At least in more serious critical literature, Belly Tarru has long since secured the place of a master of the long shot, a director who - with a strength that testifies to a 'reactionary' and uncompromising commitment to the ideals of European art cinema - completely emphasizes form as an almost autonomous area subject only to its own modes of signification.
If this is so, the main question within the director's oeuvre is the following: when did this turning point occur, what was his motivation, and when did Tarr's style become poetically solidified in its later twilight, ascetic beauty? In what way does the author's radical - we would almost say: desperate - turn to formalism correspond to a change in his worldview (and even ideological) perception? The traumatic core remains the same, but there is a difference in the quality and intonation of disappointment.
Early Tarr films - Family fireplace (Family nest, 1979), Free walk (Outsider, 1981) and Panel connection (Prefabricated people, 1982) - in highlighting specific social problems, in dealing with characters who face material hardships and emotional dilemmas, in insisting on handheld The camera and its indiscriminate ability to 'immerse' themselves in the marked situation functioned as documentary, engaging studies, not far from social-realist inspiration in fact. The depressing nature of communist everyday life was simply magnified by the constant use of close-ups, which, among other things, were meant to suggest a painful proximity to frustrations, an almost 'objective' (rather than psychological) description of an almost hopeless situation in which the characters found themselves.
Did Tarr, then, in the face of this unbearable stylistic penetration, the open look into a non-existent future, the too-deep mimetic contact with reality, have to 'retreat', to retreat to a (certainly not redeeming, but certainly meditative) distance, simply to aestheticize his approach in order to dislocate this intrusive piece of the Real? The confusion is overcome by a renewed faith in the enunciative powers of the cinematic apparatus, in the supremacy of the formal over the substantive, in symbolic processing: in the elegance loin-cloth which the camera can perform for itself, by itself.
The turning point came with Macbeth (1982), a television production - consisting of only two shots, the second of which lasted 57 minutes - in which the director learned an important lesson: the scene no longer dictated, as had been the case until then, but was now dictated, everything yielded to the author's inscription and signature. However, the full transition occurred only after the director's specific interlude: Autumn almanac (Autumn Almanac, 1985) represents an interesting step in the author's aesthetic trajectory, and moreover points to an intriguing 'background' of his transition.
Namely, in Tarr's first films, the heroes are workers, housewives or people without permanent employment, full of social frustrations, furious with themselves and their surroundings. In Autumn almanac, however, the protagonists - confined within the apartment - look more like the bourgeoisie, and finally the sensibility itself is 'softened', since the troubles are more personal than social: it is as if melancholy has replaced indignation, and the rhetoric has become more introspective. The director's increased stylization accompanies this 'class' transformation (which may be a consequence of losing faith in leftist postulates, at least on their 'vulgar' mimetic level): the previous 'proletarian' treatment is now modernized, somewhat unrealistic (as evidenced by several unusual camera angles) and philosophical, while the former agility has slowly turned into resigned irony (the use of the Hungarian version of the song Che will be, will be at the end of the movie).
Author's collaboration with My name is Lászlóm Krasznahorkai., finally, will mark a fundamental formalist correspondence, a full aesthetic overlap, the establishment of a cathartic poetic closeness: the master of the long sentence finds the master of the long shot. As a 'love' film, karhozat (The Curse, 1987) is the most depressing work in Tarr's oeuvre, as it is fundamentally focused on issues of loneliness and betrayal. More than in any other film by the director, in karhozat The landscape acts as an externalization of the hero's gloomy state and impasse from which he cannot extricate himself, as an external configuration and context of utter hopelessness and degradation.
A pessimistic epic, seven hours long Satántango (Satanic Tango, 1994), however, gathered in one place the author's obsessive themes: the fact that in Tarr the sublimation of his previous aesthetic experience was realized in the form of extension, visual and narrative expansion, in a further 'deadening' of the already slow rhythm, in an even more pronounced formal impression, tells us a lot. Organized or orchestrated in twelve parts, Satántango owes its abstract character to the director's idea that the film develops as a musical composition in which the most significant gestures will not be those that perhaps associate with a familiar milieu (say, Hungary immediately before the collapse of the old regime), but rather arabesque and grotesque camera movements that surpass pure utilitarianism and realistic 'mapping' of the scene.
The fact that the viewer is 'un-situated' brings a disturbing quality to the film, which has both a prophetic and diabolical resonance. Within this framework, all symbols take on a threatening form, although they remain within an aporic interpretation. The dance scene in the tavern from which the film takes its name, for example, can be taken as a moment of embodiment of the utter chaos and inarticulateness that reigns on the collective farm, but the length of the shot itself also introduces completely opposite sentiments or a kind of strange pleasure that grows out of that silent tango. The opening, eight-minute sequence with cattle moving freely around the farm also forces one to question themselves anew - as is the case with the 'meaning' of the great whale in Werckmeister harmoniums (Werckmeister's Harmonies, 2000) - its parodic or some other symbolic status and place in the narrative structure of the film. Metaphors in film - or itself Satántango like one huge metaphor - they are ultimately unreadable.
U Werckmeister harmoniums - adaptation of Krasznahorkai's novel Melancholy of resistance - Tarr emphasizes the movement of the camera in the process of detecting the heroes who are inside the hostile cosmos. Thus, in a seemingly paradoxical way, the director freedom movement captures and represents the existential captivity: mise-en-scène does not open up space, it limits, svodi. The long shot, therefore, acts as a marker of temporal-spatial narrowness. Existential deprivation in Werckmeister harmoniums is transformed, or rather materialized in the atmosphere (which is so fantastic that it takes on Gothic characteristics) of the coming apocalypse, so there is no other resolution than the one that leads to being-shaking horror.
When at the beginning of the film Valuska (Lars Rudolph) shows drunk people in a tavern how the cosmos works, it has already been indicated that it is largely unstable, that order has begun to disappear grotesquely and catastrophically. It is a matter of thorough disintegration: although by inertia one can read Werckmeister harmoniums as a parable about the post-communist East (just as the molding would Satántango (although a mere narrative of the arrival of capitalism would be out of place), Tarr's points go deeper and are not related to a political description of modern man, but to an essential imbalance - uncertainty, fear, unrest - in the economy of life. As Werckmeister harmoniums progresses, so chaos grows, both in the souls of individuals and in the community: the only harmony that our cosmos can produce is entropy.
The London Man (The man from London, 2007), based on the novel Georges Simenon, takes as its starting point the transgression that is perhaps the least tangible, the least concrete, but whose consequences are nevertheless all-pervading: the guilt of temptation. The Switchman (Miroslav krobot) witnesses a murder one night, and when he goes to the scene of the crime he finds a suitcase full of money. The switchman, someone who (seemingly) steers the tracks of fate, who regulates the paths of arrival and departure, is suddenly confronted with the intrusion of contingency: a precise trope for Black a hero, someone who turns from the everyday path and is placed on the path of destiny.
Although fictional The London Man in general terms and does not deviate too much from some 'stereotypical' crime plots, what Tarr insists on is precisely the difference in the visual sphere, in the quality of his chiaroscuro which is not an ethical reflection, but a description of the world. This setting implies a disproportion between style and narrative material, a disproportion which, however, as the film progresses, increasingly and inevitably turns into a coincidence, a mutual illumination of the methods and motifs used. That is why the slowness of the action - the melancholic expectation of both the hero and the viewer for something to happen - makes the picture more pregnant. And heavier, because that is exactly how the gravitational force that governs the heroes is 'embodied': in fact, couldn't that be one of the definitions of authentic Black atmosphere.
karhozat, Satántango, Werckmeister harmoniums, The London Man i The Turin Horse (Turin Horse, 2011) are a fascinating series that embodies the director's worldview and poetic expertise (with the help of his long-time collaborator, Agnes Hranitzky): if the paradigmatic frame of the author's first phase was close up faces talking, arguing, unsuccessfully trying to understand each other, then the basic unit of Tarr's new universe is the scene of a hero walking alone or in a group - most often silently - along a long, straight road while the camera persistently follows him from a distance.
This meant that Tarr's protagonists emerged into a different setting, into a vast (Hungarian) plain, into a muddy, boring, repetitive landscape: the realistic perspective was replaced - or perhaps it was just a gloomy expansion of scope - by a dystopian one. Traces of social reality, biblical quotes, political references, all of this is still present, but the director's artificial vision prevents the text from providing a comforting semantic closure, a leap out of the represented universe.
Precisely because he fundamentally sabotages the possibility of easy allegorical codification and devalues the same possibility of interpretation, Tarr supplements formal 'unusualness' with semantic 'non-transparency', meticulously creating a dark atmosphere in his films with black-and-white photography, which is responsible for a specific existential mood. If the director's films are already allegories about something, then they are allegories about allegory (as narrative, as explanation, as meaning, as a means to understand and accept the world in its ultimate randomness and arbitrariness): by experiencing this very 'emptiness' in the order of signs - which implies a refocusing on the value of the image, the frame, the staging in its 'materiality' - we emerge before the metaphysical horizon. This is where the necessary power of Tarr's version or vision of transcendental cinematography lies.
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