Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)

Counting his production of Macbeth for Hungarian television, Tarr has directed nine films since 1979. Tarr's early works are rooted in common, insular social environments. Tarr's later films are similarly distinctive but their visual styles are often characterized by frequent long takes that recall the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. This rigorous style is on display throughout the director's seminal Sátántangó, a film that is routinely lauded in film circuits but has rarely been seen by the public. Sátántangó begins with a formidable opening shot that is hypnotic: within a rural farming community, a single take captures a herd of cattle as they exit a warehouse pen. Some roam about and graze inattentively while others impulsively copulate. The entire herd moves between houses and barns, and slowly moves toward the horizon. This action is stark, unusual and darkly satiric. In these opening minutes the farmers' livestock is able to freely move around, however, it is this option of freedom that no human character in the film shares. Rain is a constant companion in the film, and Tarr seems to analogize it with poverty. Most of the film's principle characters develop a scheme to rob a sum of money that has been promised, in shares, to each farmer. The possibility of wealth fosters greed, deceit, and infidelity. Futaki and Mrs. Schmidt are seen plotting, and are interrupted by Mr. Schmidt, another secret conspirator who unknowingly reveals his scheme to a hiding Futaki. One sin leads to another and deceit interconnects each person in the entire community. The characters in Sátántangó are assembled in a hierarchy of domination and betrayal; it's a trap where even the most secret conspiracy is disruptively repercussive. At the fringe of this web is the young Estike. She has been fleeced of her modest savings by her bother, and this loss results in frustration. She latches on to a pet cat, terrorizing it and finally forcing its head into a bowl of poisoned milk. Afterward she fashions an identical elixir for herself. In this manner, betrayal inevitably tenders the highest cost for the lowest-tiered conspirator. The tragedy affects everyone. The entire film is stitched together from a series of long shots—a minute number in proportion to the film's epic length. This cinematographic tactic visually manifests the film's thematic intentions. There are numerous instances of this visual signature, and the effect is hypnotic: sunrises occur in real time; figures move toward distant horizons and diminish; close-ups track along walking heads that bob vertically—and endlessly—in and out of frame. These actions are all captured with bold, static patience, and are demonstrative of the ennui of the film's deprived community. Sátántangó is structured in a repetitive chronology that apes the rhythmic tally of the tango. Episodes are followed or preceded by others that transpire simultaneously but from different perspectives, and passages without action (for example, a lengthy scene where characters engage in the titular dance) are supplementary to ones that precede or follow. Slowly, the viewer is informed of every betrayal and lie, of every deceit in a community that relies, ironically, upon faith. The film is divided into 12 episodes, some of which only indirectly convey the film's signifying theme of desperation. In illustrative contrast to Estike's desperate violence, a community doctor, a voyeur who records the actions of neighbors through his window, fumbles through his every scene in a permanent vodka-induced stupor. He is as poor and desperate as any other character, yet his behavior is comic in what is an otherwise tragic film. Sátántangó is a compilation of such stark and discriminated pieces. It's the cumulative alliance of a number of contrasted themes that derives the film's irony: it is at once sympathetic and patronizing, both tragic and satiric. It is this insidious yet ambiguous political nature that characterizes Sátántangó as a Hungarian film, in turn perpetuating its obscurity and qualifying its art.

The Man from London (Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2007)

After the more complicated narratives of Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr reduces down a Georges Simenon novel to a few elemental essentials the center of which deals with a railway worker in a musty and run down port town, who witnesses a murder while stationed on a tower and then stumbles into a stack of cash. The Man from London is about staring, listening, and living with a guilt-ridden heart accompanied by a suggestive minimalist soundtrack and ravishing black-and-white cinematography. Tarr's superglacial camera movements and long-drawn-out shots generate a hypnotic sense of curiosity, giving us enough moments to think and always implying far more than they show. The Man from London is grave and intense, but not particularly involving, and its hard to evaluate the actors work because theyre given so little to say. Like all of Tarr's films, The Man from London is an auteurist creation par excellence, with Tarr in complete control of space, light, sound, and camera movement. But the sum of all turns out to be a test of viewers threshold of tolerance. The Man from London wished to explore some existential concerns other than offer a compact, emotionally capricious, and somber piece in which the aesthetics occupy center stage at the expense of substance.

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011)

Bela Tarr from Hungary is renowned for his minimalist approach to cinema. The Turin Horse is his last contribution to the art of cinema. This affirmation comes directly from the filmmaker himself. While many around the globe would want that to be a revocable decision, for the time being we have to take the auteur by his own words. The film opens up with a direct reference to a prominent incident in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's life. The much debated incident had unfolded somewhat in this fashion: Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse in the streets of Turin, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed to the ground. The film starts with a voice-over of Nietzsche's incident while the screen remains black. Does this signify the impending darkness? The film then documents six days in a stony house on a Hungarian plain occupied by the horse’s owner (Janos Derzsi) and his stoic-faced daughter (Erika Bok). The film presumably attempts to establish a connection between the horse in the Nietzsche's incident and the horse owned by the family.  What unfolds next is the mundane existence of the father-daughter couple amid fast-approaching apocalypse. Tarr punctuates the in-between time with a chain of repetitious acts performed by the couple: eating the boiled potato that is their daily meal, the daughter helping dress and undress the father, the daughter fetching water from a nearby well, both of them peeling away skin of hot potatoes. Tarr does not draw conclusions, but sketches a marginal and tedious existence of humans on the screen. The family in the mean time makes a futile attempt to escape the impending doomsday scenario. The only worthwhile but helpless act remains for these characters is to wait out the imminent end of the world. While this turn of events makes the two characters look like helpless creatures waiting to be crushed upon by the willful massacre of nature, the horse also undergoes the same psychological pain and displays symptoms of an imminent physical breakdown. Despite the nurturing efforts by the couple, the horse is slowly nearing death and the wagon lies down in the darkness. All these images create a sense of hollowness in the mind of the viewer. Tarr's style of filmmaking may not be for everybody. His penchant for long takes (this movie was filmed with a total of 30 shots!), stony black and white images, minimal use of dialogues, and using a handful of characters are what defines his senses of cinema. Tarr manufactures some beautiful images out of situations that are extreme in their ultimate consequence. The profoundness of the grim plot has been aptly captured in the scenes where the father/daughter sits by the chair in front of the only window of the house and silently stares out at the museum of natural destruction. These images of solitude will haunt you forever. Some of the tracking shots will stay with you much after the theater has lighted up. The background score is perfectly matched with the undercurrent of monotony and calamity. Tarr also makes subtle references to how different genders react differently to mundanity of life: while the daughter seems unfazed and stoic (when stripping away skin of hot potatoes), the father is visibly angry and unsettled. The Turin Horse is a magnificent watch by any measure; be it its cinematic images, aural experience, study of human characters in the face of most mundane existence and fundamentally the most disastrous event. 


The film won a FIPRESCI Prize at the 2011 Berlin International Fim Festival.