave themselves unguarded for a moment, this pseudo-world strikes down mercilessly and takesfrom them the little they still have. The misery of the world is not a result of financial or political situations,

but an abuse of the last remnants of faith in humanity. Krasznahorkai's novel was special in that it depictedthe process of going down rather than the static condition of miserynot a disrupted world, but continuousdisruption. This became the common denominator between Krasznahorkai and Tarr. Monotonous slownessis the time of this ruthless crash, the form of inevitability is the eternal revolution, which became the basicelement of the three great Tarr films made with Krasznahorkai.

Although the script was complete, no studio was ready to venture into adapting Satantango. Tarr then turnedto another project and co-wroteDamnation (Krhozat, 1988) with Krasznahorkai, the atmosphere, setting,and human figures of which suited the world of Satantangoperfectly. Even the story would have fit in thenovel. Human relationships in this film are just as ruthlessly instrumental as in earlier and later Tarr films.Everyone cheats on everyone, they abuse each other, while all characters dream and talk of something greatand noble. They do not lie to themselves, only to each other; they really believe in redemption, but theyalways give a reason as to why they abuse and cheat others. They genuinely believe that they will succeed in

becoming decent people in spite of the fact that circumstances now require another man to be trampledupon. And since they all reason and act accordingly, the result is the eternal revolution of physical andspiritual destruction. He who began at the bottom finishes even lower, while he who started high merelyseems to win.

The film introduced novelties in three important elements as compared to earlier Tarr films. Most significantwas the treatment of dialogue. As mentioned earlier, a common stylistic feature of all Tarr's earlier films wastextual improvisation, even in films made with professional actors. In this new film, however, not only werethe actors' dialogues written, they were also very poetic, abstract, and in sharp contrast with the naturalisticshabbiness of the environment. As inAlmanac of Fall, the mannerism of the set created tension with thenaturalism of the actors. But here it was the other way around: in a run-down world, run-down and burnt-out

people talked in a poetic and philosophical language.

A decisive affect-element of the film's forma second noveltywas much more spectacular. The imageryand location-use of the film was different from all earlier traditions. Tarr created a world that made arealistic impression in all details, but was essentially non-existent and completely set-like. Tarr and Pauer

had travelled through the whole country to find real locations for the scenes, which have the atmosphere ofthat last moment before complete destruction, when one can still feel that they were meant to serve apurpose, whose ruined memory they now document. Gyula Pauer, the set designer and one of the actors ofthe film, talked about his work:

We wandered through all the miners' villages and towns in the country. We were looking for anindustrial environment that bore the clear and irrefutable imprint of slow destruction anddecomposition. What was once meant for dynamic growth and multiplication, what still bore the signof a nicer and richer future, but was now in an infinitely run-down state, showed only the death ofsuch old illusions. We found numerous such places all over the country. Decades-old dreams oftriumphant industrialisation are now slums, where people can barely survive. We have been tominers' villages where only pensioners live nowforty-fifty-year old peoplewho were pensioned

off, since the mine was closed down and there was no other work. These people just sit around in thepub all day. We have been to places where the tubs only brought coal-dust, out of which they built ahuge spoil-bank. A couple of hundred people are building a mountain just to have something to do.One can see in the architecture of these places that they were meant for a certain way of life, andnow they are utterly unsuited for any other. In booths made of bulking paper, fiber , and tin plates wefound townspeople raising pigs and poultry in such incredibly worn-down houses, where seeing thegate and the staircase one would think life had ceased long ago, and people had moved out. We havealso been to restaurants, where now only beer is served, since the National Health Organisationclosed down the kitchen and forbade drinks to be served, and where there are no glasses for the beer;

people drink from the bottle at three-legged tables covered with appallingly dirty tablecloths. Thisrestaurant was once probably a place of which people were proud. Above the entrance, built in the


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now memorial Stalin baroque with a classicist portal and a fake-marble row of pillars, decoratedwith stucco on the ceiling, an illuminated small model trolley that moved around on the ceiling. Thewall may have once been decorated with fantastic mirrors, brackets, and chandeliers. Of all this wenow see only broken remains, as if we had trusted naughty children with a nice flat only to find itwrecked on our return. Our most stunning experience everywhere was that this was the result of livesspent in back-breaking toil and not in idleness. At the same time, our purpose in finding these placeswas not to present a diagnosis of certain devastated areas of the country. The film does not alludespecifically to time and place. We deliberately avoided showing any signs of actual politics andeconomics in regard to this environment. We created the locations in such a way that they reflectedthe endgame of a world-era, the state of the last moment before final disappearance. The sites arereal, but we shot the film in very different locations. Sometimes we only recorded a street scene;sometimes only a house-wall; and we even have a house in the film with an exterior that is inBudapest, an interior in Ajka, and a next-door shop in Pcs. So the film's world consists of realelements, which, however, do not create a real space. (Kovcs 18)

This is how the set and landscape were created; this is why they seemed naturalistically real, while thevariation of the same atmosphere made them unrealistically hopeless and claustrophobically depressing. Theset and the locations were but one element of the visual imagery. The otherthe third noveltywas thespecial camera treatment and picture composition. For Tarr this was the biggest problem. He had an exactimage of what composition he needed; however, creating this seemed very difficult. He wanted the camera

to move continuously; he wanted certain compositions to fade into each other, while most of the scenes werenarrow, closed interiors. What is more, they were intended to maintain a semi-dark and depressiveatmosphere everywhere, and to allow only those elements of the real sites to become part of the picture thatfit this mood. The movement of the camera had to be descriptive from the outside, while drawing theaudience into the film's world. What failed from the story had to be shown visually. The images had to showwhere this world came from and where it was leading. Continuous movement was needed neither formetaphysical abstraction (as with Tarkovskii), nor for an abstract choreography of human relationships (aswith Jancs), though both artists were close to him. But Tarr did not want any metaphysical dimensiontheworld of gods or historyto appear in his images. Still, he had to surpass the concrete facts of naturalistic

portrayal. If we want briefly to summarize why he needed long takes and continuous camera-movement, wecan say he wanted to depict a cyclical process returning to itself while having to create the illusion ofmoving forward. This is what the choreography of the camera-movement had to express. In order to create

this effect, he needed a cinematographer who was supposed to be capable of making this style his own.Instead of an experienced cinematographer, he chose a young man, Gbor Medvigy, for whom this became afirst film. Their collaboration can be described as a creative struggle, but the results speak for themselves in

Damnation as well as in their next film, Stntango(1994) .

To help create the dichotomy of continuous forward movement and an eternal return, one more element wasused inDamnation: continuous rain. Before Tarr, only Tarkovskii had used the rain motif with suchconsistency, but with an entirely different meaning. Rain for Tarkovskii was absolutely positive, while forTarr it is absolutely negative. From the first possible connotations of the rain, Tarr selected monotony andslow, unnoticeable, but unstoppable destruction and decomposition.

Damnation drew the attention of a wider international art film audience to Tarr, primarily in Germany,

Holland, and the United States. The film was featured at several festivals and was nominated for the FelixAward; Tarr was invited to lecture at the Berlin Film Academy and was delegated to the European FilmAcademy. In the meantime, the system in Hungary changed: the film profession almost collapsed financiallyand filmmaking decreased significantly (though not as drastically as in the Czech Republic), while manynew faces appeared in film production, for whomDamnation meant the overture of a new era. This was thefirst black-and-white film shot in Hungary in a long time, following which, however, black-and-whitesuddenly became very fashionable in Hungary. In a short time a whole group of first-time filmmakersstarted a career in black-and-white: Ildik Enyedi'sMy 20th Century (Az n XX. Szzadom, 1988), rpdSopsits' Shooting Gallery (Cllvlde, 1990), Gyrgy Fehr's Twilight (Szrklet, 1991), Attila Janisch'sShadow on the Snow (rnyk a havon, 1992), Ildik Szab's Child Murders (Gyerekgyilkossgok, 1993),


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Jnos Szsz's Woyzeck (1994). It was as if Tarr had torn down a dam and showed them how to swim againstthe current.

International fame made it possible for Tarr to start working on his original plan to film Satantango. Thisfilm could only be made in co-production, for according to the original idea it was really five films. Theextraordinary length of the film was no self-contained game, only a consistent carrying-out of the formal

principles laid down inDamnation and a consistent adaptation of the novel's main compositional principle.The undertaking was grand, perhaps the greatest gamble in film history. Tarr wanted to make a film that was

practically unsuitable for distribution, for the film does not consist of parts that one can see days or weeksapart, like Fassbinder'sBerlin, Alexanderplatz (1980) for example, but a single huge composition that onehas to see in a single sitting. One has to sit in the cinema for more than eight hours (with intervals). What ismore, this length is not justified by a long or complicated story; the events in the film are not more than whatcould be told in ninety minutes. So the fact that Tarr found a producer testifies to the latter's real bravery.

There was something in this plan, though, that was more than a unique expression of bravado in form. Thisfilm was meant to be a provocation and challenge for the entire contemporary film culture. By this time thehegemony of American films in Europe had become overwhelming. Not only because of their number, butalso because a certain Americanization had appeared in European film: readily comprehensible, emotionalstories; impetuous narration; colorful and grand imagery; fast rhythm. It seemed reason enough for concernthat the kind of filmmaking once characteristic of the new waves and of modern film art was completely

isolated by the 1990s. Another response to the same phenomenon was the manifesto of the Dogma-groupand the series of films that followed. They also wanted to return to personal expression, to deny theconventions of portrayal dictated by commercial profit, and to use a film language that sought new roads.

At the beginning of the 1990s it was imminent that European filmmakers would forget all about their pastand merely try to survive in the battle with Hollywood by becoming Hollywood-like themselves. Tarr'sgesture, however, was the most radical challenge for cinema-goers in favor of European culture. It was asifthrough shock-therapyhe was trying to lead them back to the recognition of what real film art wasabout. Black-and-white was the answer to the over -colored mayhem of today's visual culture. The style oflong takes and no cuts was a response to the raging pace filtering from commercials and video-clips. Seven-and-a-half hours were a response to today's film style of superficial, quick reactions and subliminal effects.The story of little plot was a response to action-packed, aggressive plot-structures. Satantango in all its

elements was an extreme counterpoint to the development started in the film culture of the 1990s andprevalent today.

This film was a piece of great art, represented in the 1990s by only a few filmmakersAbbas Kiarostamiand perhaps a few films by Takeshi Kitano. Great films at one time were more numerous, but today filmstrying to cover the world in its entirety are very rare, if not already extinct. It is not the task of this text tofind the reasons behind this phenomenon, but it must be said that since roughly the beginning of the 1970s ithas not been simply the battle of commercial and artistic films that we are facing. In the 1950s and 1960s,another film industry was born in Europe alongside the commercial film industrywhat we call the art filmindustry. A reaction to the emergence of this new industry were the so-called avant-garde or elitist art films(called auteur films in the US and art et essai in France), represented by Godard against Truffaut, byJancs against Szab, by Tarkovskii against Mikhalkov, by Straub and Huillet against Wenders. The

difference between them is not primarily aesthetic; it stands rather in the approach to new form andconformism. With Satantango Bla Tarr voted for the group and kind of art film to which he wanted to

belong: he chose the more marginal, more elitist, less conformist kind, devoted ultimately to the personal;the kind that sees its main task in finding new ways. Tarr was not the only filmmaker in Hungary who tookthis approach. Much earlier, in the mid-1970s, his older colleagues who had started their careers at the sametimeGbor Bdy and Andrs Jeleshad followed this lead. And such artists keep turning up incontemporary Hungarian cinema as well. But Tarr was the first filmmaker since Jancs who managed toraise Hungarian film to the top level of the international avant-garde. The great question of today'sfilmmaking is whether or not this branch of art films, which go against all mainstream trends, can survive inthe world.


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All of this, though, is only background. Satantango is not only a gesture. In Satantango, Tarr used theprinciples founded and elaborated inDamnation in a much easier and more chiselled manner. The basic set-elements remained the same, only the small-town scene changed into a perfectly indefinable, village-likesettlement, which was referred to as the block in the film. The driving force of the story here was the sameas in most Tarr films: faith, appearance, and cheating. In the portrayal of this world, however, there was nostylization at all. Tarr needed the set to allude to the background of the story as directly as inDamnation.But this world, by contrast, did not promise anything good; it just kept the people living in it captive, whilethey desperately tried to get out.

The story is much more straightforward and direct than any of the earlier ones. It is essentially a criminalstory about the tricks of two con-men, embezzlers and an informant, who cheat the inhabitants of a villageout of their last, hard-earned, meagre savings in the vilest possible way, making them believe that they willhelp them to a better life. The villagers see the Messiah in the two crooks; they follow them blindly and evenlose their homes. While the story is perfectly fictional and structured step by step, the characters areincredibly fine and authentic. Tarr used all the life experience he had from his period of direct filming. Hecreated such an elaborate scale of misery that it can be a model of the whole of society. All intellectual andspiritual types are to be found in this micro-environment, all variations of human and existential ruin. Thedoctor, the policeman, the cleaning-woman, the pensioner, the worker, the inn-keeper, the whore, the poet,and the philosopher create an entire world; they draw the whole scale of human relationships, emotions,desires, and beliefs, while converging monotonously to the same place.

Tarr created a dichotomy of the real and the unrealfor the first timenot through different motifs (set,dialogue), but in the same milieu, that of the characters. Therefore, he did not need an over-stylized set orover-poetic dialogue. Where the latter still appeared, it was strictly functional. Irimias, the con-man, issuccessful with those living in perfect uncertainty because his angelic face, his earnestness, and his

prophetic speeches find the last remnants of faith and trust in them. Irimias is a real false prophet. He sucksthe blood of the most desperate, most defenseless people, who still have something to lose, who still havedreams, and who, therefore, are happy to grab any chance that promises a better life. This character isdiabolical and all of his appeal is due to his own suggestive power. He does not try to convince people,

butwith his appearance, his secretiveness, his abstract, philosophical and poetic speechesmakes thembelieve that he is from another world. People trust him because they believe him to be the messenger ofanother world. His secret is the same as that of many real and false prophets: the other world. And an evil

irony of fate is that in a way they are right to believe in him. Irimias is a petty criminal and police informanton parole. He really has been sent from up abovefrom the police. However, he is surreal and that is whyhe can play his part so well. People's approach to him is also unrealisticand this unreality is the mostimportant statement of the film. Mankind, even in its utter vulnerability, can always find something aboveits head that seems bigger and in which it can believe. That is how its vulnerability becomes absolutelyhopeless. The more unrealistic something seems, the more realistic the danger that empty appearances cangovern defenseless people of faith. The dichotomy of semblance and reality comes from one singlecharacter, Irimias. He represents the superior world as the great con. One scene in the film symbolizes thisclearly: the bells that the characters hear tolling are not in the church, but only from a cheap belfry, on therope of which a half-wit has started pulling.

That is why it is a mistake to use the concept of metaphysics in connection with Tarr's films, though his

portrayal, which resembles that of Tarkovskii on the surface, lures us to this explanation. But Tarr'sstatement is most clear in Satantangohis film about the other world, about the domain beyond the senses.This domain, this metaphysical territory is for Tarr none other than the shelter from utter human despair, and

belief in it is the final proof of human vulnerability. It is only good for people to hide their own misery fromthemselves. Tarr's and Krasznahorkai's way of thinking is mostly inspired by Nietzsche. Their closed,circular time-concept is also proof of that.

All analyses of Satantango have to account for why seven-and-a half-hours were needed to tell this storyand whatbeyond the challenge already citedis the reason for this improbable, slow pace, and howindeed the film can still be enjoyed. In the framework of this essay it is only possible to hint at the reasons.First of all, the slow monotony and circulation of time is a central topic in Krasznahorkai's novel. Tarr and


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Krasznahorkai meant to express the inevitability of fulfilling fate with this slow monotony. This was noarbitrary choice on their part. We can portray the inevitability of fate in many ways, depending on what wethink fate owes its power to. A sentimental melodrama, a tense tragedy, a fast-paced action movie can all

become means for such a portrayal. Tarr does not find fate dramatic. According to Tarr and Krasznahorkai,fate is not the result of fatal or contrived events; it is not inevitable because something happened whoseconsequences are unavoidable. Fatein their viewis the unchanging, the eternal return. There is no crimeneeded for it; there is no blow of fate. It applies to everyone, regardless of where we are in the hierarchy.Tarr's heroes may be wealthy and powerful, but in his world they would receive no quarter in any case. Hechooses run-down heroes because their vulnerability is redoubled.

At the end of the 1950s, Antonioni placed his heroes in an upper-middle-class milieu so that no one wouldmistakenly think that estrangement can be avoided if financial demands are met. Tarr places his charactersso low to show that there are no depths of misery to which one could not sink even lower, for depravity is

primarily not a financial question. Tarr's world is as hopeless as Antonioni's, only he embraces the wholeworld from underneath and not from above. No one could claim that Antonioni's problems are those of therich, and no one can claim that Tarr's films represent only the misery of the poor. In Tarr's world,deconstruction is slow but unstoppable and finds its way everywhere. The question, therefore, is not how tostop or avoid this process, but what we do in the meantime? Tarr asks this question of the audience, but ifthe audience wants to understand the question, it first has to understand the fatality of time. And in order tograsp that, it has to understand that there is no excuse in surviving the present moment: time is emptyan

infinite and undivided dimension, in which everything repeats itself the same way.The other and most important motivation for Satantangobeing so slow and filling such an extraordinaryamount of time is the emptying of time-experience. Quite contrary to Tarkovskii, who uses slowness to builda transcendent experience, Tarr uses the same technique to rid us of the illusion of transcendent experience.A little frivolously, we could say that, knowing the reflexes of audiences accustomed to art films' search forthe transcendent, Tarr needs a little more time and an even slower pace to reach his goal than Tarkovskii.Tarr empties time by creating the constant illusion that what is happening moves the plot forward. The great

bravado of the film is that it manages to keep up the feeling of suspense for seven-and-a-half hours. Thiscould not be achieved through the plot alone. It is necessary that every object, landscape, and figure createssuch a colorful diversity that in itself awakens curiosity. One tool for achieving this impact is that mostcharacters are played not by professional actors, but by artists with very marked faces: film directors,

cinematographers, composers, set-designers, writers, painters. Most of Tarr's characters create the tensionnecessary for the audience's interest with their faces, voices, and movements. One cannot know who theyare; all figures are a secret. They all look unbelievably miserable in a miserable environment, still they showsome fineness, some sign of intellect. They are not descendants of this world; they just got here somehowand now cannot escape. They are wretched people with a serene countenance, of whom we still believe thatthey might have dreams. InDamnation, the past was carried by the outer and inner surfaces of buildings;here history is condensed in human faces.

Satantango is Tarr's modernist masterpiece. With a brave gesture, it not only continues, but also radicalizesthe stream of modern filmsthe world-forming contemplation and meditation from Yasujiro Ozu,Antonioni, Tarkovskii, and Jim Jarmuschwhich has been greatly overshadowed in contemporary filmculture. In their own ways and in their own cultural contexts, these filmmakers created something radical;

but from a formal viewpoint it is Tarr who went the furthest and who got to an unsurpassable end. This initself is no value judgement, but it has to be said. One cannot go further on this road, which, however, doesnot mean that it is a dead end. The extraordinary length and slowness was a means to tell a certain story andnot an end in itself.

Tarr did not have to give up the essence of his style in order to return to a more traditional and downrightclassical form in his next film. We notice that the more normal length of Werckmeister Harmonies(Werckmeister harmnik, 2000) is combined with a greatly reduced narration when compared toSatantango . It is based on one single, further simplified excerpt of another Krasznahorkai novel, The

Melancholy of Resistance . In this way Tarr kept all the stylistic features of time, meditation, monotony,


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slowness, and movement, which made Satantango into a seven-and-half-hour long film, only here usingtwo-and-a-half hours of narration.

A significantly different film from the two previous ones was born in the same style. If we put the threefilms next to each other, we see an interesting line of development. As much asDamnation was in themannerist form of Tarr's style, Satantango was in the classicist, and Werckmeister is in the romantic form.We see the world through the eyes of one chosen characterand only from his viewpoint do we see theevents. In a similar way, The Outsider followed only one character, but in that case the direct film style didnot allow the kind of emotional identification that prevails here. For the first time, Tarr portrays a figurefrom inside and with compassion; for the first time that he portrays the relations of this character to theworld through emotional states, anxiety and fear, that then lead him to insanity. Slow meditation here is nota form of sensing an outside landscape; it is not the means of emptying time, but the milieu of a person'srelation to the world. He portrays the process of the gathering of motifs that finally drive Valushka crazy.Valushka is Tarr's first hero who is in no way depraved and who does not even do as much of a bad deed asEstike in Satantango. Valushka cannot escape from being ruined either, but this is no moral crash; rather it isa crash of nerves, which is a significant difference if we remember that the main feature of Tarr's everyfigure so far had been moral weakness or spiritual pettiness. This is what Werckmeisterprimarily owes itsromantic and melodramatic character.

The story is naturally based on the basic elements already known from earlier films: intrigue, cheating, the

final crash, and the closing of the circle. But here, for the first time, financial crash is much less significant.The heroes of the story live poorly in a small, threadbare urban environment, but they are not miserable andtheir motivations are never financial. Tarr, again for the first time, depicts the crowd assembling on thesquare not with the social empathy characteristic of him, but as a terrifying, murderous mob. And what ismost important, hopelessness and the feeling of no way out is related to a subjective feeling more than inany other film. Therefore, here it is the most choking. Human destruction is not the result of the concretemeanness of specific people or a situation of confinement as in his earlier films. This process of destruction

becomes aggressive and conscious in Werckmeister. More than that, it is also linked directly to the illusionof a superior spirit. It is not the result of empty metaphysical faith, rather of its political program. This is the

program of Mr. Eszter and the mob incensed by the Duke. A distorted parody of the spiritual avant-garde,spiritual and political revolution is what they are; in the name of naturalness and instinct they defy the so-called unnatural culture and civilisation. They are looking for individual ways to happiness; everyone wants

to save the whole world. But redemption here equals complete destruction. It is the corrupt and alcoholicauthority figures who save the town from the raging destruction. They restore order, and Valushka, thepostman, who took care of everyone, is forced to flee. If order is where Valushka has no place and whatmakes Mr. Eszter retune his piano and give up his study of the natural tonal system, then it is just asunbearable as the physical destruction from which the town has escaped. The circle is closed: there is noway to change the order built on intrigue and vile individual interests, for the only counterpoint isdestruction. This is what drives Valushka crazy.

The significance of Bla Tarr's films in the 1990sbeyond their stylistic and aesthetic valuesis that theyoffer the most powerful and complex vision of the historical situation in the Eastern European region overthe last decade. His films reach but few viewers; still, it would be hard to deny that he speaks for hundredsof millions of ordinary European people in his universal and ruthless language, people who feel cheated and

disappointed for wasting all the values of their previous lives in a matter of seconds, who fall prey to pettyintrigues, who are led by petty, mean promise-mongers that talk of high ideals but follow their selfish powerand financial interests. This feeling is born not only from the past, but also from the present experience;although the setting and certain characters may have changed, the same petty fights and intrigue still rule ourlives; other ideologies are quoted, while the misery remains or even deteriorates in the former Soviet Union,Romania, or Yugoslavia. We cannot trust anyone; we cannot believe in anything, for all high ideals are buttools to abuse the helpless. We, Eastern-Europeans, are the tenants of the blocks of flats in Satantango andwe desperately cling to all the promises of the promise-mongers who only take our money. We are thehopeless drunkards; our leaders are the alcoholic policeman, the clever smuggler, and the mafia-man inn-keeper. And we are Valushka, as well, who serves all above him with endless humility and looks the whalein the eye with terror, hoping for Mother Nature's help. And we are the mob, too. In our helplessness we


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would like to break the windows of all luxury shops where they sell articles, of which we can only dream,and we would like to turn our anger against those who are even weaker and more helpless. All of this, ofcourse, is an exaggerationthe exaggeration of great art.

After the international success of Satantango and Werckmeister, Tarr had to carry the burden of highexpectations. He had become a sort of cult figure of European high art cinema, known for his taste forextreme long-takes, slow narrative pace, and his nearly apocalyptic vision of Eastern Europe. This image ofhim was only reinforced by his short filmPrologue (2004) in the omnibus film Visions of Europe. His five-minute-long piece consists of only one single tracking shot that goes along a long line of ragged homeless

people queuing for free soup. This is one of Tarr's favorite shots; very similar tracking shots can be found inDamnation and in Satantango, and even in Werckmeister when the camera goes among the mob. ApparentlyTarr has selected the shot that for him represents most concisely his relationship to the people he films: hisdeep emotional identification with the deprived. That is surely a most powerful vision of Europe; not of theEurope of the rich, but the Europe of the poor.

His next and so far last film, The Man from Londonbrings a certain change in Tarr's career. The change issimilar to what had occurred withAlmanac of Fall twenty two years earlier although not as radical. Theconcreteness of the environment has disappeared; the story does not take place in a recognizably EastEuropean environment; the characters do not represent typical social groups; and the emphasis is entirely ontheir relations and inner worlds. But, whereasAlmanac of Fall was a rather dramatic piece in its theatricality

and the prominence of the dialogues, The Man from London is less theatrical and, as a matter of fact, it isTarr's most taciturn film. While Tarr's earlier films were full of dialogues and long monologues, the maincharacters in this film almost never speak, and what they say is far from the poetic mannerism ofDamnationor Satantango. The environment has lost much of the importance it had in earlier Tarr films: the little townin which the film takes place functions rather as a neutral, almost artificial background than as a spacesocially characterizing the figures. The complicated plot that was so typical of almost all of Tarr's films isalso missing here. It is replaced by a very simple plot. Maloin, the protagonist, is an unnoticed witness of acrime: two men start a fight over a suitcase full of money and one of them pushes the other into the sea, butthe suitcase falls into the water, too. While the murderer leaves to find some tool to recover the suitcase,Maloin fishes it out of the sea and hides it in his tower, from where he watches over the train station at theseaport. On the one hand, he in a way finds the money rather than steals it, but, on the other, he knowswhere to find it and also knows that the money is of criminal origin. Maloin commits his half crime for the

money of course, but his purpose is highly particular: the first thing he does is to order his daughter to leavethe place where she works; the second is to buy her an expensive, luxurious fur. He does not explain hisreasons even to his wife when she starts an angry fight with him as she does not understand how he couldspend all of their money on such a superfluous thing, and how could he take their daughter out of work.Maloin does not reveal anything to anyone and the viewer can only speculate about the high tension hecarries in himself and about the reasons for this. Nor do we know much about any other character'smotivations. The only thing Tarr focuses on is to show us, or rather make us feel, the desperate situation ofall of the characters without ever explaining the reasons for it. We look at Maloin, his wife, and daughter,and we see their situation. We look at the man from London who killed his partner, desperately trying to get

back the suitcase, and we pity him. And above all, we see the eyes of his wife arriving from London. Shesays nothing except one sentence in the film, but her face becomes the protagonist of the last part of the filmas she is the only really innocent victim of a story that took place behind her back and ruined her entire life.

With this film Tarr seems to leave behind the last inspirational remnants of his documentary style. Theconcreteness of all social reality is missing entirely. Also missing is all contingency from the actors'

performance as they are nearly all professionals and have very few dialogues. What has remained is theextremely suggestive long-take style, this time not connecting the characters to their environment, but ratherforcefully inciting the viewer to try to feel the unspoken inner struggle of the characters. The atmosphere isdarker and more serious here than anywhere else in the previous films. And what represents continuityabove all is Tarr's steadfast and immovable empathy for the suffering of the innocent, the poor, and thesinful.


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Works Cited

Kovcs, Andrs Blint. Monolgok a Krhozatrl.Filmvilg 2 (1988): 18.

Tarr, Bla. Unpublished personal communication.

All stills courtesy of Bla Tarr's production company, T&T Filmmuhely

Andrs Blint Kovcs, 2008

Updated: 26 Jan 08

András Bálint Kovács - The World According to Béla Tarr

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