Screenings of Béla Tarr’s movies are rare even in his native Hungary. The most screenings are probably offered in Japan. However Tarr’s films have been received with great enthusiasm at festivals around the world, and right now (December 2011) there seems to be a retrospective show underway at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

 

Compared to his other works, his latest effort "The Turin Horse" tells a very simple story. It is about the time following an incident in Turin that triggered Nietzsche’s fall into madness (when seeing a horse being flogged by a coachman, he flung his arms around the horse’s neck, collapsed in tears, and fainted away). The focus, however, is on what happened to the "horse".

It is a story of six days that lead straight and headlong down to "the end". Reversely to the account in the Book of Genesis according to which God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, in this movie the world ends in six days. At the same time, it marks the end also of Béla Tarr’s 34-year-long filmmaking career. "The circle is closed," as Tarr himself puts it.

 

As I am going to discuss below, Tarr is considering cinema equal to film, and doesn't allow any other solution.

- Translate the gradations of light and shade into the sweet fetish that is the graininess of black-and-white film.

- Continually animate images (pixels) by means of "wind" and long takes shot by means of super-smooth camera work.

Light image = photograph, moving photograph = movie. Béla Tarr defines cinema as something that allows the viewer to enjoy this natural potential of celluloid film to a maximum extent. A film made for indulgence in celluloid film is coming to movie theatres at a time when the demise of movies on celluloid film seems near. Let me go a little more into details.

 

Tarr’s films are primarily characterized by very, very long takes shot in black and white. In a way this may be considered as a traditional method. Long scenes dominate the works of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Mizoguchi Kenji, Andrei Tarkovsky and quite a few other movie directors. As a matter of fact, this has become rather easy thanks to today’s digital film production environments. Filmmakers working in both documentary and drama, such as Wang Bing, Jia Zhang-Ke or Pedro Costa, have pioneered the long take in the age of high-definition images. Creators in the realms of experimental film and contemporary art have been challenging this technique quite aggressively as well. Works by the likes of James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, Steve McQueen or Matthew Barney contain scenes that are much longer than those in the average movie. Video works presented in loop playback in art galleries were instantly established as an art form some ten-odd years ago, and it surely isn't a completely unrelated fact that there exist countless works that have to be classified somewhere on the boundary between painting and film.

 

Another characteristic feature in Tarr’s movies is the pertinacious repetition of sounds, whereas noises, special effects and music all blend together. Mihály Vig, in charge of the music in this movie as well as in "Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmoniak)", "The Man from London (A Londoni ferfi)", plays the role of a bandit in "Satantango", and he is also in a band named Balaton.

His is a world in which images and sounds merge into a drone. Like a mountain path one walks after driving on a paved road, it is a sort of film that some regard as rough and cumbersome, while others see the true enjoyment it offers. It is a movie that depicts hart-heartedness.

 

It is at once a brilliantly haptic kind of movie. A perfectly bare, well-shaped tree; a house made of jagged rocks at the bottom of a gently sloped valley. At some distance is an unskillfully dug well. A slowly moving "horse" with lusterless hair but an enormous sense of presence, and a man and his daughter, each wearing several layers of coarsely woven overcoats (Erika Bok in the role of the daughter played a girl that commits suicide in "Satantango", and her part in "The Man from London" wasn't a very happy one as well. She appears only in Béla Tarr’s films). All things appearing in the movie look rough and ragged. The granular nature of these objects and the graininess of the film create an exquisitely balanced contrast, and as takes are left uncut, no rapid changes occur, so that the particles just keep floating around and burn themselves deeper and deeper into the viewer’s retina.

 

Perhaps it is because I am delighted (or depressed) to know that the thing of the past, by its immediate radiations (its luminances), has really touched the surface which in its turn my gaze will touch, that I am not very fond of Color. ("La Chambre Claire")

As reflected in Roland Barthes’s comment, numerous correlations of the senses of vision and touch are being pointed out here. It is about feeling the texture of particles with the eyes. This must be a trace of the retina’s evolution departing from tactile perception, and picking up colors and gradations of light and shade along the way.

Aristotle’s idea that all colors in the world were derive from black and white is probably based on the focus on the contrast of light and shadow as well. Come to think about it, three hundred million years ago the eye was nothing more than a photosensitive blotch exclusive to bodies of living beings. Parts of the skin of living organisms that originally responded only to "touch" generated photosensitive spots that could sense light, and after a long evolution process including an intermediate stage at which the body was able to respond to movements of light and shade on the surface of the skin, living organisms have developed various forms of eyes and visual perception. […] Without a doubt, the sun and the human eye have been interacting through a long process of evolution, which eventually led to the formation of intrinsic meanings such as copper money for example. (Mukai Shutaro "Katachi no semioshisu")

 

Béla Tarr’s long takes are characterized by strokes (traces), as well as by free movements of the camera, the extraordinary smoothness and slowness forms a striking contrast to the rough looking images. This ineffable gap has a truly intoxicating effect.

The question whether the perspective is subjective or objective is rather secondary here. Once there is a beautifully composed scenery with a suitable stone house, well and tree, it is up to the strokes - the way the camera moves, and the parts of the scenery it captures - to tell the story. Strong wind is an additional advantage.

Speaking of wind, Tarr himself claimed that he "couldn't make a lot of wind because of lacking funds," but that is not at all the case. There is an even heavier storm than in the street scenes in "The Turin Horse" and "Satantango" raging throughout the entire movie. ("Satantango" was shown at the Pia Film Festival right at the time when a strong typhoon hit Tokyo in September 2011! The movie runs seven hours and a half.)

 

"For me, 'cinema' means 35mm film and nothing else. Movies made with digital technology should explore such methods' unique vocabulary, but not try and imitate 'cinema'."

This is a statement Tarr made at a press briefing during a visit to Japan. It is the same kind of logic that defines a book as a bundle of paper, and disregards such expressions as "electronic book" in the first place. This comment represents very well Béla Tarr’s philosophy. Anyway, this text is about TOKYO FILMeX, which included this event at noon on the day of the screening. ("The future of digital film culture in Japan" Part 2)

 

The media controversy revolving around film and video has existed for ages, and thanks to the rapid advance of liquid crystal projectors, visitors at movie theatres can no longer recognize whether the movie they are watching was made with film or video. That is because it is now possible to reproduce the visual appearance of film by means of electronic data. The somewhat TPP-like subject of discussion on this day was the introduction of the DCP format, an expensive Hollywood industry standard that makes the conversion of formats so heavy a burden that it may threaten the survival small movie theatres. After all, the production of motion picture film will stop in the near future, so that new movies will no longer be output on film. In this respect, it is surely not a coincidence that Béla Tarr announced "The Turin Horse" to be his final work. For large theaters, the filming and screening of movies on film will perhaps be an extremely special kind of occasion in the future. "Special screening only at this theater: a movie on celluloid film!" What an admirable state of things…

 

For the amateur eye, the differences in the appearance of film and video are difficult to determine. So how exactly are they different? First of all, there is the aforementioned issue of particles. In relation to his current work on a movie (filming a still object), director Shichiri Kei pointed out the subtle horizontal shifting of frames caused by a gear effect that occurs only when shooting/screening a movie on film. "Motion" in celluloid movies is generated through such shifts in the first place. The illusion of movement is created through the synchronization of shutter and film in both the film camera and the projector, continuously recording/playing alternating sequences of still images and dark parts at a high speed. Rather than watching single frames, the viewer of a movie watches in fact the shifts that occur between them. Film is a truly shaky medium.

 

My own limited experience with movies made on film has made me keenly aware that dainty and vulnerable film is a really weak and fragile material considering its high costs. This contrast strongly to the robustness of film projectors. However, it is that vulnerability that I find very important. The fetishistic meaning of particles; the weak energy of shifts and flickers. Film, a dream one dreams awake, is suitable for spirituality and symbolism.

Cinema used to be a device for showing phantoms. Film-based expression definitely has a unique feel to it that is much broader than a matter of mere nostalgia. While it might sound anachronistic, such movies as "Charming Augustine", "Outer Space" or "Observation" (Yamazaki Hiroshi) only function on film, just like, reversely, only a few people will probably use film and a projector for an Excel-based presentation at a conference.

 

In the stormy world of "The Turin Horse", the duties of everyday life are carried out in the minimal style of a performing art. After getting up in the morning, the daughter puts on several overcoats, goes out into the storm to draw water, takes care of the horse, makes fire to boil potatoes, gets out some time-worn dishes, and the two eat with her hands…

It seems as if this recurring minimal action was expressing the meaning of "making a living", and the toughness of daily life itself. In addition, every single day marks the end of something. The horse discontinues its labor and refuses to eat hay, at some point the sounds of insects crawling around the house disappear, and the elements (water, fire, wind, etc.) wane. As the days go by, the "end" takes on an increasingly real notion. Nonetheless, this father and daughter alone resist entropy enhancement, and sparing even of the energy to cry out, they open that heavy door every morning, day upon day. The father’s line on the sixth day, "We have to make a living," weighs heavy.

 

Here is a short scene from the overseas edition of "The Turin Horse": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWYoqi4Kpw4. It doesn't really serve as a trailer for the movie, but it is highly interesting in that it condenses aspects that are typical for this movie, and at once seems to hint at the physical end of movies on film. "The Turin Horse" may in fact be marking the end of all movies on film. If there has to be a final one, then let me do it, Tarr must have been thinking.

No one knows where Béla Tarr will go from here. Tarr himself mentioned the producer trade, patronage of young filmmakers, and education as possible options, and we can only wait and see what decision he makes.