BELA TARR
A LOVE VISIONARY OF OUR TIME

The Devil Probably

There were extravagant, irresistible rumors, spreading like wild fire, about Bela Tarr's Satantango. Rumors about a seven-and-a-half hour epic that constitutes a transcendental experience for the participants in an allegedly raptured mass of a screening; about a Hungarian masterpiece that goes far beyond Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Antonioni and Jancsό, in its embodiment of the time-image; about a bold redefinition of the narrative language, inspired by the steps of the tango; about a black and white image that has been transubstantiated into gray organic matter; about the hypnotic power exercised by its travelling shots on a transfixed audience; and about a new kind of cinema that collapses the distance between spectacle and spectator, while demarcating it as the only possible space left for him/her to exist, that of sublime inferno.

The film follows the disillusioned members of a defunct farm collective, in their quest for redemption and salvation across the rain-drenched Hungarian plain. Visionary, but utterly cynical, Satantango is undoubtedly a landmark in the history of cinema, and a devastating rumination on the social and moral dis-integration of post-communist Eastern Europe.

But, more than a film, more than a ritual, watching Satantango was an event, during which three main actions took place: a post-apocalyptic cosmogony, the birth of a new narrative sys-tem, and the invention of a new way for constructing time by continuously and simultaneously emptying it out. American writer Susan Sontag was right. Satantango was a "heroic violation" of contemporary cinema.

An astonishing achievement for a black and white, seven-and-a-half hour movie, full of long takes, and with the bare minimum of a plot. It was Tarr's provocative and gutsy response to the Hollywood empire. To the action-packed, quick paced, sensory overdoses of the typical 90's movie that had invaded the screens across the globe, Tarr retorted: "Go to hell!" And he proceeded by creating a hell of his own. Never before was hell so enticing.

Since Miklόs Jancsό, Bela Tarr has been the first Hungarian director to achieve widespread attention, and gather an enthusiastic, devout following amongst cinephile circles. By some, he is considered to be the most important contemporary Eastern European auteur. Still, Bela Tarr is a perplexing case. A young director (in his mid-forties), his international fame erupted only two years ago with his last tour-de-force, the more self-contained, merely two-hour long Werckmeister Harmonies. An adaptation of The Melancholy of Resistance, a novel by modernist writer and Tarr's longtime collaborator, Laszlό Krasznahorkai, the film is yet another inexorable meditation on the eternal battle between harmony and dissonance, between order and chaos.

Going back to Tarr's first period, we discover, to our surprise, self-assured gestures toward another cinema: that of socialist realism and cinema verite. He made his first feature, Family Nest (1977), at the age of 22, a film which immediately established him as the most original (and, by far, the youngest) talent of the docu-fiction Budapest School. The story examines with rare precision the emotional exile of a young mother in the inland of an alienated, patriarchical society.

Family Nest, along with the next two films of his "proletarian trilogy," Outsider (1981) and Prefabricated People (1982), establishes Tarr's ongoing dialectic between the tyranny of quotidian life and its violent negotiation with human existence. As in Fassbinder's films, ordinary people, trapped in banal situations, are rendered extraordinary through his unrelenting gaze.

Tarr orchestrates his camera in raw close-ups, improvises the action with non-professional actors, and documents a claustrophobic reality from which there is no possibility of escape.

Macbeth (1982), a 72' video production of Shakespeare's play that Tarr shot for Hungarian Television, marks a turning point in Tarr's mise-en-scene. Comprising of only two, continuously moving sequence shots, it is an exquisite choreography of both camera and actors, and a bold introduction to Tarr's theology of Evil. This newfound formal vocabulary, which will be expanded and perfected in his later work, is further explored in Almanac of Fall (1984), a naturalistic, Bergmanesque chamber drama, a story of entanglement and deception amongst five rival characters. The inherent theatricality of the stylized set and the sensational use of lighting disrupts the orchestration of bodies and glances, arrested by a merciless lens.

With Damnation (1987), his first collaboration with Laszlό Krasznahorkai, Tarr enters the abyss. A devastated, post-industrial landscape, incessant rain, barking dogs, impenetrable fog, are all elements that will keep coming back in Tarr's and Krasznahorkai's next two films. A film noir that borders with science fiction, it denies the likelihood of salvation not only to its main character, but to humanity itself. Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) will drive the knife into the bone of what film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has called "demonic formalism," completing the trilogy of political and metaphysical allegory.

Bela Tarr's cinema has been called pessimistic, misanthropic, demonic, sadistic. But, in its tragic beauty, its spiritual longing, the wonderful horrible world of Bela Tarr is also unbelievably gentle, like love-making in slow motion. And, in the end, a Tarr moment is utterly and profoundly redemptive. For, it is always a holy moment; yet, a profane, anarchic, barbaric holy moment. Suspended in that liquid, primordial state where images, words, faces and smells have not yet cohered to a state of synaesthesia (the ultimate illusion of immersion). Still, at the same time, one cannot avoid experiencing its full intensity, but through an un-conditional and total corporeal surrender.

You either survive a Tarr movie, or you don't. It's that simple...-You don't have an option. The aftermath of your encounter with his universe is fatal; like an unavoidable car crash, or an un-expected meeting with the devil. The decision of whether we, the audience, choose, in the end, hell or paradise as our locus solus of redemption, is left up to us. It is our own predicament and challenge. Tarr makes an argument for hell, and he sure knows how to be damn convincing about it.

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