For years, Béla Tarr’s daunting films were unavailable in the UK and he was the much-discussed fugitive genius of high European cinema, the Col Kurtz of the movies, hidden deep in the jungle of ideas.
But in the 80s and 90s the work of the Hungarian auteur began to be shown in Britain and connoisseur audiences were stunned or puzzled or electrified by his extremely long movies. Often adapted from the equally revered and difficult novels of Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai, these films were edited and latterly co-directed by his wife Ágnes Hranitzky and featured the music of Mihály Vig.
Tarr retired from film-making in 2011 to run his film school, known as film.factory, in Sarajevo. But his work is being revived this summer in a major new retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, so newcomers can beam down to the surface of his bizarre, vast planet of weltschmerz, black comedy and slo-mo noir.
His films feature unbroken, sinuous camera shots of great length, mostly in black and white, showing gloomy people, often trudging endlessly across featureless plains in a bleak, stark world, sometimes getting despairingly drunk in squalid pubs and dancing unsteadily together, a knees-up of the undead. Damnation (1988) shows a depressed man grimly in love with a cabaret singer, and dealing with the situation like a particularly anguished Samuel Beckett character. His Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) shows an entire community succumb to mass hypnosis, triggered by the arrival of a bizarre circus, led by a sinister demagogic figure called “the Prince”, displaying a single attraction: a giant dead whale.
Most staggeringly of all, there is Sátántangó (1994), about a village community who abandon their lives to follow a charismatic, criminal cult figure who has apparently come back from the dead. At seven hours and 19 minutes, this is a giant haunted house of a movie, a central European gothic horror and a mad internal epic of disillusion and despair, redolent of Gogol and Tarkovsky.
When I interview Tarr it is via video call, the camera on his laptop is not working and he speaks to me from a rectangle of darkness, the metaphorical properties of which are upended by his warmth and wit.
I ask if he enjoys teaching young people as much as he enjoyed making films, and he replies heavily: “No. Film-making is like a drug and I’m still a junkie! But I want to work with the young people because I just want to push them to be themselves, to be free, to be more revolutionary than I was. My slogan is very, very simple: no education – just liberation!”
So why did he quit directing after his film The Turin Horse in 2011, which imagined the destiny of the horse that Nietzsche tearfully embraced before his breakdown? And how did he come to establish a school abroad?
“It was simple. I had a feeling. We had made everything we wanted. The work is done and you can take it or leave it. It is not my business any more. I wanted to be a producer, working with the new Hungarian cinema. We had a production office and you wouldn’t believe my desk. A minimum of 10 different projects on it! I loved to work with those people. But then we got this government, this shit, this rightwing shit. They said very clearly we have to apply for the new conditions and we have to fulfil expectations, and by the end I said: ‘Fuck! Better if I hand over all ideas and projects and scripts and I leave the country because I have a feeling it’s hopeless.”
This brings me to the political force of his movies. The retrospective suggests something new: a parable of power worship, group hysteria and suggestibility, uniquely intuiting both the personality-cult politics of the Soviet era and the world of nationalism, fascism and Viktor Orbán still to come. Werckmeister Harmonies is surely a film that remembers the pain of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the collaborationist Nazi rule of Ferenc Szálasi from 1944 until the end of the second world war, and feels it all circling around again. So is his work a warning about the threat of fascism?
Tarr’s reply is thoughtful: “It is not only about fascism – it’s about all populism. You know, this is the difference between Hungary and the UK. Hungary is still proud of this shit. It was a nightmare and it is still a nightmare. Unbelievable in this 21st century. To see the people dependent on it is a real hell. This is why I am fortunately working abroad, working with young people between 20 and 30.”
I wondered if they were being schooled in long takes and melancholy monochrome? His voice booms out of the laptop darkness: “No! It is forbidden to follow my style! They have to pose their own questions. They have to push themselves.”
Of course, it’s not simply students and twentysomethings who might fall under the great man’s spell. Gus Van Sant famously made a slow-moving film, Gerry, in 2002, starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, about two guys getting lost in the desert and trudging about in a very Tarrian way. Tarr laughs at the memory of his old friend Van Sant and this homage: “He invited us for a screening and I saw it. I said: if you want, you can. You know: the style you can copy – but the spirit? Ha! I swear to God I am a good friend to Gus and the last time I was in LA we had dinner!”
Another unexpected thing about Tarr’s movies is their deader-than-deadpan, extinct-pan black comedy. I laughed out loud when the obese, drunk doctor in Sátántangó, played by Werner Herzog’s regular performer Peter Berling, realises that he has run out of brandy, will have to buy some more and intones with a death knell drone: “It looks like I will have to leave the house …”
“You are absolutely right,” says Tarr. “I read once that Chekhov said that he only wrote comedies and he didn’t understand why people were playing his pieces in the theatre as a kind of drama. My opinion is that we were doing comedies. You can laugh a lot.” And aside from comedies, there is film noir. His film The Man from London (2007) with Tilda Swinton was, after all, based on a novel by Georges Simenon which had been made as a conventional British thriller, Tempation Harbour, in 1947, with Robert Newton and William Hartnell – although Tarr’s version is hugely slower, more ruminative and dreamlike.
“Film noir, I love it,” says Tarr. “One of my favourite directors is Hitchcock. You cannot be dogmatic or orthodox. You have to be open!”
One of my favourite scenes from Tarr is the moment when the mysterious, corrupt police captain in Sátántangó suddenly unburdens himself of his view of existence: “Human life is meaningful, rich, beautiful and filthy!” It could be a description of his films. But how does he feel when people call them pessimistic?
His voice achieves a new gravelly basso profundo: “If you are really pessimistic, you go up to the roof and hang yourself, not wake up at four in the morning and go into the countryside to film! I only ask this – how did you feel when you came out of the movie theatre after watching my film? Did you feel stronger or weaker? That’s the main question. I want you to be stronger.”
The honest answer, for me, would be both stronger and weaker in a ratio about three to two. But you emerge sure in the knowledge you’ve seen something utterly different from anything else in cinema.
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The new 4K restoration of Werckmeister Harmonies premieres at Cinema Rediscovered at the Watershed, Bristol on 27 July. Will Heaven Fall Upon Us? – a nationwide retrospective – begins on 2 August at the BFI Southbank, London.