Films by Bela Tarr
All six of these features were shown at the Toronto film festival last fall, with Tarr in attendance, but none has received adequate–or in most cases any–distribution in this country. So it’s a tribute to the indefatigable persistence of Facets Multimedia’s Charles Coleman (who’s also recently brought us invaluable retrospectives of Marguerite Duras, Robert Bresson, and Krzysztof Kieslowski) that all six are showing in Chicago this week. Since the death of Kieslowski, Tarr (who turned 40 last year) is conceivably the most important Eastern European filmmaker currently at work, but he doesn’t have the instincts for packaging that made Kieslowski into something resembling a household name. Tarr’s 1994 magnum opus Satantango–which took him years to develop (accounting for the seven-year gap after Damnation)–runs a little under seven hours and is meant to be seen with two short intermissions. It attracted a sizable audience at the Chicago International Film Festival two years ago, most of which stayed not only to the end but through an additional hour of discussion with Tarr afterward. The two screenings it will have this weekend will be the only local showings since then.
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Almanac of Fall (1984) and Damnation (1987), my two other Tarr favorites, had runs at Facets several years ago, and the former is now available on video on the Facets label. But the rare opportunity to see all six of Tarr’s features on film over a single week allows one to observe continuities as well as changes, throwing a different light on his work as a whole. Though the first three are less appealing to me as well as less familiar, they’re still full of interest in their own right. And they offer fascinating glimpses of where the three later movies come from.
Sontag’s second reference to Tarr, after she cites Damnation and Satantango as his two exemplary works, is a voicing of concern about his future as a filmmaker, since “the internationalizing of financing and therefore of casts” has had disastrous effects on the careers of Tarkovsky, Zanussi, and Angelopoulos. On this front, I can report that Tarr is preparing to shoot his seventh feature this fall, and to the best of my knowledge has not had to compromise his intentions by being forced to use an international cast or in any other respect.
Tarr himself wrote his first four features, but he wrote Damnation and Satantango in collaboration with the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, who wrote the novel, Satantango, on which the film is based. (The two also worked together on a short film I haven’t seen–the 1989 “The Last Boat,” included in the international sketch film City Life.) Their collaboration began when Tarr read Krasznahorkai’s novel as an unpublished manuscript in the mid-80s, so in effect their latest film was formulated over a full decade. Regrettably, this novel isn’t available in English (though I’m told an excerpt was translated in the winter 1986 issue of New Hungarian Quarterly, which I’m still hoping to track down).
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo: Satantango.
