Cinema’s ultra-dark unknown genius, art-film god Béla Tarr bids an apocalyptic farewell

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/03/cinemas_ultra_dark_unknown_genius/

So Hungarian director Béla Tarr has apparently made his last film, without most people in America and around the world ever noticing him in the first place. Not that he particularly cares about that. Often held up as the last grizzled lion of the European modernist art-film tradition, Tarr has made just nine features in a 35-year career, most of them shown only at film festivals, art museums and other one-off events. Even so, his reputation among film critics, his fellow directors and other hardcore cinephiles rests mainly on two of those movies, one of which is so daunting that virtually no one has ever sat through it all the way without a break. (That would be “Sátántangó,” or “Satan’s Tango” http://www.salon.com/2008/12/01/culture_mid/ — the English title has never really stuck — a seven-hour saga about a decrepit post-Communist agricultural commune invaded by a sinister con man. Susan Sontag praised it as one of the greatest films ever made, but she didn’t claim that she watched it without a bathroom break.)

In more than a decade of writing about film for Salon, I’ve made only a few glancing references to Tarr’s work — not because anyone was stopping me, but because there didn’t seem to be much point. Most people likely to be interested in his masterfully constructed, time-stretching, profoundly enigmatic fables or allegories (even to say that Tarr’s films have stories is somewhat misleading) probably already knew about them. Furthermore, his films screened only sporadically at a handful of big-city venues — only one, “Werckmeister Harmonies” from 2000, received an official American theatrical release — and until recently were largely unavailable on Region 1 DVD or Blu-ray. But now, with the theatrical release of “The Turin Horse,” http://www.cinemaguild.com/turinhorse/ a bracing, downbeat and even devastating work that will supposedly be Tarr’s final film — he’s very much alive and only 56, but has announced that he’s shifting to producing and running a film school — and a complete career retrospective at New York’s Lincoln Center, you too can follow along at home if you’re curious.

All eight of Tarr’s previous films — from the documentary-style realism of Communist-era dramas like “Family Nest” (1977) and “The Prefab People” (1982) to “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000), easily his best-known picture, and “The Man From London” (2007), which is, of all things, a film noir starring Tilda Swinton — can now be found on home video through the usual channels. “The Turin Horse” will play in honest-to-God movie theaters in at least half a dozen cities (see below), and it’s quite likely that the Lincoln Center retrospective will be exported to other venues as well. That leads us to the inescapable question of what it’s like to watch Tarr’s films — and if most movies are difficult to describe in words, his are trebly so. How can I possibly convince you to watch a film that features a 10-minute traveling shot amid a roaming herd of cows? (“Sátántangó” again.) Nobody can; you’re either game to try something like that or you’re not. Comparisons and parallels will do no good. Tarr’s best films are beautiful, forbidding, strange, often laced with black humor and almost always deeply pessimistic. Watching them is an experience unlike any other.

Tarr has been written about quite a bit, but I don’t think most of that writing gets us anywhere. (Here’s a 2001 essay by film scholar Peter Hames http://www.kinoeye.org/01/01/hames01.php that provides a good overview of Tarr’s career to that point.) He’s been variously compared to such big names as Bergman, Tarkovsky, John Cassavetes, Theo Angelopoulos and Jim Jarmusch, but that’s such a motley crew as to be meaningless. It’s more about marking out territory and saying, “If you like those drugs, try this one too.” Tarr himself mostly rejects such comparisons, and has said his favorite filmmaker is the famously decadent and prolific R.W. Fassbinder, whose pictures could hardly be more different from his. Except, and it’s a big except, for the fact that both directors are primarily focused on the look and atmosphere of the film. Both want to show us the world as it is — or at least as they see it — and aren’t much interested in conventional psychological drama or spiritual speculation.

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The Turin Horse - opening scene