the world according to tarr

7/29/2019 The World According to Tarr

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The World According to Tarr

By Andrs Blint Kovcs

The holistic vision and world view of great artists often easily confuses the beholder. In order

for us to accept the way great art sees the world in its entirety, we must surrender the part of

our own limited life experience with which such an approach does not tally. For the world can

hardly be described with one compound sentence. We usually find that it is not things which

force us to categorize them into a uniform system, but rather we are the ones who try to rob

things of their colourful, ambiguous and accidental nature, in order to be able to name them.

Minor artists, who say but little of the world, think small and are therefore truer to the

ultimate diversity inherent in everything. Great artists, on the other hand, force their will and

vision on the entire world. But it is just this arrogance which helps the recipient to discover in

everything that, which a viewer stuck in diversity and everydayness cannot see. Every single

thing can be approached in an infinite 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

categorise things according to their function. What we achieve this way, is that a single thing

suddenly seems interpretable but from a few viewpoints, its other aspects seeming

unimportant. We tend not to notice what is of no use to us. Great artists, however, do not

think functionally and do not categorise things based on their usefulness. Therefore it is

through the non-functional approach, that they make us see the world the way we have never

seen it. All great artists exaggerate, still it is not exaggeration which makes an artist great.

What makes the artist great is that through this exaggeration and enlargement we still

recognise the world a stunning experience. So exaggeration is no exaggeration after all. This

is the paradox of great art. How and when this experience is born, we cannot say, nor is it

sure, that it reaches all beholders. (Let us not forget, that it is an exaggeration we are talkingabout). Great art is the secret of the given era, as well, not only of form. So it is possible that

in a particular era no great art is born. Not for the lack of talent, but due perhaps to little faith,

tiredness or lack of susceptibility to universal vision in the given period.

Tarrs road to great art is an example of how someone can rise above the unexaggerated

correctness of small masters submerged in diversity. Tarr saw the darkness of social reality,

which for correct functionality was hopelessly impermeable. He started making films at theage of twenty-two in the very realistic and functional style of the so-called documentary-


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feature films, which infused politics into cinema vritand deprived it of the reflexive nature

Jean Rouch had added to it. When he made Family Nest, he was immediately accepted as a

member of the film-makers group, whose work was based on this style and who called

themselves the Budapest School. Among them Tarr counted as the most original talent. No

one noticed back then, at the end of the seventies, that Tarr had in fact little interest in

documentary realism. One of the exciting features of the film was that it followed a similar

structural pattern to that of Fassbinder seven or eight years earlier, although Tarr did not see

any Fassbinder film until 1982. This shows how filmmakers with similar concerns can find

similar solutions at different parts of the world with no direct influence on each other. The

way both directors described the environment was naturalistic and theatrical at the same time,

their characters were banal, but their impulses, passions, selfishness and suffering made them

extraordinary. Both of them condensed the dramatic nature of naturalistic situations to the

point of unreality. Tarr had an eye for the same thing as Fassbinder: to see the spiritual source

of the universal drama in the utterly banal figures determined by their environment. He was a

theatrical talent, as well, just like Fassbinder, but he never worked in the theatre. However, his

thesis film was ShakespearesMacbeth. Just like for Fassbinder, for Tarr the precision of the

actors acting became increasingly important with time. They both used actors in a similar

way. They could only work with actors who had their own, independent personality and could

be inspired to bring the deepest features of their character to the surface. They both made

actors of amateurs, since for both, the authenticity of the human expression was the most

important. As Tarr put it: 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 real life. So we can never trust ourselves to

direct a film. We cannot make a film, I cannot even direct a scene, all I can do is put

everything in a pot, and perhaps something will come out of it. When in Maria Brauns

Marriage Schygulla hits the black man on the head, then looks at her husband this is ascene Fassbinder could never have directed. For this scene to happen, 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 film-makers work I like to watch those

by Godard, Cassavettes or Fassbinder - where the film has personality. When I was teaching

in Berlin, this is what I always explained to the kids: you dont just write a film-script, then

the dialogue and then select the actors from a photo-album. I suggest the following: you do

not write a script, you do not write a dialogue. When you have a synopsis, the next step is tosee, if you have the characters and the sites. And when you have all of that, you need to adjust


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the script anyway. So what they learned from me was to look for actors and sites as soon as

they have a synopsis, and that only after having found them, should they start writing the

dialogues and the scenes, knowing whether the camera will fit in the space and who will play

the characters.(Unpublished personal communication)

The big difference between Tarr and the German master is that Tarr almost never lost his

interest in a realistic and social description of the environment, except perhaps for two films;

one of which for him was the beginning of a new artistic period, Almanac of Fall, and the

second his most recent film, maybe the start of another new beginning. For him the actor and

the scenery were part of the same universe and remained so. He inherited this way of seeing

through Antonioni from Jancs, from whom he also inherited the sensitivity for ritual

movement an element he elaborated in his later films more. The Prefab People was his first

film where one could sense Fassbinders structure clearly. He made a film of a bare and

increasingly hellish everyday life of a young couple in its most complete banality. Contrary to

his usual method though, he used professional actors, making them work the same way

amateurs would back then. They had to improvise texts in the given situations. He wanted the

actors to experience their roles as their own life. 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 description of the environment

contradicted the dramatic condensation. Their world might have been relatively secluded, but

the eventuality of the environment and the real life situations decreased the dramatic tension

all the time. So Tarr made a move towards the eclectic nature, the emotional heat and

preference of the artificial of the post-modern taste, which bloomed in the fine arts and

European film at the beginning of the eighties. Tarr in Almanac of Fall (1985) created a

perfectly artificial and closed world, emphatically different from naturalistic reality andplaced his drama, prone to physical and spiritual sadism, in this context. Tarrs technique here

was the same as in his previous film: he put the actors in situations and makes them

improvise, so that their impulses and emotions surface from the depths of their souls. This

artificial pseudo-world was necessary, so that nothing distracts attention from human cruelty,

pettiness and evil, which spread everywhere and consume everything. It was clear at this

point, that it is not Hungarian housing problems, political conditions or a special existential

state of life Tarr wants to speak of, but the entire world. He saw the world surrounding him,as did Fassbinder, as best summarised by falsehood, cheating, intrigue and hopeless emotional


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vulnerability, as well as the fatal existential void following from all of these. Representation

of financial distress is not a necessary property of this world-view, financial vulnerability,

however, seemed to be the best context to depict moral degradation of humankind. What

made Tarrs first film especially powerful was the way he simultaneously presented social

and spiritual distress and vulnerability as being utterly intertwined. He placed his story in a

social layer, where Hungarian people had the same personal experience in their real lives.

Except for Outsider (1980), all his early films are based on the same dramatic situation:

people confined in a small space make life hell for each other. But the fact that these people

had to share one room and had nowhere to flee from each other is not what made them so

horrid. On the contrary: being confined together was so unbearable, because they were such

horrid types to begin with. They were all the guilty and victims at the same time.

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 which lack all

concrete social motives, all figures are more moral than social examples of desperate

parasitism. Here Tarr was already looking for a world that can be generalised, one which can

lend an authentic background to the spiritual drama with the same elementary power as did

the concrete misery of housing in his first film. Social realism, however, was not fit for this

purpose. In the middle of the eighties all concrete social phenomena lost their authenticity and

meaning. This very thing became the essence of Tarrs world view: nothing is what it seems,

including the social source of human suffering. Underneath all of this lies a fraud, not to be

revealed. Therefore the world of objects cannot be real either, in the naturalistic sense of the

word. Tarr tried to create the semblance of reality in an intensified way, so that the spectator

cannot escape the feeling, that it is his/her own world, so that he/she would see exaggeration

as natural and recognise what he/she has failed to see, to which he/she has always closed

his/her eyes. So that the spectator would see his/her own world as being just as suffocating asthe human relationships in it. Almanac of Fall was therefore a starting point rather, an

intermediary stop between the functional genre, documentary-feature films and a world-

forming vision. This film sought the possibility to generalise, but in a mannerist way, feeling

for decorative abstraction. It was easy here to flee from a vision embracing the whole world,

for he did not really create a world, only a theatre set.

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


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authenticity of superficial description into something universal. AfterAlmanac of Fall it was

not possible to see how Tarr would find a way forwards. Professional isolation, the perfectly

hopeless political stagnation between 1985 and 1987 and the complete moral decadence in the

country, the deaths of Fassbinder, Gbor Bdy, Mikls Erdly and Tarkovsky 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 of modern film and

its possible successor. Our discussions always returned to the way Tarkovsky and Fassbinder

used the travelling; we compared their long takes and whether or not there is a new way - not

yet tried by film-makers - to play with time. This was not just an empty helplessness. He was

searching for the solution 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 have to play a key role in this. But what is a camera-movement like,

what is the time like that makes the image universal, while the world remains very concrete?

In other words: can one use Tarkovskys time-management in a non-natural world, which was

not artistically formed? It was clear to see that Tarr was looking for a style rather than a theme

or story. He knew he had to surpass the abstract set stylisation ofAlmanac of Fall, and return

to a seemingly realistic portrayal of the world, while keeping the feeling of universality and

the speech of the entire world and not letting it fall back to the eventuality of social problems.

It was at this time that he read Lszl Krasznahorkais Satantango and met the author. It was

clear right away that this novel was meant to solve Tarrs problem. Human situations in it are

very similar to those in Tarrs earlier films. He found the social environment (worn down

characters on the verge of misery and corruption) very close to his heart, while the structure of

the book is based on a time game with composition. It seemed Krasznahorkai answered Tarrs

as to the problem of how to treat time. The answer was: eternal return. Monotonous

repetition, infinitely slow and ruthless seclusion can raise even the most earthly, most worn

down, most extreme and most unique-seeming world from its uniqueness, concrete historicaland social facts and create a whole world of it. And so it becomes possible for Tarr to bring

back his naturalistic world-portrayal, while standing on the borderline between artificiality

and reality. This was the most important characteristic of the human world portrayed by him.

Krasznahorkai saw in the world the same thing as Tarr did: endless destruction and misery

disguised as redemption and elevation. In his early films Tarr deduced this process to a

concrete social environment or to the evil nature of the human soul; but the fact that cheating

is inherent in the world itself, in its pseudo nature has never become a central theme, exceptfor Almanac of Fall, where the emphatically artificial set alluded to it. Tarr felt that now he


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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 all this

misery and ruins are the reality of a pseudo-world, a result of cheating and conning. The way

the world is made makes 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 takes form them the little they still have. The

misery of the world is not a result of the financial or the political situation, but an abuse of the

last remnants of faith in humanity. Krasznahorkais novel was special in that it depicted the

process of going down rather then the static condition of misery. Not a disrupted world, but

continuous disruption. This became the common denominator between Krasznahorkai and

Tarr. The monotonous slowness is the time of this ruthless crash, the form of inevitability is

the eternal revolution, which became the basic element of the three great Tarr-films made

with Krasznahorkai.

Although the script was complete, no studio was ready to venture into Satantango. Tarr then

turned to another project of his, and wrote with Krasznahorkai Damnation, the atmosphere,

setting and human figures of which suited the world of Satantango perfectly. Even the story

would have fit in the novel. 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 great and noble. They do not lie to

themselves, only to each other, they really believe in redemption, but they always give a

reason 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

trampled upon. And since they all reason and act accordingly, the result is the eternal

revolution of physical and spiritual destruction. He who began on the bottom, finishes even

lower, he who started high, merely seems to win.

The film introduced novelties in three important elements as compared to earlier Tarr-films.

Most significant was the treatment of dialogue. As mentioned earlier, a common stylistic

characteristic of all earlier films was textual improvisation, even in films made with

professional actors. In this new film, however, not only were the actors dialogues written,

they were also very poetic, abstract and in sharp contrast with the naturalistic shabbiness of

the environment. As in Almanac of Fall, the mannerism of the set created tension with the


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naturalism of the actors. Here it was the other way around: in a run-down world, run-down

and burned out people talk in a poetic and philosophical language.

A decisive effect-element of the films form a second novelty was much more spectacular.

The imagery and set-use of the film was different from all earlier traditions. Tarr created a

world, which makes a realistic impression in all details, but is essentially non-existent and

completely set-like. Tarr and Pauer had travelled through the whole country to find all the real

sites for the scenes, which have the atmosphere of that last moment before complete

destruction, when one can still feel that they were meant to serve a purpose, whose ruined

memory they now document. Gyula Pauer, the set designer and one of the actors of the film

talks about his work: We wandered through all the miners villages and towns in the country.

We were looking for an industrial environment, which bore the clear and irrefutable imprint

of slow destruction and decomposition. What was once meant for dynamic growth and

multiplication, what still bore the sign of a nicer and richer future, but was now in an

infinitely run-down state, showed only the death of such old illusions. We found numerous

such places all over the country. Decades-old dreams of triumphant industrialisation are now

slums, where people can barely survive. We have been to miners villages where only

pensioners live now forty-fifty-year old people - , who were pensioned off, since the mine

was closed down and there is no other work. These people just sit around in the pub all day.

We have been to places where the tubs only brought coal-dust, out of which they built a huge

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,

and now they are utterly unsuited for any other. In booths made of bulking paper, fibre and tin

plates we find townspeople raising pigs and poultry in such incredibly worn-down houses,

where seeing the gate and the staircase one would think life had ceased long ago, and people

have moved out. We have also been to restaurants, where now only beer is served, since theNational Health Organisation closed down the kitchen and forbade drinks to be served, and

where there are no glasses for the beer; people drink from the bottle by three-legged tables

covered with appallingly dirty tablecloths. This restaurant was once probably a place people

were proud of. Above the entrance built in the now memorial Stalin baroque with a

classicist portal and a fake-marble row of pillars, decorated with stucco on the ceiling, with an

illuminated small model trolley above that moved around on the ceiling. The wall may have

once been decorated with fantastic mirrors, brackets and chandeliers. Of all this we now seeonly the broken remains, as if we had trusted naughty children with a nice flat only to find it


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wrecked on our return. Our most stunning experience everywhere was that this was the result

of lives spent in back breaking toil and not by idleness. At the same time our purpose with

finding these places was not to present a diagnosis of certain devastated areas of the country.

The film does not allude specifically to the time and the place. We deliberately avoided

showing any signs of actual politics and economics in regard to this environment. We created

the sites in such a way that they reflect the endgame of a world-era, the state of the last

moment before final disappearance. The sites are real, 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 outside in Budapest, an inside in Ajka and a next-door

shop in Pcs. So the films world consists of real elements, which, however, do not create a

real space. (source: Andrs Blint Kovcs: Monolgok a Krhozatrl. In: Filmvilg, 1988/2.

18.) This is how the set and landscape were created, this is why they seemed naturalistically

real, while from the variation of the same atmosphere made them unrealistically hopeless and

claustrophobically depressing. The set and the locations were but one element of the visual

imagery. The other the third novelty was the special camera treatment and picture

composition. For Tarr this was the biggest problem. He had an exact image 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 were narrow, closed insides. What is more they were intended to keep a semi-dark and

depressive atmosphere everywhere and to allow only those elements of the real sites to

become part of the picture, which fit this mood. The movement of the camera had to be

descriptive from the outside, while having to draw the audience into the films world. What

failed from the story had to be shown visually. It was in the images they had to show, where

this world comes from and where it is leading. Continuous movement was neither needed for

metaphysical abstraction like with Tarkovsky, nor for an abstract choreography of human

relationships like with Jancs, though both artists were close to him. But Tarr did not wantany metaphysical dimension the world of gods or history - to appear in his images, still he

had to surpass the concrete facts of naturalistic portrayal. If we want to briefly summarise,

why he needed long takes and continuous camera-movement, we can say he wanted to depict

a cyclical process returning to itself, while having to create the illusion of moving 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


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whom this became a first film. Their collaboration can be described as a creative struggle, but

the results speak for themselves inDamnation as well as in their next film, Satantango.

To help create the dichotomy of continuous forward movement and an eternal return, one

more element was used: continuous rain. Before Tarr only Tarkovsky had used the rain

motive with such consistency, but with an entirely different meaning. Rain for Tarkovsky was

absolutely positive, while for Tarr it is absolutely negative. From the possible connotations of

the rain Tarr selected monotony and slow, 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 featured at several festivals, was

nominated for the Felix-award, Tarr was invited to lecture at the Berlin Film Academy and

was delegated to the European Film Academy. In the meantime the system in Hungary

changed, the film profession almost collapsed financially and film-making decreased

significantly (though not as drastically as in the Czech Republic), while many new faces

appeared in film production, for whomDamnation meant the overture of a new era. This was

the first black-and-white film in Hungary for a long time, following which, however, black-

and-white suddenly became very fashionable in Hungary. In a short time a whole group of

first-time-film-makers started a career in black-and-white: Ildik Enyedi My 20th Century,

(1988), rpd Sopsits Shooting Gallery (1990), Gyrgy Fehr Dusk (1991), Attila Janisch

Shadow on the Snow (1992), Ildik Szab Child Murders (1993), Jnos Szsz Woyzeck

(1994). It was as if Tarr had torn down a dam and showed them how to swim against the

current.

International fame made it possible for Tarr to start working on his original plan, Satantango.This film could only be made in co-production, for according to the original idea it is really

five films. The extraordinary length of the film was no self-contained game, only a consistent

carrying out of the formal principles laid down in Damnation and a consistent adaptation of

the novels main compositional principle. The undertaking was grand, perhaps the greatest

gamble in film history. Tarr wanted to make a film, which was practically unsuitable for

distribution, for the film does not consist of parts which one can see days or weeks apart, like

Fassbinders Berlin, Alexanderplatz for example, but a single huge composition, which onehas to see in one. One has to sit in the cinema for more than eight hours (with intervals). What


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is more, this length is not justified by a long or complicated story. What happens in the film is

not more than what could be told in ninety minutes. So the fact that Tarr found a producer

tells of the latters real bravery.

There was something in this plan, though, which meant more than a unique bravado of form.

This film meant a provocation and a challenge for the entire contemporary film culture. By

this time the hegemony of American films in Europe had become overwhelming. Not only

their number, but also because a certain Americanisation had appeared in European film:

readily comprehensible, emotional stories, impetuous narration, colourful and grand imagery,

fast rhythm. It seemed reason enough for concern, that the kind of film-making once

characteristic of the new waves and the whole modern film art was completely isolated by the

nineties. Another response to the same phenomenon was the manifesto of the Dogma-group

and the series of films that followed. They also wanted to return to personal expression, to

denying the conventions of portrayal dictated by commercial profit and to using a film

language, which seeks new roads.

At the beginning of the nineties it was imminent, that European film-makers forget all about

their past and merely try to survive in the battle with Hollywood, by becoming Hollywood-

like themselves. Tarrs gesture however was the most radical challenge for the cinema-goers

in favour of European culture. It was as if through shock-therapy he was trying to lead

them back to the recognition of what real film art is about. Black-and-white was the answer to

the over-coloured mayhem of todays visual culture. The style of long takes and no cuts was a

response to the raging pace sieving through from commercials and video-clips. Seven and a

half hours were a response to todays film style of superficial, quick reactions and subliminal

effects. The story of little plot was a response to the action-packed, aggressive plot-structures.

Satantango in all its elements is an extreme counterpoint of the development started in thefilm culture of the nineties and prevalent today.

This film was a piece of great art, represented by the nineties by only few: Abbas Kierostami

and perhaps Takeshi Kitano with a few films. The great ones were at one time more

numerous, but by today films trying to cover the world in its entirety are very rare, if not

already extinct. It is not the task of this text to find the reasons behind this phenomenon, but it

must be said that since roughly the beginning of the seventies it is not simply the battle of thecommercial and artistic film we are facing. In the fifties and the sixties another film industry


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was born in Europe alongside the commercial film industry, what we call the art film

industry. A reaction to this were the so-called avant-garde or elitist art films (called authors

films in the US and art et essai in France), represented by Godard against Truffaut, by Jancs

against Szab, by Tarkovsky against Michalkov, by Straub and Huillet against Wenders. The

difference is not primarily aesthetic, it stands rather in the approach to new form and

conformism. With Satantango Bla Tarr voted on the group and kind of art film he wanted to

belong to. He chose the more marginal, more elitist, less conformist kind, devoted ultimately

to the personal, the kind, which sees its main task as finding new ways. Tarr was not the only

one in Hungary who took this approach. Much sooner, from the middle of the seventies his

older colleagues, who had started their career at the same time, Gbor Bdy and Andrs Jeles

followed his lead. And such artists keep turning up in contemporary Hungarian film, as well.

But since Mikls Jancs, Tarr was the first who managed to raise Hungarian film to the top

level of international avant-garde. The great question of todays film is whether or not this

branch of art films, which go against all mainstream trends, can survive in the world.

All of this, though, is only a background. Satantango is not only a gesture. In Satantango Tarr

used the principles 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-like settlement, which is talked of as the block in the film. The

driving force of the story here is the same as in most Tarr-films: faith, appearance and

cheating. In the portrayal of this world, however, there is no stylisation at all. Tarr did need

the set to allude to the background of the story as directly as in Damnation. This world, on the

other hand, does not promise anything good, it just keeps the people living in it captive, while

they desperately try to get out. This story is much more straightforward and direct than any of

the earlier ones. It is essentially a criminal story about the tricks of two con-men, embezzlers

and an informant, who cheat the inhabitants of the village out of their last hard earned meagresavings in the vilest possible way, making them believe that they will help them to a better

life. The villagers see the Messiah in the two crooks; they follow them blindly and even lose

their homes. While the story is perfectly fictional and structured step by step, the characters

are incredibly fine and authentic. Tarr used all the life experience he had from his period of

direct filming. He created such an elaborate scale of misery that it can be a model of the

whole of society. All intellectual and spiritual types are to be found in this micro-

environment, all variations of human and existential ruin. The doctor, the policeman, thecleaning-woman, the pensioner, the worker, the inn-keeper, the whore, the poet and the


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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 creates

a dichotomy of the real and the unreal now - for the first time not through different motifs

(set, dialogue), but in the same milieu, that of the characters. Therefore he does not need an

over-stylised set or an over poetic dialogue. Where the latter still appears, it is strictly

functional. Irimias, the con-man, is successful with those living in perfect uncertainty,

because his angelic face, his earnestness and prophetic speeches find the last remnants of faith

and trust in them. Irimias is a real false prophet. He sucks the blood of the most desperate,

most defenceless people, who still have something to lose, who still have dreams and who

therefore are happy to grab any chance, which promises a better life. This character is so

diabolical, while all his appeal is to his own suggestive power. He does not try to convince

people, but with his appearance, his secretiveness, his abstract, philosophical and poetic

speeches - makes them believe that he is from another world. People trust him, because they

believe him to be the messenger of another 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 him. Irimias is a petty criminal and police informant on parole. He has really been

sent from up above, from the police. However, he is surreal, and that is why he can play his

part. Peoples approach to him is also unrealistic and this unreality is the most important

statement of the film. Mankind, even in their utter vulnerability, can always find something

above their heads, which seems bigger and which they can believe in. That is how their

vulnerability becomes absolutely hopeless. The more unrealistic something seems, the more

realistic the danger that empty appearances can govern defenceless people of faith. The

dichotomy of semblance and reality comes from one single character, Irimias. He represents

the superior world as the great con. One scene in the film symbolises this clearly: the bells the

characters hear tolling are not in the church, only from a cheap belfry, on the rope of which a

half-wit has started pulling.

That is why it is a mistake to use the concept of metaphysics in connection with Tarrs films,

though his portrayal, which resembles that of Tarkovsky on the surface, lures us to this

explanation. But Tarrs statement is most clear in his film about the other world, about the

domain beyond the senses, Satantango. The domain beyond the senses, the metaphysical

territory is for Tarr none other than the shelter from the 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


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from themselves. Tarrs and Krasznahorkais way of thinking is mostly inspired by Nietzsche.

Their closed, circular time-concept is also proof of that.

All analyses ofSatantango have to first account for why seven and a half hours were needed

to tell this story, and what beyond the cited challenge is the reason for this improbable, slow

pace and how indeed 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 Krasznahorkais novel. The inevitability of fulfilling fate is what Tarr and

Krasznahorkai meant to express with this slow monotony. This was no arbitrary choice on

their part. One can portray the inevitability of fate in many ways, depending on what we think

fate owes its power to. A sentimental melodrama, a tense tragedy, a fast-paced action movie

can all become means. Tarr does not find fate dramatic. According to them it is not the result

of fatal or contrived events. It is not inevitable, because something happened, whose

consequences are unavoidable. Fate in their view is that of the unchanging, of the eternal

return. There is no crime needed for it, nor a blow of fate. It applies to everyone, regardless of

where we are in the hierarchy. Tarrs heroes may be wealthy and powerful. In his world they

would receive no quarter in any case. He chooses run-down heroes, because their

vulnerability is redoubled. At the end of the fifties Antonioni places his heroes in an upper-

middle-class milieu, so that no one makes the mistake of thinking estrangement can be

avoided, if financial demands are met. Tarr places his characters so low to show that there are

no lower depths of misery from which one could not sink even lower, for depravity is

primarily not a financial question. Tarrs world is as hopeless as Antonionis, only he

embraces the whole world from underneath and not from above. No one could claim that

Antonionis problems are those of the rich, and no one can claim that Tarrs films represent

only the misery of the poor. In Tarrs world deconstruction is slow, but unstoppable and finds

its way everywhere. The question therefore is not how to stop or avoid this process, but whatwe do in the meantime? Tarr asks this question of the audience, but if the audience wants to

understand the question, they first have to understand the fatality of time. And in order to

grasp that, they have to understand that in surviving the present moment there is no excuse:

time is empty. An infinite and undivided dimension, in which everything repeats itself the

same way.

The other and most important motivation for Satantango being so slow and of anextraordinary time is the emptying of time-experience. Quite contrary to Tarkovsky, who uses


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slowness to build a transcendent experience, Tarr uses the same technique to rid us of the

illusion of the transcendent experience. A little frivolously we could say that knowing the

reflexes of the audience used to the art films search for the transcendent, Tarr needs a little

more time and an even slower pace to reach his goal than Tarkovsky. 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. This could not be achieved through the plot alone. It is necessary that every object,

landscape and figure create such a colourful diversity that in itself awakens curiosity. One

tool for that is that most characters are played not by professional actors, but artists with very

marked faces and characters: film directors, cinematographers, composers, set-designers,

writers, painters. Most of Tarrs characters create the tension necessary for the audiences

interest with their faces, voices and movements. One cannot know who they are, all figures

are a secret. They all look unbelievably miserable in a miserable environment, still they show

some fineness, some sign of intellect. They are no descendants of this world, they just got

here somehow and now cannot escape. They are wretched people with a serene countenance,

of whom we still believe that they might have dreams. In Damnation the past was carried by

the outer and inner surfaces of buildings, here history is condensed in human faces.

Satantango is Tarrs modernist masterpiece, which - with a brave gesture not only

continues, but also radicalizes the stream of modern film, which has been greatly

overshadowed in contemporary film culture: the world-forming contemplation and meditation

from Ozu, Antonioni, Tarkovsky and Jarmusch. In their own ways and in their own cultural

contexts they all created something radical, but from a formal viewpoint it is Tarr who went

the furthest and who got to an unsurpassable end. This in itself is no value judgement, but it

has to be said. On this road one cannot go further, which, however, does not mean that it is a

dead end. The extraordinary length and slowness was a means to tell a certain story and not anend in itself. Tarr, however, did not have to give up the essence of his style in order to return

to a more traditional and downright classical form in his next film. We notice that the more

normal length of Werckmeister Harmonies is combined with a greatly reduced narration

compared to Satantango. It is based on one single, further simplified excerpt of another

Krasznahorkai-novel The Melancholy of Resistance. In this way he kept all the stylistic

features of time, meditation, monotony, slowness and movement, which made Satantango

into a seven-and-half-hour long film, only used in two and a half hours of narration here.


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In the same style a significantly different film was born from the two previous ones. If we put

the three pieces next to each other, we see an interesting line of development. IfDamnation is

the mannerist form of Tarrs style, Satantango is the classic, and Werckmeisteris the romantic

form. We see the world through the eyes of one chosen character, and only from his

viewpoint do we see the events. Likewise The Outsider(1980) follows only one character, but

in that case the direct film style does not allow the kind of emotional identification, which

prevails here. It is for the first time, that Tarr portrays a figure from inside and with

compassion. It is for the first time that he portrays the relation of this character to the world

through emotional states, anxiety and fear, which then lead him to insanity. Slow meditation

here is not a form of sensing an outside landscape; it is not the means of emptying time, but

the milieu of a persons relation to the world. He portrays the process of the gathering of

motifs, which finally drive Valushka crazy. Valushka is Tarrs first hero, who is in no way

depraved and who does not even do as much of a bad deed as Estike in Satantango. Valushka

cannot escape from being ruined, either, but this is no moral crash, rather a crash of the

nerves, which is a significant difference, if we remember that the main feature of Tarrs every

figure so far, has been moral weakness or spiritual pettiness. This primarily is what

Werckmeisterowes its romantic and melodramatic character to.

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 and their motivations are never financial. Tarr for the

first time depicts the crowd assembling on the square not with the social empathy

characteristic of him, but as a terrifying, murderous mob. And what is most important,

hopelessness and the feeling of no way out is related to a subjective feeling more than in

any other films, therefore it is here that it is the most choking. Human destruction is not theresult of the concrete meanness of specific people or a situation of confinement as in his

earlier films. This process here becomes aggressive and conscious destruction. More than

that, it is also linked directly to the illusion of a superior spirit. It is not the result of the empty

metaphysical faith, rather 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, who in the name of naturalness and instinct 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 destruction completely.


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But it is the corrupt and alcoholic authority figures who save the town from the raging

destruction. They restore order, and Valushka, the postman, who took care of everyone is

forced to flee. If order is where Valushka has no place and what makes Mr. Eszter to retune

his piano and give up his study of the natural tonal system, then it is just as unbearable as the

physical destruction which the town has escaped from. The circle is closed: there is no way to

change the order built on intrigue and vile individual interests, for the only counterpoint is

destruction. This is what drives Valushka crazy.

The significance of Bla Tarrs films in the 1990s beyond their stylistic and aesthetic values is

that they offer the most powerful and complex vision of the historical situation in the Eastern-

European region over the last decade. His films reach but a few, still it would be hard to deny,

that he speaks for hundreds of millions of ordinary European people in his universal and

ruthless language. Feeling cheated and disappointed for wasting all the values of their

previous lives in a matter of seconds, falling prey to petty intrigue, being led by petty, mean

promise mongers, who talk of high ideals, but who follow their selfish power and financial

interests. This feeling is born not only from the past, but also from the present experience, that

although the set and certain characters may have changed, still the same petty fights and

intrigue rule our lives, other ideologies are quoted, while the misery remains, or even

deteriorates in the Soviet Union Romania or Yugoslavia. We cannot trust anyone, we cannot

believe in anything, for all high ideals are but tools to abuse the helpless. We, Eastern-

Europeans, are the tenants of the blocks of flats in Satantango and we desperately cling to all

the promises of the promise mongers, who only take our money. We are the hopeless

drunkards, our leaders are the alcoholic policeman, the clever smuggler and the maffia-man

inn-keeper. And we are Valushka, as well, who serves all above him with endless humility

and looks the whale in the eye with terror, hoping for mother natures help. And we are the

mob, too. In our helplessness we would like to break the windows of all luxury shops, inwhich they sell articles we can only dream of, and we would like to turn our anger against the

ones even weaker and more helpless. All of this is exaggeration of course. The exaggeration

of the great art.

After the international success ofSatantango and WerckmeisterTarr had to carry the burden

of high expectations. He has become a sort of cult figure of European high art cinema known

for his taste of extreme long takes, slow narrative pace and his nearly apocalyptic vision ofEastern Europe. This image of him was only reinforced by his short film made in 2004 in the


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collective short film series Visions of Europe. The 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 shot is one of Tarrs favourites: very similar tracking shots can be found in

Damnation and in Satantango, and even in Werckmeister, when the camera goes among the

mob. Apparently Tarr has selected the shot that for him represents the most concisely his

relationship to the people he films: his deep emotional identification with the deprived. That

is surely a most powerful vision of Europe; not of the Europe of the rich, but the Europe of

the poor.

His next and so far last film, The Man from London (2007) brings a certain change in Tarrs

career. The change is similar to what had occurred with Almanac of Fall twenty two years

earlier although not that radical. The concreteness of the environment has disappeared; the

story does not take place in a recognizably East-European environment; the characters do not

represent typical social groups, and the emphasis is entirely on their relations and inner

worlds. But whereas Almanac of Fall was a rather dramatic piece by its theatricality and by

the prominence of the dialogues, The Man from London is less theatrical, and as a matter of

fact, it is Tarrs most taciturn film. While earlier films of Tarr were full of dialogues and long

monologues, the main characters in this film almost never speak, and what they say is far

from the poetic mannerism ofDamnation or Satantango. The environment has lost much of is

importance it had in earlier Tarr-films; the little town in which the film takes place functions

rather as a neutral almost artificial background than as a space socially characterizing the

figures. The complicated complot is also missing in this film that was so typical of almost all

of Tarrs films. It is replaced by a very simple plot. Maloin, the protagonist is an unnoticed

witness of a crime: two men starts a fight over a suitcase full of money, and one of them

pushes the other into the sea, but the suitcase falls into the water too. While the murderer

leaves to find some tool to recuperate the suitcase, Maloin fishes it out of the sea, and hides itin his tower from where he watches over the train station at the seaport. He in a way finds

the money rather than steals it, but on the other hand he knows where 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 her daughter to

leave the place she is working at. The second is to buy her an expensive luxurious fur. He

does not explain his reasons even to his wife when she starts an angry fight with him as she

does not understand how could he spend all of their money on such a superfluous thing, andhow could he take their daughter out of the work. Maloin does not reveal anything to anyone


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and the viewer can only speculate about the high tension he carries in himself and about the

reasons of this. We dont know much about any other charaters motivations either. The only

thing Tarr is focusing on is to show us, or rather make us feel the desperate situation of all of

the characters without ever explaining the reason of 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

and desperately tries to get back the suitcase and we pity him. And above all, we see the eyes

of his wife arriving from London. She says nothing except one sentence in the film but her

face becomes the protagonist of the last part of story as 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 remnants of his documentary style

inspiration. The concreteness of all social reality is missing entirely. Also missing is all

contingency from the actors play as they are nearly all professional and they have very few

dialogues. What has remained is the extremely suggestive long take style, this time not

connecting the characters to their environment, but rather forcefully inciting the viewer to try

to feel the unspoken inner struggle of the characters. The atmosphere is darker and more

serious here than anywhere else in the previous films. And what represents continuity above

all is Tarrs steadfast and immovable empathy for the suffering of the innocent, the poor, and

the sinful.

the world according to tarr

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