There is a derisive cliché in circulation about people who like particularly concentrated or reduced narrative cinema: They would prefer to watch a glass of water gradually become emptier through evaporation. And this for hours and of course in black and white. The films with which the Hungarian director Béla Tarr became famous come radically close to this ideal of “slow cinema”. First of all, the monolith, which was presented at the Forum at the Berlinale in 1994: “Satanstango” lasts seven and a half hours, and many minutes of these hours pass with someone taking a look outside from an inhospitable dwelling, at a flat landscape on which it rains relentlessly.
However, in this almost standstill time there is a glimmer of hope: a dangerous charismatic named Irimiás is supposed to return to the village. And while the local doctor takes ages to renew his supply of liquor, “Sátántangó” becomes a complete, albeit drastically slowed down, story about a country that can hardly free itself from the morass of its sense of the future destroyed by communism.
People are special animals
Béla Tarr had a congenial source for his magnum opus: a novel of the same name by László Krasznahorkai, with whom he had previously made “Damnation” (1988) and then “The Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000), “The Man from London” (2007) and finally “The Turin Horse” (2011). All of these adaptations are based on the maximum extent of the imagination: Krasznahorkai, who finally received the well-deserved Nobel Prize this year, is basically a linguistic artist, but with a penchant for the allegorical, as suggested by the Hungarian cinema of Miklós Jancsó.
Tarr, in turn, started from the latent fantasy of the books and placed them in front of his camera in a state of suspension between extreme concreteness and symbolic charge. In this vision, people can hardly be separated from animals and the earth, and just as “Satanstango” began with a herd of cattle, Tarr’s film work ended in 2011 with the suffering of a horse and the implication that Nietzsche‘s madness would probably be the most logical of all reactions to the world, and not just for him.
Tarr declared his retirement from filmmaking after “The Turin Horse” and largely stuck to it. “Missing People” (2019) belongs more in the world of theater; the Vienna Festival had commissioned it, and Tarr had brought 250 homeless people together for a project. In a certain sense, he was continuing his artistic beginnings when he began writing stories about “ordinary” people in Budapest in the 1970s. The encounter with Krasznahorkai inspired him to place a greater emphasis on the formal aspects of cinema, which he then brought to solitary mastery, for example in a planned sequence (in a long, uninterrupted tracking shot) in “The Werckmeister Harmonies”.
Tarr, who also had close ties to Berlin and was an influential teacher at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), always kept his distance from Viktor Orbán’s political regime. His own Hungary remained stuck in a forced aesthetic autonomy, which not only communism, but even more so the only remaining capitalist world system, forced. Béla Tarr, like the character of Irimiás in Satanstango, was a negative prophet. He died on Tuesday at the age of 70 after a long and serious illness.
