This is the seventh in my 2018 monthly series (I skipped January) watching two films per month by auteurs whose work was unfamiliar to me.Hungarian director Bela Tarr promised to be a truly formidable entry in this series. Not only were both the movies I had on the docket in excess of two hours, but they had a dreaded assignation affixed to them: "Slow Cinema."
Wikipedia describes "Slow Cinema" as "a genre of art cinema filmmaking that emphasizes long takes, and is often minimalist, observational, and with little or no narrative. It is sometimes called 'contemplative cinema.'"
This is a genre that has only started to become familiar to me as a genre, even though I've seen many films that would conform to its broad strokes. I just didn't have a name for such a film until recently. Wikipedia lists Tarr as one of the genre's progenitors, but it also includes the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Kelly Reichardt and Abbas Kiarostami as filmmakers who were either responsible for launching the genre or are modern representatives of it. I've loved at least one film by each of those directors, so watching two Tarr movies in August would not necessarily be a death sentence.
But I understood that Tarr was slow even by the standards of slow cinema.
I'd toyed with watching the second of my two films when it was on Netflix ages ago, but had never quite been able to pull the trigger. Rarely -- or really, never, as it proved -- was I in the mood for a night of such work.
Well, that's pretty much exactly why I'm doing this series.
August may not have been the best month to try Tarr, as the first half of the month was consumed by MIFF, and the second half by the upcoming playoffs in my fantasy baseball league. Slow cinema did not seem to fit into my prevailing mindset.
But the pickin's are getting slim as I find myself increasingly unable to source films from my original list of filmmakers, previewed for you at the end of 2017. Tarr was on that list. So was Chantal Akerman, another director who worked in slow cinema and has so far eluded me. Tarr had two movies available on iTunes, one of which was the film of his I'd definitely planned on seeing, so Tarr it was.
But before we talk about those movies, let's talk a little bit more about Tarr.
I'm almost wondering if this shouldn't be a series about Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky, Tarr's wife, who is actually credited as a co-director on both of the films I watched. I guess their credits are not exactly the same -- if they were both listed as co-directors, they might be, but he's the director and she's the co-director, which I guess is why many sites just list him as the director. Anyway.
Tarr was born in Hungary in 1955, the son of a scenery designer and a dialogue prompter at a theater. He originally wanted to become a philosopher (which has a rather direct relevance to one of the two films) and considered filmmaking sort of a hobby. He started out making amateur documentaries that caught the attention of a Hungarian studio, which funded his first feature. Social realism was a guiding principle of his early work, but a 1984 adaptation of Macbeth represented a shift to what would become his dominant mode: films compromised of long takes lasting between six and 11 minutes in which the camera would move around on a dolly and swoop and glide through the set. All of it, as you would guess, fairly slowly.
Tarr has said that the second film I watched would be his last, but it's only been seven years since that came out and he's only 63, so who knows.
The Man from London (2007)
Although Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) are both films I've heard of -- Satantango because it's 415 minutes long -- I went straight for his second-to-last and last film, the first of which was 2007's The Man for London. And boy did it give me an idea of what to expect from Tarr pretty quickly.
The story, such as it is, surrounds a dock worker, who mans an observation station by night, who witnesses a murder that occurs after two men are arguing over a briefcase of money. When the murderer flees the scene, he abandons the briefcase in the water, which the night watchman goes and fishes out. He must continue about his routines as a detective from London comes poking around and asking questions.
This sounds like pretty standard material for a thriller/murder mystery, but it would be impossible to use the word "thriller" in relation to anything made by Tarr. Before this murder occurs, the camera spends what must be about 20 minutes just panning around the docks, following the activities of men from afar and of trains as they pull in and out of the adjoining station. The camera is looking down from the very tower you see in the poster, which does make for quite a good set. But nothing is happening, really. The setting of the scene is taking place, only for 20 times longer than any other filmmaker would spend on it.
The man makes his way between his home, his work and other locales, such as a bar, in this presumably French port town. (The actors speak French, including, somewhat surprisingly, Tilda Swinton as his wife.) The story slowly develops, I suppose, but everything is so drawn out and elongated that it's possible to lose focus even on the minimal amount that is "happening." I had to consult the Wikipedia plot synopsis afterward to be sure I'd actually noted the developments in the plot correctly, and in fact, I had missed some of them.
It's the kind of film you should not watch tired, and of course, I was very tired when I watched it. But in this case that also had its benefits. There was one particular shot where the camera was following the man as he walked along a pier. I think I had front-loaded the sweets I'd planned to eat during the movie and was trying to make it through without any more. Well, I actually fell asleep on two separate occasions during this shot; both times I awoke, it was still going on, with no appreciable change in the scenery or in the visual information being communicated.
This might sound awful to you, but actually, I give the film a marginal recommendation. The black and white cinematography looks really nice, and it's clear that Tarr is going for, and pulling off, something very specific and intentional. It's very possible to say I appreciated it without having any intention of ever watching it again.
The Turin Horse (2011)
The Turin Horse was, if anything, more of a chore, but it was almost a chore I didn't get to have. I'll explain.
You know how you seem to get the option with iTunes nowadays whether you want to download your rental or stream it directly from the cloud? That was certainly the case with The Man From London, which I did stream.
Well. The Turin Horse wasn't having any of that. I'd press play, and it would never start progressing forward with the film. It was a slightly different phenomenon than the one I wrote about with my broken rental of Thor: Ragnarok, which also would not start playing. In the case of The Turin Horse, I could drag the time marker forward to any random part of the movie, and it would show me a still from that moment. It just wouldn't play.
And unfortunately, I'd left it until the last minute to watch it. This was Wednesday night I discovered this, and I'd already set aside Thursday night as spillover in case I couldn't take the whole thing down in one evening. (Friday night was the 31st of the month, but I wasn't about to spend my Friday night this way.) So I reported the problem to iTunes in the hopes that they might be able to provide me with a working copy. On a lark, I also decided to set the film to download while watching something else that night.
The next morning I had a refund from Apple, which seemed to doom any hopes I had of getting a working copy of the film from them. But then I also checked my download, and lo and behold, it worked. So I managed to take the whole thing down on Thursday night ... and didn't end up paying for it either.
The thing that's most interesting about the "plot" of The Turin Horse is the thing that sets the plot in motion -- whether that's literally or metaphorically is unclear. And it was interesting because it taught me something about the life of Friedrich Nietzsche that I'd never known. Were you aware that Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown while watching a man whip a horse? Well he did, and threw his arms around the horse to hug it, shortly afterward uttering his final words and living as a mute cared for by family for the last ten years of his life.
This story follows that horse, at least metaphorically, which is as literally as anything can be taken in this film. I was put in mind of another film I watched in this series, Au Hasard Balthasar, as I watched this horse receive some of the same abuse the donkey receives in that movie. A man rides this horse through a windstorm out to a remote farmhouse with a nearby well. His grown daughter is there waiting for him. For the next week, the man and his daughter eat potatoes, get water from the well and spend timing staring out the window into the wind.
That's it. That's the whole movie.
It's pretty arduous, as this goes on for two hours and 35 minutes. There's a part sometime in the middle when a neighbor shows up to report vaguely of post-apocalyptic occurrences in the nearby town and spout some philosophical mumbo jumbo about the division of responsibility between God and man for destroying the world. Later, a group of gypsies show up in a horse-drawn carriage, and are turned away almost immediately. Shame, as you are really desperate for something to shake up the monotony by this point.
And though I spent most of the movie certain I was going to give the film a star rating 2.5 or lower -- meaning I could not recommend it -- I ended up at three stars with this movie too. There is again something raw and pure about Tarr's artistic intent, and the mood he creates can be downright haunting, especially with the sound of that wind always blowing in the background. There's a shot that focuses on the father in the foreground outside, and only eventually do you realize you can see the face of his daughter staring out the window, almost like a ghost. Who knows, maybe she is.
It's a lot easier to take this film as a metaphor than maybe it is for The Man From London, and it has a special funereal tone to it given its expected place in Tarr's career as his last film. I came to think of these characters as existing in some kind of unchanging purgatory, either already dead or perhaps in the throes of a terminal illness, waiting for death to arrive. The final ten minutes of the film really drives this home. It ends up being hopeless and profound.
I still do think there are better ways to expend 155 minutes of screen time than to beat us into some kind of submission that's almost like a fugue state. So I can't go a lot heartier on my recommendation than that. But there's no doubt that Tarr has something going on that can be dark and mysterious and unnerving. The apparent simplicity of his storytelling style and narrative content is belied, also, by the occasionally complicated camera movements, which require intense amounts of premeditation.
I've got some candidates for September, but you and I will probably be equally surprised by who I end up going with. Stay tuned.
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