CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: FREE FALL (PÁLFI GYÖRGY , HUNGARY)

Screens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/12 & 10/16
World premiere: 3 May, 2014, Jeonju International Film Festival

I am totally unfamiliar with director Pálfi György's notorious/beloved 2006 Taxidermia except by the outlines of its reputation, so I can't speak to the accuracy of the common thread I've seen in the reviews I've peaked at, that his newest film, Free Fall, is basically like that movie, only a little bit more audience-friendly and easy to digest. And if that's really the case, than whoa, must Taxidermia ever be a trip. For if ever there were adjectival phrases that I'd go miles out of my way to avoid applying to Free Fall, "audience-friendly" and "easy to digest" would be way the hell up near the top of that list.

The film is a series of vignettes, united in that they all take place in one apartment building, and are at least nominally triggered by the presence of an old lady (Molnár Piroska), who gets the first of the vignettes when, following a routine but nasty spat with her husband (Benedek Miklós), she slowly carries her ancient body to the roof of the building, with her little wheeled grocery cart, and jumps off. After a few minutes, she picks herself up off the pavement and starts to crawl back up the stairs. And each of the remaining stories takes place on one of the floors she's crossing, or to one of the people she spots, or behind one of the doors she passes.


Structurally, it feels a little bit like an anthology film, with one theme to be broadly interpreted by a host of filmmakers using their own unique style; the key difference is of course that Pálfi is only one man, and the wildly different genres he quotes are all of his own devising. And quite a spectacular range it is: there's a strange, anti-erotic setpiece involving a couple's lovemaking in an apartment kept so antiseptic that they don't even expose their flesh to each other; an angry sexual relationship imbalanced by a third partner and the use of jolly sitcom canned laughter on the soundtrack; a creepy thriller-style sequence between a new mother (Kiss Diána) and a kindly but off-kilter gynecologist (Hegedüs D. Géza), along with a dark fantasy, a boring dinner party where nobody pays attention to a nude woman, and so on.

The notion uniting all of these, as far as I can tell, is that they each highlight a form of disconnect between people: an old married couple that barely communicates, parents who ignore their son's hallucinatory distress, sex as the inability to connect with a beloved partner. At no point do Pálfi and his co-creator, Ruttkay Zsófia, lean on that theme so overtly as to make the project in any way didactic or programmatic; honestly, it wasn't until about halfway through the eight segments that go into the brief (80-minute) feature that I began to notice that they even might be linked in some way beyond the elaborately random conceit of peculiar goddamn things going on in this one building. I take this to be a good thing: Free Fall is such a fluid experience, working at the level of curious, bizarre sensation rather than as a series of just-so connections in the writing, that I don't think it would be have as appealing if it spelled everything out and clarified what it was up to. Sometimes, watching as what appears to be inchoate nonsense coalesces into a unified whole is more exciting than something clean and polished. What am I saying? Always. It's always exciting.

Free Fall is certainly neither clean nor polished. The individual segments range from the terrifically rattling and perfectly executed (the gynecology sequence) to the befuddling and thematically strained (the naked woman) to the outright bad (the sitcom parody, which makes its point by about the one-third mark and just keeps on truckin'). The film is messy, and I'd suggest that the film must be messy: what fuels is it is Pálfi's freedom to keep changing up the pacing, the mood, and the visual style, and strict filmmaking discipline would unquestionably get in the way of that. The movie needs to explode out of the dark recesses of the mind, or at least off the illusion of having done so; neat, crisp scene structure and tight editing and a clear, fluid line connecting all the segments would shatter that illusion.

It's not for everyone; the gynecologist sequence alone would make it hard viewing for the parents of small babies, for starters. And the whole thing is spiked with gross, bleak comedy that is tremendously funny, but hardly universal: though it has a clear moral sensibility (communication and connection are better than the absence of those things) it's a fucked-up movie describing a fucked-up world and finding it too ridiculous to take seriously. Underneath all the weirdness, the film has a certain amount of despair twined around its desire for humans to be healthier and better, and those things all combined make for a distinctly dark and twisted viewing experience. But it's a strong, if wildly inconsistent version of what it is: mordant Hungarian bleakness turned into something savagely hilarious, and catnip to the kind of people for whom that kind of thing is enjoyable at all.

7/10

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TARR BÉLA IS THE MAN

Tarr Béla's penultimate film (barring an un-retirement), 2007's The Man from London, is among those movies for which more time is needed: at this writing, nearly seven full years have passed since it prickly, divisive premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival, but that event still hovers over the movie, working in tandem with some of the particular eccentricities of its production to over up, if only as a ghost, the suspicion that it's not a "real" Tarr film. Certainly, if we look at the evolution of movies from Almanac of Fall in 1985 to The Turin Horse in 2011, there is a visceral development across them, from the brink of apocalypse through to apocalypse to the post-apocalypse, and The Man from London does not really belong in this same sweep; it especially does not feel like the next film in a row after Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, which do very much feel like one another in some key ways. (I am driven to wonder if Tarr's retirement announcement, made prior to The Turin Horse, was in response to The Man from London's conflicted reception: if he resented, on some level, the sense that he'd only be respected as long as he kept making Tarr Béla films, unable to ever evolve or explore. And well he might resent that).

Everything else, though, is parochialism - Tarr and his producers even vocally wondered if the brittle Cannes reception might have been the fault of an audio dub that wasn't quite ready yet. Even in the final version, there's something distracting about seeing French and English words coming out of mouths not speaking French or English; of seeing and hearing art film darling Tilda Swinton using her own voice in French while her lips move in English. But every Tarr film had been dubbed, and several of them had employed actors just as famous in Hungary as Swinton is in the anglosphere. So to use those as reasons to make The Man from London some kind of deficient "other" in the director's career (and I have seen people do this, though thankfully not many) is no kind of intellectual position at all.

And to the last substantive criticism of the film that I've encountered, that it's too much of a "genre story" for Tarr's style - well, that's the fun of it, really. We have here an adaptation of a1934 Belgian crime novel by Georges Simenon, done in an aesthetic that suggests equal parts American film noir from the '50s and German Expressionism from the '20s, both of them filtered through the marathon-length takes and portentous camera movements of Tarr's mature career. He, co-director Hranitzky Ágnes, and cinematographer Fred Kelemen assembled here some potent and emphatically weird visuals that call attention to just how much lingering realism was still hanging onto something like Werckmeister Harmonies: the intensely harsh black-and-white compositions that dominate The Man from London leave its setting, a railyard next to the docks in an unspecified French-speaking city, with the texture of a nightmare or hallucination of a real place where all the proportions and lines are out of order.

The plot, which is baiting the audience as much as doing anything else, is not unlike fellow Cannes '07 competitor No Country for Old Men: one inky black night, a workaday nobody named Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) spots a pair of men having a fight at the edge of the dock beneath his observation room overlooking the railway. One man and his briefcase end up in the dark water as a result of this fight; Maloin wanders down after the survivor has fled, retrieving the briefcase, and finding it stuffed to the brim with British pounds. Telling no-one what he found, he goes about the daily routine of his life, only with a new patina of insanity that confuses and to some degree terrifies his wife, Camélia (Swinton), and their daughter, Henriette (Bók Erika). In the meantime, a man from London, Inspector Morrison (Lénárt István) shows up in town to inquire about the theft of £55,000 from a theater owner named Mitchell, a crime that the victim is content to blame on a former associate named Brown (Derzsi János), who has been slinking around in places that lead us to believe he's probably guilty; only he can't take up Mitchell's surprisingly generous offer to forgive all if the money is returned, what with Maloin having taken the money and all.

All of which sounds like a thing, and it's not the thing that The Man from London is, at all. What it is, really, is a film about observing things from the outside: the film is absolutely rotten with drastically canted angles and scenes that emphasise Maloin watching or listening to things that he has no connection to, and a certain point, the film gets in on the act, making us spectators to a story that hasn't been sufficiently contextualised. The thrilling climax of whatever crime story is going on here takes place as we stare at a closed door for at least a couple of minutes, hearing nothing but the drone of the wind; the biggest emotional impact of anything in the movie is a shot of Brown's wife (Szirtes Ági) looking distressed, an image we see twice, without learning anything else about her; in fact, unless my memory is completely off, these two long takes are literally the only times we get to spend any time with her. We see and process her emotions, but they are taking place entirely within her, unable to reach us.

It is a film, then, about disconnection: about being aware that there are people living lives and having feelings and committing crimes and dying, and being even more aware that all this has nothing to do with you at all. Perhaps the suffocating noir visuals of the docks and railyard are meant to express precisely that: not just other people, but the entire world acting in a hostile, alien, unknowable way. The film's opening shot is an exhaustively long (12 minutes!), glacially slow tracking shot up and across the prow of a ship, focused so intently on the surface of the thing that it's actual meaning and shape get lost, and this is the most stable, unexotic object imaginable in this film's world. The idea, as I take it, is that the longer and closer you focus on something, the more unreal and unrecognisable it becomes, like saying a word over and over until it becomes gibberish.

All this results in a film more icy and alien than anything else Tarr and his collaborators (the usual suspects: Vig Mihály compsed the score, Krasznahorkai László co-wrote the script with Tarr, Hranitzky edited and contributed to the production design), a deliberate anti-narrative about deliberate anti-characters, with only poor Camélia coming across as someone with any inner life at all, and then only because Maloin is so profoundly unable to comprehend it. Combined with the generally static energy of the protagonist, the film is perhaps the most uncomfortable thing to watch in the director's largely unfriendly career; and this, also, maybe contributed to its mixed reception out of the gate. It presents a horrifyingly arbitrary world where every choice by every character is apparently a disastrous one, but they're all so modulated, all so clearly happening to someone else, that it's hard to feel much moved by them. This, then, is the film's horror: it reflects a world of alienation so complete that even we in the audience can't see past it. It's a hard and cruel film, the moral universe of classic noir taken to its absolute extreme, and a gripping experience for anybody already onboard Tarr's wavelength, though I think it would be an especially grueling first exposure.

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TARR BÉLA HAS A WHALE OF A TIME

Funny to say about a movie whose immensely cryptic plot can best be summed up as "humanity dances on the brink of cosmic destruction and lashes out violently in desperation", whose characters are almost all nameless townsfolk except for the protagonist who becomes more unknowable the longer we spend time with him, and whose average shot length is a dumbfounding 3.7 minutes - that's a minute long than Sátántangó, y'all - but I'm pretty confident in saying that Werckmeister Harmonies from 2000 is Tarr Béla's easiest movie to watch and process. Which is not something that most people coming blind to the film would be prone to say; indeed, it was not at all the thing I said some years ago when Werckmeister Harmonies was my own first encounter with cosmically-minded Hungarian with the fetish for glacial pacing and languid camera movements.

The thing is, though, and this is easy to lose sight of in conversations about tracking shots and pointedly empty acting and symbolic cetaceans, is that Werckmeister Harmonies is - or can be, rather, if you let it - an extraordinarily pleasurable experience to watch. Not unlike Sátántangó itself, the way it's structured is so modular, with every new shot functioning as a mini-movie (some of which, you understand, are still ten minutes long), it begins to build a kind of fever-dream, anything goes momentum which makes it skim by faster and in a shorter feeling time than anything this slow and long (nearly two and a half hours, with either 37 or 39 shots - I forgot to count for myself) should remotely be able to achieve. Meanwhile, those individual marathon-length takes tend to be so complex and involving and engaging, they somewhat cease to register as as singular tracking shots that therefore insist upon their own length; it's more like being plunged into a vibrant, tremendously present human moment. The film's setting is vague, but the way Tarr and his six camera operators (including his frequent cinematographer Medvigy Gábor; this would be their final collaboration) frame the activity as immediate and active leaves the film feeling like the director's most emphatically present-tense piece since his early social realist projects, though it is of course in a vastly different form than those.

Whether any of that holds true at all, the film does at least begin with a grand gesture of liveliness and creativity that ranks among the most addictively kinetic moments in Tarr's filmography. In the main bar in whatever beaten-down town in Hungary this is, the drinkers enthusiastically greet the arrival of Valuska János (Lars Rudolph, one of three Germans in the three most prominent roles - make of that what you see fit), who will help to explicate something that the men have apparently been confused about. János, apparently more educated than most of the town (though he makes up for it by being impossibly naïve and slow-witted as events progress), is happy to show of his knowledge, and he takes one burly drunk and sets him directly under a light bulb in the center of the room, waggling his fingers, to represent the sun. Another barfly, spinning around as he moves in a circle around the first, is Earth; yet another is the moon.* Once these three boozy celestial bodies are in play, János slips imperceptibly from the language of science to the language of poetry, explaining the phenomenon of an eclipse using heightened and virtually allegorical descriptions of light and dark. Triumphantly, he sets the spheres back on their paths, bringing the whole room into a dance of balletic orbits not usually found in the drunken inhabitants of a small town in Hungary late at night; but such vigorous dances are of course an important thread found in most of Tarr's films.

Two things have just happened. One is that we've been exposed to a profoundly magnetic piece of cinema, reducing human bodies to their most essential qualities as abstract objects in motion, with Vig Mihály's vivid, intense music adding to the sheer joy of watching movement in the gorgeous monochrom that Tarr employed on this movie (it utilises every hue of grey possible from stark white to jet black, and to significant effect, as we shall presently see). The other is that we've just been handed the answer sheet, so we don't have to spend all of Werckmeister Harmonies puzzling what it means: indeed, for a film where so much of the plot takes place on an entirely non-representational level, it's almost dismayingly easy to say what it's "about". Simply put, it is about the conflict between lightness and darkness, both as literally qualities that duel across the film's grey-soaked frames, and as the expected metaphor for how human beings are capable of great savagery and great kindness alike, though kindness does certainly get its ass handed to it in Werckmeister Harmonies. It is also about human beings as inhabitants of the whole cosmos: we are on the one hand immodest specks that can barely be picked out on the planetary scale, let alone the universal one, and yet we're also the only thing that makes up the universe as we live and experience it - in one brazen gesture, that opening dance suggests both the enormity of planets and stars relative to our lives, but also makes human beings the literal equal to planets and stars.

So that, in brief, is Werckmeister Harmonies: how we live in the universe. The title itself is in reference to the German musicologist and composer of the 17th Century, Andreas Werckmeister, whose writings and calculations form the basis of the 12-tone system used by most Eurocentric musical traditions of the last 300 years; it is based in Werckmeister's belief that properly-divided octaves could function as a musical representative of the harmonious, well-ordered structure of the celestial bodies. He is also regarded within the film, by János's uncle Eszter György (Peter Fitz), himself a composer and apparently the most moral man in town, as a perverse adulterer of the true purity of music, and a philosophical criminal. Tarr and his co-authors - Krasznahorkai László, co-writer and author of the source novel The Melancholy of Resistenace, and editor Hranitzky Ágnes, both of them given the usual credit that implies their contribution to be indistinguishable from Tarr's own - don't take sides on this point, but the question of whether or not the universe is in harmony with itself or not is central to the film's subsequent plot, in which György's ex-wife Tünde (Hanna Schygulla) browbeats him into signing off on her unpleasantly small-minded and authoritarian desire to purge improper behavior from the town, signified by the arrival in the black of night, like a shadow swallowing the whole town, of a carnival whose sole apparent attractions are the shadowy, charismatic Prince, and the corpse of a great whale, kept safe in a massive trailer. The whipped-up conflict between two sides that don't seem to even bother defining themselves is certainly a sign of disharmony, as is the final disposition of the whale, rotting and savaged in the morning mist in a crude parody of the inexplicable mystery and majesty it represents when János first enters the trailer to see it. And yet the fluid motions of the camera, blending gracefully with Vig's best score for a Tarr film, certainly puts the stamp of a weird kind of harmony and beauty on even the most brutish events.

It is a film that doesn't bother trying to answer anything, because it is so invested in raising issues and asking questions of the broadest, most sweeping kind: it is the culmination of Tarr's focus on ever more cosmic films, and while it is neither as overwhelming nor as flawless on a moment-by-moment basis as Sátántangó or, I'd argue, Damnation, it still feels like the culmination of what they were driving for. It is a work of stupefying ambition, overreach, and maybe pretension, though I prefer to reserve that word for people who ask the Big Questions without earning the right to talk in such lofty tones as Tarr does in the meticulous evolution of his film from one scene to the next. It is a film one watches to be forced into a state of reflection and contemplation that has nothing to do with plot or theme, but with consciousness, knowledge and its absence, and humanity. I treasure it as much as I treasure any work of cinema.

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TARR BÉLA STAYS MAINLY IN THE PLAIN

At heart, Tarr Béla's curious little noodle of a movie from 1995, the 35-minute Journey on the Plain, is an exercise, not quite avant-garde enough to be a genuine experimental film but totally lacking in narrative or insisted-upon theme. And in this respect, it's the only such film in the director's career, for no matter how much we who love him like to talk him up as a devastatingly complex and unconventional filmmaker, he's still ultimately making stories about characters whose actions suggest meanings. None of that here. What this is, is a film shot on full-color video, with Vig Mihály, the composer and one of the main stars of Tarr's feature from the year prior, Sátántangó, reading pieces from the greatly beloved Hungarian poet-revolutionary Petöfi Sándor, in the same fields and locations where Sátántangó was shot.

Three thoughts present themselves, and in this order:

-Journey on the Plain is less a "movie" and more an attempt to marry subdued, semi-melancholic imagery to the work of Hungary's foremost poet, foregrounding his poetry and serving mostly as a visual and aural backdrop to his words.

-Poetry, more than any other form of art that has yet existed, depends for its greatest impact on being experienced in the language in which it was originally written, so that not merely the meaning but the flow and emphasis of certain words for greater impact can be understood and enjoyed.

-I don't speak a word of Hungarian.

This matters, and it would be silly and disingenuous to pretend that it doesn't. The whole project is an examination of nuances, of what word and what image combine, of what expressions we might read into Vig's face as he recites specific emotions. "Poetry is what gets lost in translation", Robert Frost famously said, and I have only rarely been as keenly aware of that while watching a movie as during Journey on the Plain.

Which isn't the same at all as saying that the film is devoid of value to the non-Magyar viewer. Cinema being a visual language and all, and this clearly subscribing to the particular styles and cinematic techniques of Tarr's mature period. If absolutely nothing else was true of the film, having the chance to compare footage shot on black-and-white film by Medvigy Gábor with footage of the same locations shot on color video by Fred Kelemen (his first of three collaborations with Tarr) is downright revelatory. There's something about black and white that just suits the director's timeless and placeless storytelling better than than color. Seeing, the shot of a man walking for what feels like several minutes down a dirt path towards the camera, to name the most prominent example of something that appears in both films almost exactly the same way, really underlines that: when it's in gritty, jagged video color, it lacks the ethereal, hypnotic quality of Sátántangó itself. And yet, by virtue o that same nasty video, there remains a heightened, distancing quality that keeps us in a different kind of abstracted, removed place from the material. One that perhaps suits it better as a poetry performance piece; certainly, imagining the same material presented in the cosmically gloomy register of the director's features simply doesn't work at all.

The chosen poetry is assembled to suggest a kind of "cycle of life" narrative, broadly sketching out a pattern by which love is found and then lost, and the general progression of shots (unless my memory has gone off on me, each poem is recited in a single long take, though virtually none of those are static; conversely, there are a few long static shots without any words being spoken) moves from empty fields to empty building, representing a kind of building-up over time, though the end point of life represented in the movie is a ragged, abandoned one. That being said, this is surprisingly far from Tarr's usual "we are all in a decaying, lifeless universe" themes, in part because Vig has a certain spry casual body language that never makes it appear like he's truly unhappy, and the music he provides to the film - playing it on-camera in the bed of a moving pick-up truck on one shot - has a certain yearning rather than despondent quality. And the film ends on a surprisingly placid final shot of a child on an ancient-looking swing, one of the few frames in any Tarr movie that could rightfully be called "hopeful"; this last shot is explicitly termed a dedication, giving the impression that we're meant to view it as the hand-off to younger people who might do a better job of living than the grown-ups have.

As tightly yoked as it is to Sátántangó, it's hard not to view it as a deliberate contrast: in length, in color, in simplicity of narrative (the former film a complicated nest of chronology, this film literally devoid of any plot to keep track of), and in emoitional tenor. Undoubtedly, the long-in-planning creation of that film required a bit of a respite, and Journey on the Plain does undoubtedly feel like a minor work, nor is it solely because of the comparison. That said, simplicity is no vice, and the straightforward presentation of feelings in a concise and direct package, but with the same vocabulary as Tarr's messier and more daunting films is undoubtedly bracing. In its own little way, just for supplying a vigorous contrast, it is essential for understanding how the man's cinema works; and while some of the shots are a bit over-conceived to no end (the camera pointing up through a chimney or some other sort of brick channel, rotating in a circle, is distracting and frankly silly), the thing as a whole has its own kind of low-fi beauty. It's an odd little B-side, but rewarding in its own right.

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TARR BÉLA DANCES WITH THE DEVIL

Just the name can send a shiver down the spine of the ill-prepared cinephile. Sátántangó. For Tarr Béla's 7+ hour signature work is one of the endurance tests to tend all endurance tests in the art form of film. It is not the longest movie; even without leaving the realm of (relatively) conventional narrative cinema, we find Out 1 and Berlin Alexanderplatz are significantly longer, right off the top of my head. But neither of them is typically held to a one-day viewing prospect. And neither of them is held to be as massively unpleasant, for after all, neither of them has "Satan" right there in the title.

In honesty, though, Sátántangó's claims to misery are blown substantially out of proportion to it's nihilistic content. Stories of 7-minute opening shots of nothing but cows wandering around in the mud, and little girls poisoning cats that die in disconcertingly realistic long takes are true, by all means, but they tend to obscure the equally true reality that the film is astonishingly, compulsively watchable, attention-grabbing from the first moments and unwilling to relinquish its grip for any part of its hypertrophic running time. Speaking personally, I didn't watch the film in a single sitting - the three discs of the Facets DVD set (which remains the best chance most Americans outside of New York will ever have to see the film) were interspersed with a shower and a meal - but I have virtually no doubt that it would play that way, with enthralling abandon. For all its mass and famously glacial cutting pace - the tally I got was 152 distinct shots over almost precisely seven hours - the film moves, surprisingly quickly.

Let us turn now to that opening shot to see what I mean: we're in a rural town, mud as far as the eye can see, staring down an old building. After some while, cows start to pour out of that building, until eventually a whole herd stands in the street; eventually they start to walk off to the left, and the camera rotates exactly 90° counterclockwise, at which point it starts to track left while the cattle meander through the street; frequently, buildings between us and them obscure the cows from our view, and at one point, a cow that came up right along side us moos irritably as it hustles down an alley on the Z-axis, to rejoin its fellows. I could spend the rest of my life trying to describe that shot in a way that communicates how legitimately exciting it is: how, after a couple of moments following the cows, it becomes impossibly disorienting when we lose sight of them for a good minute behind a structure; how gorgeously Tarr and cinematographyer Medvigy Gábor render the streets, buildings and animals in every stop along the grey scale besides exactly black and exactly white, teasing out so much texture and variability in each and every object that they practically go (setting aside the obvious point that watching a 7-hour movie is a wholly different experience in a theater than in a house: it's been months since I last so a movie that I so desperately wanted to see on a clean, crisp film print). It is beautiful and kinetic, and it's also a perfect introduction to the film in that it basically serves as a quick instruction in how to watch the film: Sátántangó is a movie rich with lateral tracking movements, with right-angle turns, and with gloriously touchable physical tactility those things, and everything that will visually dominate the next 7+ hours of the viewer's life is laid out in simple, easily-digestible terms in that very open shot.

It's also a sneak preview of the themes and narrative of those hours as well. Before they start their tour of the town, the cattle stand in the open street before the building, patiently enduring the mud and looking at nothing in particular. A collection of dumb animals caught in a miserable place and totally unconcerned with the actions that might free them up to go someplace more pleasant: that describes the unknown population of this town to a T, and the plot (insofar as it's the draw, which is certainly a debatable matter) is all about how these bored people are led off to slaughter by a fellow who doesn't even present a particularly appealing or compelling outlook for life: he's' merely the only person offering up any idea for the cows to lumber after.

That person, who fills the role of Satan in this dance, is Irimiás (Vig Mihály, who also provides the film with its electronica-carnival score), who exists in the beginning as an unseen figure viewed by the townspeople with dread that goes far beyond the natural fear of a notorious conman thought to be dead for this past year. "The news is, they're coming" is the title of the first of the film's 12 chapters (six forward, six back, the structure of a tango and the structure of the 1985 source novel written by László , Tarr's collaborator on his previous film, Damnation), which finds the residents of an unnamed communitarian farm that has just about puked out its last drop of life in the waning days of Communist Hungary interrupting the sorry little melodramas of their life with real mortal fear of the impending return of Irimiás and his colleague Petrina (Horváth Putyi). And yet not interrupting their lives so much that don't slink right back into the same patterns of petty double-dealing, lazy adulterous sex, and a detached attempt at spying on one another.

For people who are more or less explicitly being painted as anonymous archetypes, the population of Sátántangó ends up making quite an impression, if only because we spend so damn much time with them that they really don't have an opportunity not to. Tarr, Krasznahorkai and Tarr's reliable co-auteur editor, Hranitzky Ágnes don't depict them as having terribly characteristic personalities and behaviors as such, but by dwelling on the rhythms of their behavior at such length and in such detail, the filmmakers mange to tell us in evocative terms precisely who they are. The resentful loner Futaki (Székely Miklós) waits just so before barging in on the unexpected husband of the woman he's been sleeping with; the drunken doctor (Berling Peter) goes through precisely these actions in precisely this order, and it's easy to tell that he does much the same every day.

By the end of the film, the nine individuals making up most of what's left of the population of the town have made themselves very clear to us: they are pitiable and a bit reprehensible, but Tarr does not look to make any kind of emotional or moral judgment: he merely depicts. What he specifically depicts is the crushing mediocrity of a life stripped of imagination or affect; no living hell like the one scene in Damnation, this is much more of a purgatory of endless muddy, rain, and play-acted emotions. It is the perfect place for Irimiás to sell his obvious and not very compelling lies of another, better but only marginally different, way of living if everybody would just give up their autonomy and self-interest; a metaphor for the dogged refusal of Communism on its death bed to just give up and die that openly indicts the willingness of the people suffering most under that system to keep on suffering out of some mixed combination of comfort and self-laceration. It is both a study of the capacity of humans to do harm to other humans, but also the capacity of humans to bring harm unto themselves; most horrifyingly but also intelligently in the notorious centerpiece that finds the child Estike (Bók Erika) torturing and murdering that cat and then killing herself, precipitating the rest of the action and giving Irimiás the knife to twist into the town's collective psyche, and all because she could find no other way to take control in a world where everyone either ignored or abused her, than by first attacking the one thing weaker than herself and then by taking ownership of her own death.

Grim, weighty, extraordinary stuff, presented by Tarr with remarkable vision and sophistication. It is not merely that Sátántangó creates a complex moral universe, but how - as befits a movie of such gargantuan running time that it would have to do something to fill the space, the movie engages in some remarkable layering of scenes viewed in different chapters from different perspectives, creating a gnarled puzzle box of a movie that doesn't even announce itself as a puzzle until it has shown us the solution. In the fifth chapter, "Come unstitched" we see the interior of a bar in which the adults of the town are drunkenly cavorting in a frenzied dance, from Estike's perspective; in the sixth, "The spider's work II (the devil's nipple, satantango)" we look from inside that noisy, busy room to see the little girl blankly looking in, behind a wall of glass; and as we already know that she's going to die early the next morning, it makes her isolation that much more piercing than the image itself communicates. The film is full of mutually-expressive conversations between shots and scenes, culminating in a climax that queasily but not fatalistically suggests that the while cycle of events is going to repeat itself, albeit with some of the principals dead, exiled, or desperately attempting to entomb themselves in their tiny little worlds, blocking all the light out by boarding up windows (the final shot of the whole movie, a brilliant parody and replacement for the traditional fade to black).

It is dense, rich, and beautiful, a visually challenging movie that uses its long takes not so much to create a reality or to draw us into the world (the blocking is much too stiff and presentational for any of this to seem remotely naturalistic), but so that every one of the cuts feels like a profound moment - a violation or a moment of emotional release, depending on the context, and sometimes both. The slow progression of the film through a relatively full narrative - there are sequences in which the conflict changes multiple times in the span of just one shot - creates a tension that makes the film spectacularly electric and even exciting to watch, a peculiar response to a film that, moment by moment, is so languorous and boring. Not as a whole, though. As a whole, this is anything but boring: it is a whirlwind tour of a whole rainbow of unhappy human emotions, presented with fluidity in the writing, the acting, and the cinematography, and it's surprisingly gripping for something so full of miserable people feeling misery. No film of this length, so fixed on human despair with only shallow, trivial attempts to stave off that despair through drunkenness and cheap sex should trigger a response at the end, "it's not over already, is it?", but that's how you can tell a masterpiece: it turns pain into art and static lives into vibrant, kinetic images, without ever cheapening its subjects in the process. It's a great film, as great as they come, and that's all there is to it.

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TARR BÉLA GOES TO HELL

Noted Hungarian miserabilist Tarr Béla. A movie titled Damnation. What do you need, a road map?

And I would love very much to tell you that you'd be wrong to expect this film to be a punishing, cruel-minded exploration of a world-as-literal-Hell mise en scène, but then I'd be lying. This is every inch the dead and decaying, grimly misanthropic European art film scenario, and if Tarr's previous film, Almanac of Fall, found the director prodding at the themes of human isolation in a dying environment that would define the rest of his career, Damnation witness his enthusiastic cannonball right into the deep end of those themes. It is as bleak and hopeless as movies get; luckily, it's also a straight-up masterpiece of cinema, the first of the director's films to earn that kind of praise. The lingering attachments to Bergman and social realism that flecked his previous work was, with this film, totally expunged, leaving something behind that is almost totally Tarr's own.

The narrative content of the film - which I bring up more so that we have some common ground to discuss everything else, and not because Damnation is in any recognisable way about the snappy execution of a plot - fixes mostly on Karrer (Székely Miklós), a miserable drunk in a miserable mining town in some godforsaken hinterland of Europe. He's sticking around - not that he has anyplace to go - largely because of his deep and abiding passion for an unnamed singer (Kerekes Vali) who works as the main attraction at a miserable bar, the Titanik. I do not know if that name has the same resonance in Hungary as in English-speaking places, but the equivalence between the central location of this film and the most famous disaster of human engineering and manufacturing certainly works in its favor, even if it's just a linguistic accident. The singer is married - probably not happily, because nobody does anything happily in Damnation - to a worn-out, impoverished fellow named Sebestyén (Cserhalmi György), and when Karrer is offered a smuggling job by Willarsky (Pauer Gyula), the owner of Titanik, he passes it on to his lover's husband solely to get the other man out of the way. This cunning plot ends up backfiring, of course, and everybody manages to end up much worse than they started.

The film was the first collaboration between Tarr and novelist-turned-screenwriter Krasznahorkai László, and the director never made a feature without the writer ever again; it's also the first time that Tarr worked with cinematographer Medvigy Gábor, who'd shoot all of the three "core" Tarr films, as it were. It is thus that the last important pieces of the puzzle snaps into place, and the core group of collaborators - further including editor/co-author (Hranitzky Ágnes) and composer Vig Mihály - are assembled like a mighty team of gloomy superheroes, combining their mighty powers to save mankind from undue optimism. Whatever is true of watching Damnation, it is exhilarating and urgent cinema: at two hours long with literally not a single pleasant moment in the whole of that time, it's astonishing how quickly the film flies by, with even its most lingering static shots coiled tight with potential energy. And there are some lingering shots here: further perfecting the version of his aesthetic that most of us now associate with him, Tarr uses plenty of long takes of very little activity, starting with an opening image that spends two minutes watching coal carts slowly inching through the sky on an elevated tramway, like some nightmare version of Disneyland in grotty black and white. This slowly pulls back through a window, into a room, and behind Karrer's back, revealing him to be dully focused on the same view, and thus we are immediately pitched into the film's universe of tedium and stasis.

But the stasis never feels like a slog. Damnation is full of images that crackle with energy, if only because Medvigy's use of contrasting light and shadow is so hard and vivid, demanding that your eye darts across the image constantly, taking in every gradation of black and white. But it bears pointing out that simply because the takes are long, does not mean that they are also languid: one of the things Tarr and Medvigy do in this film that marks it out as the sign of terrific craftsmen is to combine camera movement and blocking of the onscreen action in a way that, rather than suggesting a single flowing moment in time, the images constantly challenger our relationship to the image and the narrative contained within it, shifting the relationship between viewer and space each moment. For a film that's more or less explicitly about being stalled in one physical and emotional place, unable to do anything but suffer from the awareness that nothing is changing, Damnation is extraordinarily fluid, shifting on us constantly, always keeping its depiction of Hell on Earth fresh and intense.

I mean, let's not miss the forest for the trees: for all that it moves and sparkles with dark light, Damnation is a film about suffering with an undue amount of self-consciousness about one's suffering - befitting its title, the worst thing that happens is knowing that one is in Hell. This is carried less by the specific details of the plot than by the moment-by-moment mood generated by the content of each scene: a torch song delivered with sickly noirish gloom by Kerekes, putting a corroded, self-loathing spin on her singing that recalls the waking nightmare interludes in David Lynch; a circular dance in which the camera watches from a corner, like a vulture perched over the action, as seemingly the whole down tramps around and around with directionless momentum. And above all, the film's overriding sense of clammy dampness: not only is Damnation an extraordinarily rainy film - and that rain always takes place at night, snuffing out everything in a pitch black blanket - but even when it's not raining, it is a wet movie, with mud everywhere, and a palpable sense of chilly humidity in nearly every shot. It is a film wherein you can almost smell the mildew, rotting out every interior and ruining the air outside.

This is, in other words, not a pleasant film at all. But oh, it is a potent one - one of the most powerful pieces of cinema of the 1980s. Its depiction of humanity fallen from grace and goodness is pervasive and complete, and a more awesomely bleak portrait of town life is hard to conceive. But conceive it Tarr and Krasznahorkai did, and if Damnation on its own terms feels like quite a pinnacle achievement of unforgiving European asceticism, it's just a warm-up hill compared to the cinematic K2 that the men would scale with their next collaboration.

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TARR BÉLA HAS A GREAT FALL

It's funny - not like, "oh my God, I can't stop laughing" funny, but little about European art cinema is - it's funny, I say again, that the first Tarr Béla film that made me bolt upright and think, "YES, THAT'S IT. That is the Tarr I've been waiting for" would also be the one whose effectiveness is most divorced from anything else in the director's career. But there you have it anyway: Almanac of Fall, a brazenly non-realist domestic drama set entirely within the crumbling confines of an old apartment, with five characters trapped like fish in a glass bowl, forced to enact their parts in a narrative of cosmic alienation. All of which is pretty much par for the course compared to the run of films it set up (or is that Tarr for the course? Ha ha! You have to make your own jokes, with Tarr Béla), which are similarly presentational anti-dramas tinged with supernatural impact though not really anything actually supernatural. The key difference being, everything from Damnation to The Turin Horse depends significantly for its effect on its stark black-and-white cinematography. Almanac of Fall depends, just as significantly, upon its use of lurid color.

(At least, I think it's lurid. Like all of Tarr's films, Almanac of Fall exists only in somewhat disappointing quality on DVD, and the color retention screams "lousy transfer of an already faded distribution print". So one is obliged to guess a little bit).

The film takes place inside the flat of a mother and adult son. They speak Hungarian, so it's fair to assume that the flat is in Hungary, but even more than that, it is detached from any sort of outside world, in a state of something like pre-apocalyptic dread (the Fall of the title, though the film is never so literal as that). They have names: she is Hédi (Temessy Hédi), and he is János (Derzsi János). But the film is largely disinterested in any personalising details; they, like the three people they interact with, are figures more than personalities, and though everyone in the film is identified by name, on multiple occasions, I still tended to think of them by role: the mother, the son, the mother's nurse (Bodnár Erika), the nurse's lover (Székely Miklós), the drunken tenant, a professor (Hetényi Pál). A commanding majority of the film - all but three or four scenes, in fact - consists of two-handers between every possible pairing of characters, all of them building up, somewhat cryptically, the narrative situation. The mother is ill, but not, like dying right this minute ill; the other four people are all mostly interested in figuring out what's going to happen with her money if she dies, or if she is made to part with her money through some other means. This comes out in various conspiracies between individuals, far more often conspiracies that go splat, and far most often of all rancor between participants so sharp and full of disgust and distrust - both outwardly and inwardly directed - that the notion of a conspiracy is almost laughably optimistic.

Trying to dissect Almanac of Fall out on the level of plot is an exercise in madness, though: this is a mood piece on the subject of how people abysmally fail to co-exist happily and peacefully with each other. The script is heavy with lengthy conversations in which people lay out in minute detail what they're thinking, feeling, and hoping, but in the hushed, choking sound design, their words tend to sputter and clatter and all of the talking in this, the last exceptionally wordy Tarr film, feels like a hollow attempt at fabricating meaning, not a way of communicating meaning. It is a study of broken, isolated people in a cold, dying environment.

And here we come to the color. Elsewhere, Tarr explores this spiritual nihilism and personal isolation using a palette of filthy greys and whites, but in Almanac of Fall he employs an unconventional and singularly counter-intuitive mix of blue, reddish-orange, and green. They are not, as far as I can tell, colors meant to signify, at least the blue and orange aren't. There's no color symbolism involved as such. What does matter is that blue and orange are complimentary colors, direct opposites on the color wheel. And while this tends to make them visually appealing (there would be no plague of orange & teal color correction in modern cinema if it didn't work on a primal level), they still contrast with each other, violently. Tarr and his tiny army of cinematographers - Pap Ferenc, Gulyás Buda, and Kardos Sándor - do everything in their power to highlight that contrast, sometimes, by using one color for the foreground and one for the bakcground, frequently using a simple system of shot-reverse shot conversations in which the two halves are saturated in conflicting colors. The result is a physical mis-match that our eyes and brains have a difficulty parsing; it's almost easier to read it as two separate conversations spliced together by accident. Everything we know as trained watchers of movies and humans who exist in a full-color world gets itchy and antsy watching these scenes; it is a visceral and direct expression of the film's theme of disparate elements of humanity being crammed together and not fitting.

The use of green-yellows - not sure which is more accurate; again, the DVD I watched was hardly reliable - is more conventional and thus "easier", but no less effective. Simply put, the bilious hues which represent the film's visual "normal" are the colors of sickness, decay, and atrophy; the film's way of visually evoking the world created by the dehumanised, disconnected psychologies it depicts. Everything is wrong and getting worse, and the film's grotty color palette underscores that, vividly.

Outside of that, the rest of the film is solid and well-crafted, if not quite as bold: there are a handful of tremendously showy camera angles (one from below a glass floor, looking up at a violent fight) that seem weirdly at odds with the rest of what Tarr and the cinematographers are up to with their sinewy slow movements revealing physical locations inch-by-inch, but the off-kilter feeling thus produced certainly works in the film's favor. I am especially impressed, though, by the fine work done by the director's established editor Hranitzky Ágnes (also the production designer, and credited for the first time as Tarr's co-author) in breaking moments down into arrhythmic flashes - it is a film that often cuts before you expect it to, with the last shot in particular slamming shut harshly - and composer Vig Mihály, who would collaborate on every future Tarr film, and whose first work with the director is full of droning tunes that feel like worms under the skin, coming across in oh-so-'80s orchestrations that feel even more alien now than they would have in '85.

None of this, I am sure, makes Almanac of Fall sound pleasant, for it certainly isn't. It's a film about physical, spiritual, and emotional disconnect between people forced to share space, and it dramatises in vivid detail the corruption of the parent-child relationship into something rancid. That it does this with striking cinematic flair is what makes it captivating, compelling art, and that Tarr simply depicts without making any judgments is what keeps it from being a miserable wallow. It is still glacial, chilly, and pessimistic - the film, in other words, where the Tarr of '90s and '00s fame and infamy arrived to stay.

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TARR BÉLA'S DAMNED SPOT

It was with his 1982 television adaptation of Macbeth that Tarr Béla suddenly and without warning turned into Tarr Béla. No learning curve, no gradual shift - all at once, the social realism that had marked his early features simply wasn't there, replaced with "fuck you, that's why" approach to formalist storytelling that turns his film less into a version of William Shakespeare's tragedy than an exercise in how cinematic blocking dictates our response to narrative. I think that even one who has not seen a single Tarr film and merely knows of his reputation will understand how much more characteristic this film is of his later, more famous work if I share the simplest, most essential facts about it. The opening shot is about five and a half minutes long, on the NTSC DVD released by Facets; it contains the scene of Macbeth (Cserhalmi György) encountering the three witches (played by men; which men, I cannot say with certainty), hearing their prophecy, and having his lightbulb moment about what "king hereafter" might mean, exactly. The second and final shot is 57 minutes long and contains everything else.

It occurs to me, as I let that bit of trivia sink in, that Macbeth is, itself, the "gradual shift" from early Tarr to mature Tarr. There's a lot about that 57-minute single take into which the plot of Shakespeare's shortest (but not that short) tragedy has been compressed which feels tremendously different from the occasional stretched-out camerawork of The Outsider, the latter of which frequently involves documentarylike observation that Macbeth wholly lacks. But in certain key ways, Macbeth is just as clearly aligned with Tarr's realism trilogy, especially in its overwhelming reliance on close-ups. Faces dominate Tarr's Shakespeare film just as significantly as they dominate Family Nest, and as they certainly do not dominate The Turin Horse, to name one example. It is a story told almost exclusively through faces: the stone building playing the Scottish castle where all of the story takes place is devoid of all but the most plot-essential furnishings, meaning that the film consists of basically nothing for the great majority of its running time but yellow stone walls and human beings. The close-ups in the film belong to an entirely different order than the essentially neo-realist Family Nest (there's not a damn thing in Macbeth that can be meaningfully described as "realist"), but the emotional effect of them is more or less the same: we are confronted, with great immediacy, by persons in moments of intense, wrenching emotion, and forced to devote all our attention to how that emotion makes them feel.

This tendency reaches its clear peak during the scene where the witches return to present Macbeth with a vision of the future kings, staged so that Cserhalmi's face is bathed in candy apple red light, as he stares directly into the camera; the most aggressive moment in an aggressive film, and one that could take an essay in its own right to unpack, so I'll content myself with suggesting that by making the viewer co-exist with the horrifying vision Macbeth experiences, the film is making us active participants in his mental decline. Not necessarily in some schematic, gaze-theory manner where we're being condemned for wanting to watch him (though it's not not that. inherently), but that our act of watching him, and having his emotional state beamed directly to us through Cserhalmi's young-looking, open features, is what drives the film's meaning. That is, Macbeth - or anyway, this particular Macbeth, and plainly, Tarr isn't trying to make a definitive version - has meaning only because we're watching it decode that meaning.

For by all means, this is a film that must be decoded, not watched; stripped of everything conventionally entertaining about films set in palaces in the 11th Century where witches and murderers run rampant, the film openly presents itself as a intellectual exercise in considering Macbeth the play, rather than a spectating exercise in being moved by the story. In this incarnation, the story is virtually a shambles, as it must be: there's no conceivable way to fit the content even of Tarr's severely truncated version of events into just an hour, but there's that unavoidable single take insisting that every event we see happens with rampaging chronological and physical continuity. That being a clear impossibility, what we're left with is not the story of Macbeth, meaningfully told, but something like a walking tour of the emotional terrain of Macbeth conceived as a flow rather than a narrative (it is a most fluid movie: the camera practically floats through the castle, gliding back and forth along hallways with a fleetness that's most impressive for a dirt-cheap TV production made by a young director, while the scene transitions involve characters sidling in and out of frame so briskly that it takes a few tries before you notice that they're doing it). A distillation of Macbeth, if you will. One in which the titular anti-hero and his scheming wife (Kútvölgyi Erzsébet, absolutely wonderful in every imaginable regard that a non-speaker of Hungarian can judge) are not walked through scenes but hurtled through an inevitable chain of realisations and impressions in one blast of dramatic fatalism.

This is, all of it, terrifically compelling on an intellectual level and even on an emotional one, the latter effect relying heavily on Cserhalmi and Kútvölgyi's tremendous high-wire acting. I would be horrified to think of it being anybody's first contact with the play Macbeth, even setting aside the issue of it being translated to Hungarian (the Facets DVD uses direct lines from Shakespeare as the subtitles, which I somewhat wish it did not do). It's simply not a version of the story; not really a story at all, and not dramatically comprehensible, really. It uses the framework of Macbeth to explore how people feel, and how their feelings make them interact with their physical surroundings; the physical surroundings of the characters being, of course, particularly present in a film made this, the camera moving in and out of all the hallways and doors it can find. The nice way of putting it is that the film cuts to the immediate emotional truth of the play by using specifically cinematic techniques of staging and acting to dislocate those truths from the genre mechanics of the story; the mean way is that it relies on us already knowing what's going on and what to think as it indulges in snobby art film showmanship for its own sake. Clearly, I tend toward the former interpretation while allowing that the latter argument is easy to make; for all the film's audacity, Macbeth is the work of an ingenious mind more than a sophisticated one, perhaps. There's little in the film, individually, that Tarr himself didn't do better, earlier or later in his career. But he never did it all in one place like this, and that's the reason above everything else that Macbeth is such a stunner: it combines ideas about acting, character, and film creation in specific ways that are both surprising and intuitive, and it's pretty safe to say that there's never been anything else exactly like it.

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TARR BÉLA GOES OFF MODEL

With 1982's The Prefab People, the third film in what we might profitably think of as Tarr Béla's "Social Realism Trilogy", we finally reach the defining point where social realism seems to have begun loosing its appeal for the young director, who began with this film to explore the styles and very characteristic rhythms that would define his later aesthetic. It is the first Tarr feature where a modern-day viewer, aware of Damnation and Sátántangó, might be able to say, "I can tell that Tarr made that". (Or perhaps not. Also in 1982, Tarr directed a television adaptation of Macbeth, which would make a strong claim on that development, but I have been unable to determine with absolute certainty which one was released first - IMDb suggests Macbeth, but I am suspicious. At any rate, The Prefab People appears to have been shot earlier). This despite it lacking one of the definitive traits of Tarr's later work, an expansive running time; clocking in around 80 minutes, give or take - the Facets DVD that I watched takes - it's a bare wisp of a thing that, from the outside, you'd never suppose would be able to reach any kind of emotional heights in such a compact frame.

But emotional heights are reached nonetheless, resulting in the best of Tarr's early realist films, and not by a little margin: it is, at any rate, the only one of the three that lacks any clear and obvious flaws, while also feeling much deeper and richer and rawer in its depiction of marital dischord. Eschewing the melodrama of Family Nest and the uncertain pacing of The Outsider, The Prefab People settles in on an unnammed married couple (Koltai Róbert & Pogány Judit), on the day that the husband finally decides he's had it, and he's walking out. This is presented gruffly and bluntly, with Koltai snapping about emotionlessly, and we're as thrown by it as his wife is, with her pathetic confusion informing our own. But this not a story about a cruel man abandoning a woman. For once we see the end point of this relationship, we are then allowed to see all the rest, as the bulk of the rest of the movie depicts in no immediately obvious order the couple's life together, allowing us the opportunity to watch all of the happy and unhappy moments of their marriage as something like pieces in a puzzle: since we know that this will end badly, we're encouraged to look for the cracks long before either of the characters have understood them to be so.

The results are wonderfully even-handed and objective and analytical, notwithstanding the opening scene that makes us so clearly identify with the wife. Once again, Tarr's thesis is that life in Hungary under communism is soul-crushing, and that the suffocating world outside the family unit negatively impacts the family to effectively communicate and co-exist. Only in the case of The Prefab People, it doesn't take the same pummeling with political content to make that point. The one explicitly political scene in the whole film finds the husband attempting to explain to his son the difference between capitalism and communism, and why it's preferable to live under the latter, and it quickly becomes clear to him and to us, and probably to the son, that he has absolutely no clue about communism or capitalism or anything like that; he just knows that everything kinds of sucks the way it is for him, and trying to sell a happy version of it confounds him.

As presented, this is the Tarr version of a funny scene, and it is certainly the lightest moment in The Prefab People, on top of being the most political. The film as a whole is far more invested in exploring the ramifications of dehumanised life in Hungary than in explaining it, like he sort of did in The Outsider and explicitly did in Family Nest. It does this with brutal directness in depicting the husband and wife consistently failing to make connections of any sort with one another, with Koltai and Pogány giving two immaculate performances, begging for neither sympathy nor understanding from the audience, but just existing in the most natural way they can. They were the first professional actors Tarr had worked with, and the shift is tremendous, all apologies to the non-professionals in the world. There's so much more nuance and elegant simplicity, and most of the film's best moments rely extensively on that.

It is, for example, the reason the director could get away with a handful of shots that do absolutely nothing but park and stare at the characters, probably the biggest single jump this film makes towards being more like later Tarr. There's a scene at a dance hall that is very nearly the perfect mixture of neo-realism and the proescenium-like tableaux of later Tarr; the emotional content is very character and psychology-driven in the fashion of his more conventional films, but the way we viewing the film access those emotions is not nearly so simple, relying as it does on comparing and contrasting different moments within the same frame, and understanding the physical relationship between the people based on the way they are presented in the flat panel of the image. The final shot (my favorite part of the film) does much the same thing.

As far as prefiguring future development, there's one lengthy, spurious moment of men riding on office chairs that feels particularly close to the director's later work, in terms of its absolute focus on the image and the moment rather than plot or "meaning", but in the main, it's not fair to The Prefab People to demand too much that it functions as a "transitional" film. For the most part, it's clearly not that - it is a simple, straightforward realist tale of two people in a bad situation that let it get worse through their somewhat self-destructive choices. The flashback structure muddies that a little, but mostly, this film is a very good example of something that was certainly not new by 1982; it finds Tarr attempting to do new things to make more interesting realist stories, not to abandon realism altogether. Taken for what it is, though, and it's hard for me to imagine it being any better. Naturalistic dramas about failing marriages are easy to find, but this is unquestionably one of the most sociologically intelligent and psychologically acute that I've ever seen.

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TARR BÉLA STEPS OUT

Looking back from 2014, Tarr Béla's second feature, The Outsider, is a staggering break from the filmmaker's normal way of doing things. That's not fair at all to the movie and moviemaker who, in 1981, had no idea that he'd one day become Europe's crown prince of long takes, slow plots, and stasis, but it's really hard not to be taken aback by it - having purposefully not done any research on the director's early films before starting this retrospective, it never occurred to me that I'd end up seeing something so willfully uncharacteristic as a Tarr film in color. Which is by no means the only thing that sets the film apart aesthetically, but still: color. Everything I associate Tarr with demands the hardness of stark black-and-white, which just goes to show that you should prejudge and make assumptions about nothing. Especially not three-decade-old Hungarian social realist films.

That would be the other big thing that separates The Outsider from Tarr's later work, and even his earlier feature Family Nest, though it is much closer to that. This is an unusually clear-cut example of European realism of a sort that would become absolutely inescapable a generation later, though in 1981 it was still a bit unusual to see something as stripped down and grotty as this story of András (Szabó András), a twentysomething young musician making ends meet in a series of ill-fitting jobs. The one we first see him practicing is as an orderly at a mental hospital; other than the chances he gets to play violin for the patients, it doesn't seem to be very rewarding, and he gets fired in fairly short order for getting drunk with a patient, anyway. For the bulk of the two-hour movie, András floats from job to job, never being very reliable or good at anything, and as a result incurring the wrath of his girlfiend, Kata (Fodor Jolan), who's already losing patience with him on account of his insistence on giving all his money to his child by an ex-lover.

That is, by the way, the entire plot. So even at his most outwardly conventional, at least we can say that Tarr makes a point of thwarting our expectations for dramatic situations that movie characters forward. Nothing moves the people in The Outsider forward; this is the whole point. The film isn't a specific indictment of a dysfunctional society, as Family Nest is, but a close examination of how that dysfunction plays out on the individual level. András is both a pitiable character and a somewhat repellent one, hoping to coast by on some foggily-expressed bohemian ideal perpetually, holding onto a very romantic and thoroughly useless idea of how True Artists fit into the world that makes him powerfully ill-equipped to deal with the realities of life in Communist Hungary. Tarr sympathises with him to a degree (as he'd almost have to, being himself a young artist at the time The Outsider was shot), but doesn't let him off the hook, regardless. His romantic outlook frequently serves as nothing but mask for laziness and the terror of having to go out and fight for scraps in a horrible environment of desperate, starving people; for all that she's a bit of a stock character, Kata's harangues to this effect are generally persuasive and it's as easy to share in her frustration and impatience as to share in his artistic struggles.

The film's running time is a bit long to sustain this simple situation; Tarr had not yet begun to master the exquisite art of using duration as a means of testing the audience, and The Outsider merely feels like there's too much repetitive dialogue, not like it's being stretched out to create a particular mood. That said, the film's slow pace and lack of affect does neatly mirror András's own life, making it a reasonably effective character study, if nothing else. It certainly helps that the non-professional Szabó (no-one in this cast was a professional) inhabits the part so comfortably and laconically, making it seem thoroughly plausible that the unfocused longeurs of the movie are exactly in tune with how his character views the world. I would want this to be no-one's first exposure to Tarr's cinema, for it is a bit pacey without earning the impact of it, but it does surely feel like there's some point to it.

To present this narrative, Tarr and his pair of cinematographers - Pap Ferenc (their second collaboration of four and Mihók Barna (their first of two, four if you count acting) - relied on grainy 16mm with flat colors and a boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio, a whole mess of close-ups cut together with some choppiness, and all of it handheld. It was not an unknown style in Europe at the time, though it was nowhere near as commonplace as it is now, ever since the Dardenne brothers made it their preferred technique in the late 1990s. Still, even by the standards of 1981, this was hardly a groundbreaking or challenging or complex way to tell a story about poverty-ridden youth letting life slide by them. It is good realism - an acute psychological portrait and an unforgiving depiction of life on the edges in contemporary Hungary - but it is not particularly unusual realism, and the use of color simply underlines the unpleasant reality that herein lies a Tarr Béla film with no particularly aggressive and lingering visuals; even Family Nest, generally a less mature movie, had a more pointed and purposeful use for its suffocating realist interiors.

If the film challenges us, that comes in the unexpected form of its music, something else that Tarr wouldn't do much with later on; or rather, what he did with music was nothing like this at all. The Outsider is frequently punctuated with songs of all kinds: folk music, disco, rock (there's a cover of "House of the Rising Sun" that is maybe my new favorite version of that song). The film's most powerful moment finds András and Kata screaming at each other to be heard in a discotheque where András has a DJ job, playing some insipid piece of dance music about Christopher Columbus as his girlfriend tries to make her anger and frustration known; perhaps its second-best sequence comes at the end, during a rousingly amateurish performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 on violin. It's a little clichéd, but not therefore inaccurate, to propose that music is the film's emotional release valve: András is stalled-out and inept in all ways, but the performance of music gives him some kind of release, wakes him up, and proves that even in the midst of a lifeless wasteland like Hungary under Communism, there is a way to find some brief measure of satisfaction and expression. That's a shockingly sentimental approach for Tarr, which is why I tend to wonder if I'm not misreading it altogether; but he was young, and the film does spring to life whenever the music starts up... The point is, the film lapses into convention more often than not, but it plays those conventions well, and as part of the fledgling director's learning curve, it is sturdy and satisfying and earnest. None of which are quite as good as "creative", but you make do.

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TARR BÉLA GETS CLOSE TO THE FAMILY

The first project completed by director Tarr Béla, and the second released, the 1977/'79 film Family Nest is a great deal more conventional than the student short Hotel Magnezit, though mostly for that reason, it's also a great deal more successful and satisfying.

Opening with a title card ironically claiming that this isn't a true story that didn't happen to these people... but it could have!, the film feels very much like it was made by a talented, ambitious, and extremely pissed-off 22-year-old whose youthful righteousness has not yet been tempered by restraint and craftiness, for that is after all what happened. It's a dissection of one element of life under the brutally inefficient and dehumanised Communist government of Hungary that favors lacerating frankness and uncomfortable direct, aggressive visuals; yet at the same time, it's a film with real cinematic boldness and flair that one would hardly expect from a first-time director barely out of his teens. Family Nest is, undoubtedly, an apprentice film, one that lacks all subtlety and suffers from some obviously bad choices, but also one that makes it extremely clear that we had all best keep an eye on this young man, who has a real knack for how to pull a performance from a non-professional actor, a strong instinct for how the audience is going to respond to the camera, and is altogether Going Places. That Tarr ended up going to places entirely unlike the ones implied by any aspect Family Nest is one of those ironic things that we just have to live with.

Primarily, the film focuses on Laci and his wife Irén (Horváth Lászlo and his wife, who according to conservative Hungarian naming custom is named (Horváth Lászlone), living with their daughter in Laci's parents' apartment (Laci's parents being played by a married couple as well, Mr. and Mrs. Kun Gábor). It's far too small for the number of people crammed into it to be couple, and Irén trundles off weekly to check and see if the housing office has any flat for her and her husband, which they never do; meanwhile, she has to be miserable not just because of the space, but because of the irredeemable awfulness of her father-in-law, a lecherous monster whose actions become no less scuzzy, only less overt, once Laci returns home from his military service.

The film has something akin to a plot, involving pretty much every male character behaving rancidly towards every female character, but Family Nest isn't telling a story, so much as documenting a lifestyle. In a typical melodrama (which the film superficially resembles, moreso as it goes along), the horrible events that play out would be squarely based in psychology, demonstrating the father-in-law's wickedness as a driving element of the dramatic conflict. Tarr's treatment makes the act of the plot much more about the nature of the society itself, which crushes everyone and encourages only the worst kind of behavior, since it never rewards or acknowledges goodness. There are virtually no decent people in Family Nest, but it's not an indictment of people, only the system that crams all those people together in tight spaces without regard to their needs, either physical or emotional. It turns humans into animals, and they act accordingly.

To express the daily ghastliness of being kept in a box with unpleasant people that you'd like to stay away from, Tarr and cinematographer Pap Ferenc employ a series of unforgiving, claustrophobic close-ups that make us feel like we're right inside the same shoebox with Irén - an early scene takes place at a dinner table where the camera can barely fit in around all the people, and the result is one of the most uncomfortably close conversation scenes I've ever encountered in a movie. It's simplistic, sure, but also effect and nerve-wracking (it doesn't take a lot of time staring Laci's father right in the face to want to get the hell away from him just as desperately as his daughter-in-law-does), and when the film visually opens up to let Irén sit across the room from the bored functionary denying her requests for housing, the contrast is even more upsetting: despite the little toady's insistence that he's heard this story, he cannot possibly understand it, he didn't experience that cramped blocking like we did.

Eventually, the film rounds a corner and turns into a series of documentary-style interviews (right down to dissolves in the editing like news broadcasts use to shorten interviews), an unexpected stylistic jump that should feel disorienting and wrong, but instead pushes the film into a new level of intimacy and realism, giving the characters a chance to simply express themselves and be, something they have conspicuously not been able to do to that point. It's perhaps a bit more clever than natural and perfect, but it keeps the film at the in-your-face pitch that it has been all along, and this was, after all, the point Tarr was going for the whole time.

All that said, the film's one significant problem is a doozy: at a couple of moments (including, ruinously, the ending), the film launches into one of a handful of absolutely insipid pop songs, one of which is used to underscore a montage of Laci and Irén and their daughter having a pleasant time at an amusement park. It's shlocky nonsense that feels out of place in the type of social realism where Family Nest has been living, and totally outrageous in the context of Tarr's entire career; this is the kind of junk food cinema that his later work would specifically, even conspicuously reject. There's not a lot of this material, but what's there has a wildly disproportionate impact on the movie as a whole. The best parts of the film are intimate, raw, and harrowing; when it shifts out of that so abruptly, it takes the film a lot of work and time to get back on track and restore us to our proper mood. And I could take exception with some of the more miserabilist turns in the script, which push right up to the edge of melodrama and perhaps bleed over a bit. It's probably not worth nitpicking, though. This is a movie with the directness, energy, and roughness of a passionate young person puking himself out onscreen, and while that lacks elegance, it's heady stuff regardless.

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TARR BÉLA CHECKS IN

For anyone who doesn't speak Hungarian - and you, reader of this English-language film blog written by an American, will be shocked, I am certain, to learn that I do not speak Hungarian - the work of director Tarr Béla (or Béla Tarr, if you're too good to use Hungarian name order) is typically held to consistent of unnaturally long takes focused on people engaging in highly theatricalised activities staged along rectangular lines. This is, in no small part, because Tarr's first films with any kind of exposure in the West came fairly late into his career: of the 14 features, shorts, and documentaries that make up the entirety of his filmed output (unless changes his apparently firmly-set mind about retirement in the wake of 2011's The Turin Horse), it was the seventh, Damnation, that made his significant splash in the anglosphere. So we all got to miss out on the learning curve period of Tarr's career, of which the short Hotel Magnezit is actually the second step; it was his graduation piece at the Hungarian School of Theatrical and Cinematic Arts in 1978, by which point he had already completed an undistributed feature, Family Nest. Which we shall turn to in its time.

Meanwhile, let's stick with this oddly stiff and - from a backwards-looking perspective - wholly uncharacteristic entry in the director's canon. At just a hair more than 10 minutes in length, Hotel Magnezit is a study of a certain Szepesi (uncredited in the film, and if you can find any production details for this movie anywhere online in English, I'm all ears), who is given marching orders by a member of the Communist Party in the first moments of the film, to vacate the hostel where he's been staying. Apparently, he stole a motor; while neither confirming this nor exactly denying it, Szepisi goes on a tirade in which he begs the rest of the hostel inhabitants for help, turns viciously angry at them when they don't, and ends up a mournful, desperate mess.

It's always tempting to read satire into films made in Communist countries, and Hotel Magnezit theoretically opens itself to an interpretation that Tarr is criticising anyone who stands by passively as the Party runs roughshod over fellow citizens, but that doesn't end up holding water. Szepisi may be a pathetic victim, but he's also a drunken dick who has long since alienated everyone else in the hostel, most of whom seem perfectly happy to see him go. And maybe that's the political angle - the 22-year-old Tarr, at the State film school, taking the safe road of telling a little fable about pricks who break the rules.

But the film is primarily neither of these things, but a character study. Tarr films almost exclusively in close-ups (though not lingering ones: there are more cuts in this short than some of his later features), and seems more interested in capturing the flow of Szepisi's thoughts and emotions than anything else. The unidentified actor who plays the part lives up to his director's needs, creating a complex, quickly-shifting personality who starts with the legs kicked out from underneath him and keeps failing to get his footing, but Hotel Magnezit ultimately ends up feeling very much like an exercise, and nothing more.

Which, of course, it was: proof that young Tarr knew how to make a movie and could go do it professionally. There are some flashes of insight throughout, and even some crude wit - one of Szepisi's rants includes a line that made me laugh even subtitled: "I don't want to offend you, but you're a rat, you shitty fucker" - but it's a largely stiff thing, with frankly bland images that present the human face without capturing much of the nuance and subtle of human expression. Certainly, nothing about it suggests where the director's late career would go, with its general allegiance to social realism bearing no relationship to the arch tableaux we no him for know. But this was a stretching exercise and a warm-up, and it fills those functions to satisfaction, if not to any sort of artistic edification.

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FIL FESTIVAL '13: THE NOTEBOOK (SZÁSZ JÁNOS, AUSTRIA-FRANCE-GERMANY-HUNGARY)

Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/18 & 10/19
World premiere: 3 July, 2013, Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Special Mention by the Festival jury for Molnár Piroska

Szász János's The Notebook is an immensely handsome movie, and it is a movie about two children surviving World War II at the expense of their childlike innocence, and if you are anything like the film viewer that I am, this is the point where you begin backing away from the movie slow as you can, glancing surreptitiously to every side for something sharp to brandish, in case it decides to charge you. If that is the case, I am happy to say, Fear not this movie! For while it still suffers some of the normal extremes of its genre, including an obsession with seriousness and grimness that results in a nearly limitless cavalcade of agonies (the Nazi pedophile is the point where the movie will either break you or it won't), this is on the whole quite a lot more slippery than the dour prestige film it looks like. I can't quite get behind the intensity of the love that seems to have accrued to it in its young life (though the "kids + WWII" angle makes it obvious why this was Hungary's official submission for the Foreign Film Oscar), but it's quite a lot more interesting and special than the bare bones of its plot synopsis would indicate.

Part of that comes from its unabashed embrace of fairytale tropes, beginning with the way that virtually no characters have given names. Our protagonists are twin 13-year-olds, identified in the credits as only One (Gyémánt András) and Other (Gyémánt László) - their hair is slightly, recognisably different, and the boy I presume to be the One tends to be the first to speak or commit to actions, though it's a huge cornerstone of the movie that they do almost everything in near-perfect tandem - whose father (Matthes Ulrich) has been called up to war, leading their mother (Bognár Gyöngyvér) to take drastic steps to keep them out of harm's way. This means shipping them out to the deep country to live with her mother (Molnár Piroska), a hard-hearted sphere of a woman called "the witch" by the local townsfolk, despite the women having not spoken in 20 years. Perhaps as a result of this rift, perhaps out of her natural meanness of spirit, the boys' grandmother treats them with unflagging hostility, calling them "the bastards" and feeding them just enough to keep them from starving as she burdens them down with heavy labor.

Convinced by this, and by the general awfulness of the village, that life is a font of unstinting misery, the boys decided to train themselves how not to feel pain: taking turns beating each other to blunt the sting of physical brutality, and building a wall of cold hate that keeps them from feeling enough attachment to any human being other than themselves to feel emotional pain. Thus it is that they become the very avatars of a mechanistic, life-denying war, though The Notebook isn't so nihilistic as to make that the end point, and by the time the film reaches its end, the boys have been granted at least a very small measure of grace.

Ordinarily, I have very little patience for this kind of sorrow-glossed prestige filmmaking, which mistakes pain for profundity, but in the case of The Notebook, I can see my way clear to making an exception. For one thing, it exists in a stunningly unreal register - the glowing grey cinematography by Christian Berger gives the whole thing a remote, artistic quality above and beyond how much the story already feels like a fable more than a dramatic scenario, actively resisting any specific personalising elements for characters that it steadfastly renders as archetypes, even gross caricatures (it is both off-putting and miraculous how much the grandmother comes across as an elemental force). When there's a moment that foregrounds the actual meat and potatoes of Nazism - the deportation of a kindly Jewish shoemaker, alone among the villagers in being kind to the boys - it's weirdly dissonant, given how much the film to that point hasn't felt like it took place in an real-world historical context.

As a result of all this, the acting remains in a steadily presentational, stagey register that leaves the characters more like objects than people. It's hard to make that sound appealing (and impossible to use normal "good" and "bad" standards of acting to judge it, though I particularly liked Molnár, and Ulrich Thomsen as the gay Nazi with uncomfortably overstated affection for the boys' good looks), but Szász uses it to great advantage, leaving the film forced to be about primal feelings and gestures, since there is no space for anything more refined. I admire this in the film, though "admiration" is not by any means the most passionate emotion we can feel leaving a movie, especially ones about how young people deal with the horrors of the world. Still, however remote The Notebook ends up leaving itself, it has the effect of a good folktale, presenting raw, unvarnished emotional truths without any nuance or cleverness getting in the way. Bleak as it is, this is a kind of bedtime story in the end, and in that register it works quite well.

7/10

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