Bela Tarr: Cinema as enigma

The Hungarian auteur, who died on Tuesday, was known for his slow, lingering takes on political ruin, writes M K Raghavendra

Béla Tarr, who died on Tuesday, was arguably one of the two most celebrated Hungarian filmmakers, the other being Miklós Jancsó. Hungarian cinema was the best in eastern Europe and that makes him exceedingly important. Tarr made a reputation with two films ‘Satantango’ (1994) and ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ (2000) but all his films are marked by a profound melancholy arguably provoked by the decline and fall of communism — underway from the 1980s.  His use of the uncut sequence in his mise en scène — also like Tarkovksy and Angelopoulos — went beyond maintaining the integrity of space (as by Max Ophuls and Jancsó) and Tarr explained it at the International Film Festival of Kerala 2022 (where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award) as an effort to be true to life since compression is essentially a kind of falsehood.   

Tarr is not an easy filmmaker to discuss but after attracting attention with ‘Damnation’ (1987), which I take to be about stagnation and people stuck in a rut even in their personal relationships. ‘Satantango’, regarded a masterpiece, is a seven-hour work dealing with the fate of people on a collective farm. The collective farm is being shut down and the people on it have been given a year’s wages each. On the morning the story opens, news comes that two others, Irimiás and Petrina, who were presumed dead, are returning. This causes consternation and the two are apparently dreaded in some way. There are other episodes — Irimiás and Petrina being interrogated for being criminals but their help being sought for some unknown purpose, a little girl being robbed of her money (a handful of coins) by her older brother, the girl torturing and poisoning her cat to death and consuming rat poison. 

Tarr does not give us enough for us to follow the action, and the conversation is always enigmatic. Irimiás finally arrives and he has a scheme for investing their savings in a new enterprise — which is not strictly legal. Irimiás makes a politician’s speech over the little girl’s corpse and the general impression gathered is of the collapse of a system, no other options being open and people being persuaded against their better judgement. There are some stunning extended sequences of which the most mysterious shows Irimiás and Petrina walking along a street, their backs to a tracking camera; the wind blows shreds of paper incessantly in the same direction after them. My own reading of it relies on the knowledge that the end of a political system generates wastepaper since files and records are destroyed. Hungary was in a state of economic collapse in the late 1980s and the film was perhaps anticipating its end. As in Russia where a criminal class gained prominence after 1989, we may also see the weakening of the system in Hungary as creating people like Irimiás and Petrina. 

Neither ‘Damnation’ nor ‘Satantango’ can be read as allegory because they carry the enormous burden of the immediate, but one feels that Tarr’s style lends itself naturally to allegory. ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ (2000) is a haunting film in black and white and set in a small unnamed town. A circus comes there in the dead of night and its chief exhibit is the giant carcass of a whale. Also advertised alongside the whale and various other marine wonders is a performance from a mysterious person called ‘The Prince’. The arrival of the circus is followed by civic disturbances brought about by the incendiary speeches of the Prince, who is never shown. 

At the conclusion the stuffed whale, once a mysterious artefact lies in the square, abandoned and clearly a patched-up exhibit. The whale is perhaps an allegory of the original wonderful object associated with the dogma, the sacred object associated with the faith — the stone slabs on which the Commandments were inscribed, the Holy Grail for Christianity, the Black Stone in Mecca for Islam or a cultural object like Marx’s Das Kapital for communists. This object is an emblem of the wonder of creation and/or the world and of god’s laws. But after the strife initiated by the warrior-prophets has finally concluded and equilibrium is re-established, the sacred object has lost its wonder. The whale is only a profane object now and not an emblem.  

Tarr is admired but there have not been any convincing explanations for his films; my own understanding is that they are political. Or, more precisely, they respond to a situation brought about by politics. But Tarr’s camera style is hardly the kind associated with political cinema and his films have been loosely categorised as ‘metaphysical’. But would the imposition of political ideology upon all aspects of everyday life not have consequences upon the human psyche and, in a sense, engender metaphysical despair? Such a phase would pass and a filmmaker who had invented a kind of cinema style suited to the moment might be handicapped when it passed. After ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’, Bela Tarr’s output was disappointing. ‘The Turin Horse’ (2011) seemed to be following old habits rather than breaking new ground.

Tarr had great hope in a young Chinese filmmaker he had mentored. Hu Bo made one film ‘An Elephant Sitting Still’ (2018) about four young people in China left behind by the nation’s economic march. But he took his own life at the age of 28 before the film could be released.   

(The author is a well-known film critic)