The narrative features of the Tarr films can be assessed really only in relation to the themes they are utilised to express. The stories of the Tarr films are focused on only one basic theme, and each film’s story offers a variation on this theme. The basic theme of all of Tarr’s films is entrapment. Each film shows a situation which the characters are incapable of getting out of, however hard they try. They remain hopeless captives in their miserable situation, whether or not they are responsible for their own suffering. Different types of situations can be discerned in different groups of Tarr films.
The most frequent topic of the early-period films is what I will call ‘everyday hell’. This theme is about how people make each other’s lives a living hell, thinking that the people close to them are the only obstacles to their happiness. They torture each other psychologically and sometimes even physically; they have no respect for each other and have no plans of how to get over their problems together with the other person. This is the main topic of three early films, Family Nest, The Prefab People and Almanac of Fall, but one can also find this motif in other Tarr films, such as Damnation and The Man from London.
The other topic, mainly typical of the second-period films, is betrayal and conspiracy. Damnation, Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies in particular are based on this theme, but just as in the case of the first topic, it is a frequent and important element of many other films too, such as Almanac of Fall, with the topic first appearing consistently in Macbeth. Whereas in the ‘everyday hell’ type of film entrapment is an existential situation which forces the characters to live together, in the ‘betrayal and conspiracy’ story type the characters are in principle free to go, but they choose to stay, thinking that cheating the other will help them to move forward.
Two films cannot be categorised as focusing on these topics, and they are similar in many respects. Both The Outsider and The Turin Horse tell the story of people who are totally lost and incapable of finding a way of coping with their environment, but not because they are betrayed or because other people make their lives difficult. In The Outsider it is the protagonist’s personality that makes it impossible for him to move forward in his own life; in the case of The Turin Horse it is the physical environment. However, these films are also powerful stories about the situation of entrapment. The narrative features of the Tarr films are all direct consequences of this basic topic.
There is one narrative feature that probably anybody who has seen at least one Béla Tarr film from the second period would immediately mention: that they are extremely slow and relatively long. The length of a film is relative but quantifiable. The slowness of the narration is also relative but not quantifiable. The general impression of viewers that Tarr’s films are long is due to a single film, Satantango, which is not only 420 minutes long, but is meant to be screened in a single session, unlike its famous predecessor, Fassbinder’s Berlin, Alexanderplatz, which was released as a television mini-series. This is what made Satantango not only a long film, but also a screening event. But Satantango is also an exception in Tarr’s own career. The length of Tarr’s released feature films excluding Satantango is about average for their film historical context, and does not change much. It varies between 100 and 146 minutes. It is not the objective and quantifiable length of the Tarr films that makes the viewers feel that they are long; it is rather their other, non-quantifiable feature, their extreme slowness.
The questions regarding narrative slowness are these: what may be the reason for it, and what makes it acceptable (for a certain art-film audience)? To answer these questions we have to map all the important features of Tarr’s narratives, and try to find the relationship between them. We have to find their specific function in the overall effect of the Tarr style. I will argue that what the dramaturgical form of Tarr’s films succeeds in doing is making the viewer believe the same illusion as the characters, which is that the story is going somewhere, even if slowly, while in fact it is only making a circle, and arrives at a situation as hopeless as the one it started out from. The main problem Tarr resolves in different ways in different films is how to create the deceptive sense that the characters’ situation is evolving toward some solution and, at the same time, to make one feel the hopelessness of this situation right from the beginning; the art of Béla Tarr is thus to make believe without hiding anything. To reach this paradoxical sensation is the main function of the Tarr style as well as of Tarr’s narrative devices and character representation. The aesthetic and emotional effects resulting from this are very complex, but the main driving force of these effects is the dialectics of hope and hopelessness.
The technical realisation of this dialectics and the most important manifestation of entrapment in the narrative structure is the fundamental circular dramatic form of the Tarr films. This means essentially that the dramatic conflict developed at the beginning of the story is not resolved in the end. On the surface, circularity appears in different forms, discussed later in some detail. I will explore four aspects of Tarr’s narration that are more or less constant in the oeuvre, and that are the main cornerstones of the complex effect of his narratives: banality of narrative events; slowness of narration and suspense; static situations and circular narrative form.
Banality of narrative events
The basic building block of the early Tarr films’ static stories and of later films’ circularity is the banality, or the unexceptional, everyday character, of the events. Even though some events may result in small changes, none of these are of the sort one would call exceptional, which would undo the initial situation of the characters. At his best, Tarr is able to render even the most excessive or exceptional event an everyday banality that has no effect on the characters’ way of life.
Family Nest’s radicalism is also due to this effect of rendering the shocking or exceptional banal. The main example is the most shocking scene of Family Nest, and probably of the whole Tarr oeuvre: the rape story. Every element of this story is shocking or surprising. Accompanied by his elder brother, Irén’s husband, Laci unexpectedly arrives home from two years of military service. His father makes a remark regarding the fact that they were not informed about the son’s arrival, but after all everybody is glad to have him back again. This is surprising, but as the family members get over it very quickly, the viewer also takes it as normal. Shortly after their arrival the family and Irén’s friend visiting her sit down to have dinner. After dinner Irén and her friend go to the next room to take Irén’s little daughter to bed, while the rest of the family remains in the main room playing cards. After a while Irén’s friend announces her intention to leave. Surprisingly, the two brothers also stand up and announce that they will go to the pub for a beer. Irén is absent in this scene, and nobody among the rest of the family members remarks on the fact that the son, who has just arrived, is going to the pub instead of spending time with his wife and daughter. Again, they take it as normal, so the viewer is also obliged to accept it as something that is part of the normal course of events. The next scene is clearly shocking, because instead of going to the pub the two brothers rape Irén’s friend on the street. The whole story comes to a point where the viewer can no longer consider it an ‘anthropological’ description of the way of life of a certain subculture that may be surprising, but after all has to be accepted as normal. The woman tries to resist, struggles, and wants to escape, which makes this scene not an ethnographic curiosity but a clear-cut case of a sexual crime. And then comes an even more shocking surprise. After the rape, the three of them go to the pub together and drink peacefully. Tarr’s procedure is the same here as it was before. Whatever happens, if the characters cope with it, the viewers have to cope with it too. If the young woman instead of going to the police goes to the pub, and accepts a drink from her two rapists, and no violence is involved any more, the viewer has no other option than to take it as ‘the way things usually go around here’, however unusual and shocking all of it may seem. And that is what makes the whole story after all an impassive ‘ethnographic’ description of a certain cultural milieu. The film forces us to accept that even though we know rape is a crime, and even though the young woman protests, at the end all this becomes a part of everyday life.
Originally the script had this story without the shocking twist at the end. The two brothers were to bring the young woman to a pub, get her drunk, and rape her afterwards. This version seems more ‘logical’, or closer to the way things are likely to happen in real life,1 but dramaturgically this solution has two important weaknesses. First, if we see the young woman drinking with the two brothers first, we already know that the two brothers have left because of the woman, and thus we have a certain expectation of things getting worse, so the rape would not really come as a surprise, even if it is shocking. Second, if the woman gets raped after getting drunk, she would become a simple victim, which would provoke the viewer to make a conventional moral judgement on the brothers alone. The way the events proceed in the film makes the viewer make a moral judgement against the young woman too, or drop any moral judgement at all. Part of the shocking effect comes from the fact that what we see is a legal crime according to the law but apparently it is not a big crime on their terms, and not even on the woman’s terms. That is the way they live; this act, and probably other kinds of crime too, are just ordinary parts of their lives, and they do not ever reflect on this fact. And that is what is shocking for the viewer. This is where the film becomes ethnographic: the viewer feels that this moral universe cannot be part of his or her world, and if it is, if this really happens in our world, then it seems even more scandalous.
Clearly, this series of events does not constitute an average ‘everyday’ rape case. Every element is at the borderline of the ‘normal’ (if there is such a thing as a ‘normal rape’). But nothing in it seems totally impossible either. And once the viewer accepts the course of events as possible, the aesthetic effect of the film starts to work. We find ourselves in the middle of a world that looks familiar and predictable, but which turns out to be entirely unpredictable and full of surprises. The viewer believes that anything can happen in this world. And that is Tarr’s great achievement: he makes the viewer believe something can change in this world, whereas in fact nothing really happens to effect any real lasting change. At the end, what we get is what we see. It is just like what we expect at the beginning of the film, but in the meantime we are made to believe that we were wrong. In fact we know this world from afar, and we expect nothing good from it. But Tarr shows us that, in fact, we don’t know this world in detail, and we don’t have much idea as to how much more horrible it is than we think, although, in the end, the result is in fact what we expected.
However, Tarr’s purpose is not simply to show something that is more horrible than we think it is. The illusion through which he leads us to the expected result is an illusion inasmuch as it deceivingly suggests that something in this world can in fact change. But as long as the characters and the viewer are captives of this illusion, there is some positive element in it. This is the human capacity for the desire for a better life and for real values, in whatever ugly or ridiculous way the characters may express it. This illusion is the most essential part of Tarr’s characters, the part which gives them dignity. I will discuss this later, in the section dealing with character representation.
Topic 1: Everyday hell
Three of the four early Tarr films, Family Nest, The Prefab People and Almanac of Fall, have the same topic, which is how ordinary people make one another’s life a living hell. This topic itself requires banality as the main characteristic element of the story. Not only do no extraordinary things happen in the stories, but they have no outcome whatsoever. If we consider the ending of The Prefab People as the outcome of the series of events resulting from the leaving of the husband, we can say that an important narrative feature of the early Tarr films is that their narratives have neither start nor ending. We step into the middle of an everyday event that seems to go on unchanged for some time, and step out of it without reaching any solution or substantial change. However, in order to give the stories a certain linear narrative development, Tarr incorporates in each of the stories one linear plotline that starts after the beginning and ends before the end. This way the basically circular narratives have a linear supporting element.
Family Nest
The film starts with the day that has the potential to change Irén’s life: in the evening of an ordinary day her husband, Laci, unexpectedly arrives home from his military service. It may seem that her humiliating situation in the apartment of her father-in-law might now end, because her husband is back, and will protect her from the constant mean and violent verbal attacks of her mother-in-law and father-in-law. The rape scene at the beginning of the film suggests to the viewer that nothing of that sort is likely to happen, and that is what Irén will realise at the end of the story too, when she is ousted from the apartment by her father-in-law, with Laci’s passive assistance.
The hopelessness of Irén’s situation has two sources. One is the housing conditions of 1970s Hungary, which were the result of massive urban immigration without appropriate housing development by the government. Whole families lived in a single space or in one-bedroom apartments, without even a proper bathroom; two or more families lived in larger apartments, obliged to share bathroom and kitchen facilities with strangers. Generations grew up in these conditions without any hope for improvement of their housing situation. The other has nothing to do with the housing conditions, but rather with the aggressive and amoral attitude of the family members Irén has to live with. It is not possible for her to cope with the parents of her husband, but there is no escape; she has nowhere to go. Most of the scenes illustrate the human condition of this family rather than their housing situation. Tarr dedicates only one scene to the latter: when Irén goes to the city council to apply for an apartment. In the rest of the film he shows everyday scenes depicting the relationships between and attitudes of family members. These scenes are dialogue situations not associated with actions or stories. Most of these dialogues have as their only function the characterisation of the players. The more banal and empty the dialogues, the better, for this purpose. These people do not have any extraordinary problems in their lives other than the living conditions which they share with a million other people. It is not these conditions that make them the way they are; this situation only makes the way they are even more unbearable. Any extraordinary story event would suggest to the viewer that their behaviour is due to material problems. This is why it is essential for Tarr to make the story out of scenes as insignificant as possible.
This doesn’t mean, however, that nothing is building up from these situations during the film. The challenge of Family Nest’s narration is that in spite of the banality of the events, the scenes coming one after another have to contribute to motivating Irén’s leaving the house. This is the only important narrative change in the film, whereby Irén finds herself in an even more desperate situation than that in which she was before. Tarr achieves this by two means. One is a linear plotline starting around forty minutes into the film and ending after around one hour and ten minutes, representing Laci’s father manipulating his son to get rid of Irén. Although the film starts with a violent argument from which it becomes clear that the parents want Irén out, this is the first thing the father actually does to reach this goal. This plotline has the function of providing a supporting element to the otherwise circular or static structure. It does not even fill the whole thirty minutes; it takes only two scenes. The first is when Laci’s father tries to convince Laci of Irén’s infidelity; the second is when in an argument over money he brings this issue up again, and Laci starts to question Irén. This is what leads to the break-up; it is at this point that it becomes clear that Laci’s parents not only verbally abuse Irén, but are ready to try anything to get rid of her. But this alone wouldn’t be enough for Irén to leave the house or Laci to let Irén go.
The other means of motivating Irén’s departure is the description of the emotional bonds between the family members as being weak and unreliable. To demonstrate this, the narrative uses a contrasting method. The characters’ behaviour in individual scenes is in strong contrast to the way the given character behaves in a subsequent scene. The rape scene is the most telling example of this. This is how the sequence goes: a) a peaceful family card game; the young woman and the two brothers leave; b) the two brothers rape the young woman; c) the three of them drink relaxed in a pub; d) Laci goes to bed and tenderly embraces his wife, whispering nice comforting words in her ears.
The characters’ behaviour in each of the scenes is in contrast to the way they behave in the previous or next scenes. We don’t expect the two brothers to rape the girl, and we don’t expect her to drink with the brothers afterwards, and we don’t expect Laci to be so tender with his wife following all this. Sometimes the contrast is in a single scene. When Laci, Irén and their little daughter go to the amusement park, the whole scene has an atmosphere of peace, happiness and cheerful relaxation. That is also the only scene where there is light music all the way through. However, in the last sequence Laci is not with his family any more; he drinks alone while his wife and daughter are on the merry-go-round, and the scene ends with him vomiting, having drunk too much.
The situation is the same with Laci’s father. Until the end of the film it seems as though the father is consistent in his behaviour. Although he is very arrogant and rather stupid, he seems to consistently defend very conservative family values and a working ethic. That is why it is shocking when at the end of the film we see him a little drunk, courting a woman, Irén’s friend by the way, which both makes him ridiculous and discredits everything he has said before and every moral lesson he has given to all of the members of his family. Even this scene is not unambiguous. The father’s behaviour is repulsive and ridiculous during the time the woman sits next to him and he tries to approach her. When she finally has had enough and leaves the table, the scene does not end. We see him alone at the table drinking and singing a sad folk song about how lonely he is. Although he does not win our sympathy with that, we no longer see him as harmful and violent as before, as he shows some desperation, even though we know that he is the victim of himself alone. The last contrast is the fake interview scene with Laci, who is far from being cynical or unsympathetic to Irén, where he winds up crying over this situation, and the viewer cannot help feeling a little sorry for him too.
The film’s most audacious narrative turn is when it apparently shifts genre, and ends as a (fake) documentary. The last two scenes are arranged as if they were interviews with the characters who act, as if the film’s story were about their real life, and they played their own roles in it. I elaborated on this in chapter two from a stylistic point of view; from a narrative point of view this part is a reflection on and thereby a closure of the director’s statement at the beginning of the film: ‘This is a true story, it didn’t happen to the people in the film, but it could have.’ The fake interview sequence at the end of the film confirms this statement stylistically, but also brings this extradiegetic element into the diegesis. Through this narrative device Tarr turns the initial director’s statement into an aesthetic experience of the film, whereby the viewer forgets about the fictional character of the story and accepts it as a literal part of reality. That aesthetic experience is what makes the director’s statement really credible.2
The Prefab People and Diplomafilm
The Prefab People is Tarr’s second ‘living hell’ film. The narrative process and the basic situation are similar to Family Nest’s, but there are some changes. Around half of the film plays out in an apartment, and a little bit less than half in different exterior locations. This provides a less ‘claustrophobic’ effect than the mise-en-scène does in Family Nest. After all, the family conflict here is not related to the housing situation. However, allusion to the Hungarian housing situation is not missing from the film entirely. Its title refers to the housing projects that were built extensively at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s around Budapest, with the help of the low-quality Soviet technology of prefabricated concrete panels. The word ‘panel’ in the Hungarian usage of the time evoked for everyone those very low-quality buildings on the outskirts of Budapest, occupying huge territories with their monotonous geometrical planning and without any green areas around them. For most working- and lower-middle-class people this was the only housing solution, for which they longed during many years, like Irén did in Family Nest. It appears as though Tarr followed Irén and Laci after they reunited and finally had an apartment of their own. Both films represent a situation which leads to a couple’s break-up. And both proceed through banal, everyday scenes. This film is based on a contrasting structure similar to that of Family Nest, only the contrasts here are not as shocking. The contrasting structure concerns the circular frame of the story: at the beginning and at the end of the film we find the same event sequence: a) Robi unexpectedly packs up and leaves his family; b) the couple is reunited.
It is not simply the scene of Robi’s leaving that makes this narrative circular. It is this larger event sequence that suggests that this life goes on the same tracks forever with different variations, without any way for the characters to step out of their vicious circle. That is what this circular form suggests, but it is not what it explicitly articulates. The first break-up scene looks like a flash-forward to the end of the story, and it seems as if afterwards the narrative goes back to an earlier stage to show what led to this outcome. The two break-up scenes are very similar but not identical. Firstly, they are different in length. The first scene is a 140-second single shot, while the second scene is a 240-second single shot, so the second is almost two minutes longer than the first. They differ also in small gestures, in little bits of dialogues, and some camerawork, which is due to the characters’ different movements. The scene we see at the end of the story is thus not exactly the same as the one we see at the beginning. This little difference is important, otherwise the last scene coming after the second break-up scene, where the two of them are together again buying a washing machine, wouldn’t make much sense. Even though it can be interpreted as a flashback – just as in the beginning where the scene could be interpreted as a flash-forward – this doesn’t make much sense, as we have already seen enough of their relationship. Why show another banal scene from their life together after their break-up? This scene makes sense only if this is not a flashback but a chronological continuation of the preceding events, suggesting that Robi came back, but nothing is resolved.
Having said that, it is very unlikely that any spectator would notice these differences in the movie theatre, because the narrative content is the same, the starting and ending situation is the same, and basically the two characters behave the same way. Most viewers would interpret the two scenes as identical, and the repetition as just a narrative frame.3 But, again, on this interpretation the last scene does not really fit. Still, precisely because no other interpretation is possible, most viewers would come to the conclusion that probably it is the film that starts again rather than their life together, which may have the same interpretative effect as would the other possibility, that this is a story that repeats itself over and over again. Thus, in spite of the ambiguity and lack of explicitness of this ending, its circular effect is very strong, and that was Tarr’s main intention here. From this film on circularity will become the most important structural element of Tarr’s narratives.
Just as in the previous films, banality of life is what each scene suggests to the viewer. Tarr doesn’t use the method seen in Family Nest whereby a scene, even if it is shocking or extraordinary, becomes ordinary, because in this film nothing is really shocking or extraordinary. On the other hand, he uses the contrasting method within one scene exactly the way he used it in Family Nest, especially in the amusement park scene. In this film there are three such scenes, and these are longer and more elaborate than the amusement park scene in the first film. But the idea is the same: to take an event that is supposed to be pleasant and cheerful, and that could bring family members closer to one another, and spoil it gradually so that at the end it becomes clearly embarrassing and unpleasant, possibly engendering conflicts rather than agreement. We can even say that these three scenes make the backbone of the narrative: together they occupy one-third of the film’s running time.
That is how the chronological narrative starts after the flash-forward. Robi and Judit have their nine-year wedding anniversary, which they celebrate at home. Robi buys a bottle of cheap brandy and some hairspray for his wife, which doesn’t make her particularly happy. Right after they have their first drink, Judit brings up a subject that will be the source of the conflict (she had asked Robi to arrange a job for her in the factory, but he didn’t attend to his wife’s request); she winds up crying, and finally the whole celebration of their wedding anniversary turns into a bitter fight, making them more unhappy than they were before. The second scene of this kind is when the family goes to the local beach, and Robi stays behind to say hello to a friend. This visit lasts only twenty minutes according to Robi, but an hour and a half according to his wife, and when he finally arrives by the pool she starts a fight again, which makes him leave the scene and the rest of the family alone at the beach. The third is the longest. It is a company party for which Judit excitedly prepares, having her hair done and dressing nicely. She speaks at length to the women at the hairdresser’s about how much she loves dancing. At the party Robi dances only with other women; he winds up drunk, and his wife is totally depressed. All of these occasions could have been special and constructive for their marriage, but all these events just contribute to its decay.
Just like Family Nest, this film represents very little tenderness in the couple’s relationship. The only two scenes in which they show some tenderness for each other are the anniversary scene, where this emotion dissipates very quickly within the scene itself, and the love-making scene after Judit opposes his going to work abroad. But right after this Robi leaves his family. In the rest of the film he either ignores her or has the necessary minimum everyday conversation with her. There is one exception, where Robi tries to explain to his wife that it would be a good thing if he accepted a job abroad for two years. Other than that there is no substantial communication between the two of them, even in the two break-up scenes, in which Robi just leaves without any explanation. The emotional bonds represented here are as weak as in Family Nest, and even though communication is not as violent and aggressive as in the first film, it is no less void of human understanding. Because of the lack of explicit social content in their conflict (comparable to the housing problems in Family Nest), nothing outside their personal relationship can be realistically blamed for it. That is why Tarr felt it was important this time to use professional actors, who are more experienced than amateurs in expressing different and nuanced psychological states. There are no scenes in this film which could shift the viewer’s perspective out of this family context. The only scene which shows that Robi is interested in anything in the world is when he explains the difference between socialism and capitalism to his son in an extremely primitive way, which is not primitive because he wants his son to understand but rather because that is the only way he is able to talk about these things. They are watching a television programme where some scholar is speaking about the nature of world capitalism in very abstract ideological terms. As they listen, Robi sort of translates what he hears, as much as he can understand it, into the primitive terms of dialectical materialism such as he remembers from school. A complicated and sophisticated ideology coming from the television and its simplified mirror image sunk into the brains of ordinary people are juxtaposed in this scene to show that emotional and psychological emptiness is coupled with an effective ideological brainwash in the lives of these people. The social milieu around them does not offer any more possibility for them than their own family life, which provides in turn very restricted prospects in financial terms. It is not a particular meanness or moral decay that works in this film, as was the case in Family Nest, but a simple lack of personal and social awareness of a whole social milieu that is translated into a personal relationship.
In this film the characters’ lives are a living hell not because they torture one another actively, which sometimes they do too, but because the things they expect from one another are unavailable to them. Both feel that they are prisoners of their own family and they do not have control over their own lives, and because of that they cannot make the other’s life happier either. They both think in their own ways that leaving home is the solution, while there is nowhere to go for them.
The Prefab People has an antecedent, which is Tarr’s forty-minute-long diploma work, submitted a year before at the film school under the title of Diplomafilm. This film contains all the important elements of The Prefab People except the circular structure. The characters and the actors are the same, the conflict is the same, and the outcome is the same; even the interview scene at the end is there. In this film one can trace back the original idea of the story. In the interview scene Judit tells the original story Tarr heard about a man leaving his family and moving into a house across the street, just opposite his former home. From that point on, he was living in separation from his family, but they could see each other every day from a distance. This narrative motif is missing from The Prefab People. In Diplomafilm the wedding anniversary scene is preceded by several other scenes which either come later in The Prefab People or are simply missing from it. The most important scene missing from the longer version is the first shot in Diplomafilm. Here, Robi is talking to the camera about his work, emphasising the powerful position he has at the power plant. Robi says that he is at the top of everything, and everything depends on him. With the push of a button, he can turn whole neighbourhoods black, he can kill a patient on the operating table, he can make the streetcars stop. This scene is meant to be very ironic, and the actor’s way of talking is exaggerated in such a way that the viewer can see the absurdity of a petty person’s self-image as someone very important. However, this scene does not contribute to the development of the real conflict with his wife, since there is no plot-line dealing with his work or with his psychological complex of being the master of the world. Other than that, this scene ridicules Robi in a way no other Tarr character is ridiculed; Tarr omitted this scene from The Prefab People.
Diplomafilm’s narrative structure is linear and not constructed upon surprises. As the viewer is prepared for the wedding anniversary by other scenes where the couple’s imperfect relationship is exposed, the fact that the anniversary turns out bad is not really surprising. It is immediately followed by the scene where they buy a washing machine, which is more logical dramaturgically, but not at all surprising. The scene where Robi packs up and leaves the family is, again, logically at the end of the story, but by that token, it is not surprising either.
What Tarr accomplished in The Prefab People was the creation of the surprise effect with the help of the circular structure.
Almanac of Fall
The next film dealing with this topic is Tarr’s last film of his first period (or the intermediary film between the two periods). In this film, Tarr returns to the narrative framework of his first film: an ensemble play in a closed environment, which is again a single apartment. This time Tarr develops the claustrophobic effect of this situation to an extreme: no scenes occur outside the apartment. The characters’ situation is also similar to that in Family Nest: most of them live there because they have nowhere else to go, or because this is the simplest way to solve their housing problems. However, they are not forced to be together as in Family Nest. The apartment is owned by an elderly lady, Hédi, who lives there with her son, János. Hédi’s nurse, Anna, has moved in, because it is simpler for Hédi, and she brings her boyfriend, Miklós. The last person to move in is Tibor, János’s friend. There is enough room for everyone here, narrow space is not a problem, and seemingly Hédi is rich enough to sponsor this little community. The characters have no goals that would make the story progress, such as having an apartment of their own, or having a decent occupation, or making more money. This story is about a power game for the control of a territory. It is an abstract closed-situation drama where the story moves forward through different shifts in the positions of the characters relative to each other. This is the first time that the permutation principle appears in Tarr’s oeuvre explicitly in a dramatic construct. And it is associated with a similarly explicit circular dramatic structure, which, as already mentioned, after The Prefab People will be the main structure of Tarr’s narratives. All of the first-period Tarr films’ narratives are based on the representation of personal communication in rather everyday situations. The narrative structure of Almanac of Fall is based on dialogues between pairs of characters, with the relationships within the pairs changing each time. In this film there is no linear plotline, and the only movement in the film is the changing relationships of the characters. The difference between the initial and the concluding situation is that Anna, instead of being Miklós’s girlfriend, is now János’s fiancée or wife, although she is dancing with Miklós in the last scene while János sits by the table with tears in his eyes. These shifts go through violent, sometimes even physical fights, betrayals, rapes, lies and mean manipulation. But the initial set of characters remains stable. The catalyst of the series of changes is Tibor, who moves in about fifteen minutes into the film and is taken away by the police in the last scene. His presence brings some hidden conflicts to light, and accelerates slow processes. But when he is gone the initial power relations are restored, and only slight changes take effect in the relationships of the characters.
It is very easy to outline the structure of the drama. The characters can be placed in different categories: ‘primary’, ‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ tenants. Primary tenants are those who are within their rights to stay in the apartment: Hédi and her son, János. Secondary tenants are those who are invited by a primary tenant: Anna (invited by Hédi) and Tibor (invited by János). Miklós is the only tertiary tenant (invited by a secondary tenant, Anna). As Miklós has the weakest status among the initial characters, it is in his interest to make a move forward and become a protégé of a primary tenant, which is why he is the only one who must not have a conflict with the primary tenants. There are two ways of accomplishing this: either he could always stay beside them, or he could not communicate with them. Miklós goes both ways. The couple we see communicate the most are Miklós and Hédi (they have five scenes together), and the couple we see communicating the least are Miklós and János (they have only one scene together). All the other pairs get into conflict with each other at some point. Hédi and Miklós are stable allies, informing each other about everything that happens with the others and manipulating them. On the other hand, Miklós avoids interfering with Hédi’s and János’s conflict. Anna is a secondary tenant, and as she is losing Hédi’s confidence, she recognises her interest in Hédi’s and János’s conflict. This is the reason why she becomes János’s fiancée in spite of the fact that János brutally raped her in the kitchen previously (the ‘Family Nest pattern’). Tibor is the catalyst of the story because he stirs up the relationships, but he cannot stabilise his own situation because, in the meantime, he makes all the wrong moves. He loses his protector’s confidence, but fails to gain his other possible protector’s (Hédi’s) confidence because he steals her golden bracelet and has sex with her new protégé’s girlfriend (Anna). This way, he helps the others gain their new and better status (Anna becoming János’s wife, i.e. a stronger secondary tenant status, and Miklós becoming Hédi’s personal confidante, i.e. a secondary tenant status), but propels himself out of this setup.
More than in any previous Tarr film, there is no problem to resolve for the characters. Although, obviously, each of the secondary and the tertiary tenants has some kind of housing problem, otherwise they would not be living there, this is not a topic of conversation between them. We suppose that if they wanted they could arrange their lives in other ways too. Staying here is only the simplest solution for them for the moment. But once they are there, their goal is merely to keep their status in the hierarchy by any possible means. Every kind of human contact is an instrument to this end, and they use the whole array of possible relations to reach their goals, from intimacy and sex to physical violence. There are no moral or physical taboos: betrayal, rape and physical aggression towards the elderly are as common here as tenderness, confidentiality and sincere confession. No manifestation of any human relationship can be trusted because all such manifestations are just weapons in the power game. More than in any previous Tarr films the amoral nature of human relations is laid bare in Almanac of Fall, as there are no exterior circumstances involved in the story to be blamed at least in part for the miserable lives of the characters. There are no financial or moral issues at stake, yet, instead of cooperation the characters without exception resort to ruse, aggression, manipulation and betrayal, by which they make it impossible for the others and for themselves to base their relationships on trust.
The ‘living hell’ topic in Almanac of Fall does not come in the form of a story of banal everydayness. This situation is not typical in any of its details, but what is more important, the narrative does not reveal the most basic everyday details about the characters, such as for example their profession, their history or their goals for the future. The previous Tarr films abounded in such details; in Almanac of Fall it seems as if the power game fills the characters’ entire lives. From this film on, the banality of everyday life will not be the medium of Tarr’s stories. Everything will be exceptional, and if all we can see in these films is cruelty, misery, suffering and human baseness, then all of these qualities will be exceptional in their extent too.
Topic 2: Being lost in one’s life (1)
The banality of everyday life was a medium for yet another topic in the first-period Tarr films: how someone can be totally lost in his or her life with no perspectives and no opportunities. In a way, all the other films touch upon this theme too, but the one in which this is the central topic is Tarr’s second film, The Outsider.
This is Tarr’s only single-protagonist story in the early period. The reason why this is relevant is that the film shows that multiple-protagonist or ensemble plays are more appropriate for Tarr’s themes and narrative methods in this period. A story that does not have a conflict, which would provide it with a goal-oriented trajectory, makes it very difficult to distinguish a single protagonist. The only exception is when the distinctive feature of the protagonist is that he or she does not have a goal, and doesn’t want to accomplish anything. This protagonist type was actually quite fashionable in 1960s and 1970s European art films and even in certain American films at the turn of these decades. This kind of protagonist was mostly associated with the general idea of alienation, loneliness and deficiencies of human relationships. Characters like Guido in Fellini’s 8½ (1962), Guiliana in Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), Joseph Block in Wim Wenders’ The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), Robert Lander in another Wenders film, Kings of the Road (1976), and Travis from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) are just a few of many aimless, depressed or alienated characters from this period who contributed to the formation of this art-film archetype. The character of András is an example of this archetype placed in a Hungarian small-town environment of the late 1970s.
Banality of story means in this case that the protagonist is not challenged in any important way, and he himself does not have any goals that would disrupt his environment either. Yet a series of important changes take place in his life which would normally perturb anybody else, but not him: he loses his job and his place to live, a woman gives birth to his child but he does not want to take care of it, he gets a new job and a new place to stay, his brother comes home after three years of absence, he meets a woman who he marries, and finally he is drafted into the army. Each one of these changes would be enough for a drama of deep psychological crisis. András just gets over them quickly with no emotional shock. Tarr’s procedure is the same as in Family Nest: if the character takes it easy the viewer has no other choice than to get over it as quickly as the character does, and to accept the event as unimportant. András’s reactions to these events make them, after all, irrelevant. Tarr’s challenge in this film was to show a series of otherwise important life events that happen to a character for whom none of them makes any difference. The film works only if the viewer sympathises with András and finds that none of these changes really represent opportunities for him. For the viewer who feels that András is just a lost alcoholic who is simply too weak to grab the opportunities that he is given in life, this film does not work. The danger of the single-protagonist structure within the framework of Tarr’s topics is that there is too much weight on the protagonist, who does not really control the narrative. Outside of melodrama, a multiple-protagonist structure is much less ambiguous with regard to stories that represent helplessness and inability to control one’s life, because individual personality traits are less exposed than the external factors. Multiple protagonists are caught in a web of constraining forces from the outset, and the viewer does not expect them to act entirely on their own. A single protagonist either strives to reach something or must have very good reasons not to do so. If those reasons are not unambiguously exposed in the film, the viewer can be easily lost in assessing the relevance of the given protagonist.
Accordingly, this is the only Tarr film of the early period where it looks as if the protagonist proceeds in some direction. However, András is not the driving force of these events; they only happen to him, and most do so without his active participation. All he does is back out of situations which would need his engagement. The only time he does not is when he marries Kata, giving some hope for a change, but very soon it turns out that this marriage will not influence his way of life. At the end, when she proposes to have children, which would engage András more in this marriage during his military service, he backs out again. As they leave, there is no doubt in the viewer’s mind that it will not be long before this relationship breaks up. After all, the apparent trajectory of the events brings András back to the point where he started: alone, poor, with a job which does not get him anywhere, and which provides him with just a basic living. This is where circular form appears implicitly within a static narrative. Whenever András is pushed by an ‘opportunity’, he soon falls back to his initial position.
This position is also embodied by a physical place which is the ultimate ‘attractor’ in András’s life, the place where everything and everybody converges: the pub. In all of Tarr’s films until Satantango, the pub is a key location, and alcoholism is a natural condition for the characters. Nowhere it this as true as in The Outsider. No less than seven scenes are located in a pub, and these scenes last 57 minutes altogether, almost exactly half of the film’s running time. Many times in pub scenes the protagonist is not András, but someone who talks to him, and who he is listening to. Characters so far unseen just pop up in the pub talking for a few minutes, only to then disappear again from the film. That is how the film ends too. András and Kata walk out of the restaurant-pub, but we do not follow them; rather, we stay in the pub watching a company of local politicians drinking and having fun for another eight and a half minutes. Their cultural level is not much higher than that of the rest of the characters in the film (and in the pubs), but they have a higher social status. Tarr suggests by this gesture that wherever we may go in this society we find the same routines, a little lower or a little higher maybe, but mentalities are not that different, only the sets and the financial background are.
Thus Tarr makes his principal point, which is that the lack of perspective of his characters is not due to the fact that they are unable to resolve their problems (which is also true), but because there is nothing in the larger social environment to provide them with goals. The reason why this seems to be Tarr’s most fundamental idea in his early films is that we can detect a clear tendency in the first three films to emphasise this idea by gradually purging any concrete social or moral factors that could be blamed for the characters’ misery, such as housing problems in Family Nest and alcoholism in The Outsider. In The Outsider there is already no identifiable concrete social conflict between the protagonist and his environment. However, his and other characters’ heavy alcoholism (one of them even dies from drugs and alcohol in the film) appears as a generalised ‘bad solution’ in the society that can be blamed. In The Prefab People nothing other than the general idea of a lack of perspective in life, which the characters cannot escape, is to be blamed for their unhappiness. And in Almanac of Fall the social environment disappears entirely.
But this is exactly why The Outsider is a step forward in Tarr’s career. It is no longer a network story in a precise social situation (as Family Nest is), but it is not yet a personal relationship drama with nuanced character depiction either (as The Prefab People and especially Almanac of Fall are). It was certainly The Outsider that convinced Tarr that for his particular approach he had to mix sophisticated character formation, which needs professional acting, with the reality effects needed for his particular topics. That is how he found the solution known already from the 1970s Cassavetes films: improvised acting and improvised dialogues delivered by professional actors rather than amateurs. This was a novelty in Hungarian cinema, and became Tarr’s method for his two subsequent films.
Banality of everyday life such as we can see in the early-period Tarr films is not the main characteristic of the second-period films. For one thing, psychological and social misery is so condensed in these films that this condensation alone makes the story worlds of these films exceptional. Secondly, due to the circular trajectories these stories are built upon, the narratives need events that are out of the ordinary, if not exceptional, whereas in the early period, where the static nature of the stories was more emphasised than their circularity, extraordinary events were unnecessary; on the contrary, as we have seen, even extraordinary events were represented as ordinary parts of everyday life.
Slowness of narration and suspense
This is one of the most spectacular qualities of the Tarr style, but it somewhat characterises Tarr’s early films too. Paradoxically, even though slowness of narration is not a quantifiable feature of narration, it is one of the least ambiguous non-quantifiable qualities. I seriously doubt that there is anyone in the world who would say about The Man from London that it is a film of a fast and sweeping tempo. It could be an interesting project for spectator research to determine why we find a narration slow or fast, but there is one sure thing: when we do, it is with surprising unanimity. Another, much more controversial, question is whether we find a slow narrative also boring. But in this book I will not judge Tarr’s films in this respect. I will try to account for the means by which Tarr (and other slow-tempo filmmakers for that matter) makes his films enjoyable for an audience that is willing and able to accept slow narration.
In music, tempo is quantifiable. It is marked by a number, which is called ‘beats per minute’ and which is given by the composer. In cinema the equivalent of ‘beats per minute’ could be ‘events per minute’, which would show how many events the viewer has to process in order to follow the narrative. The problem with this is that events are not distinct units, whereas a ‘beat’ could be given a very clear definition. Because spectators unanimously would describe a narrative tempo as slow or fast we can say that they have a common sense of what an event is, even though it would be hard to give it a general definition. As long as this is the case we do not need a better working definition than the one that says that we classify a narrative as slow when the events in it last much longer than the understanding of their narrative meaning would require for most audiences. The implication of this is that in a slow film there are fewer events than in a fast-paced movie. This definition is easy to use when a film shows a repetitive action like shaving or a simple movement like walking. Ambiguity begins to arise when a film represents a series of different actions, all of which are parts of a goal-oriented action. In this case we feel slowness if little actions are shown to take as long as they take in real time, regardless of the fact that we know what the character’s goal is. Usually, when we can guess the end result of a series of actions, detailed description of steps that are not decisive or are clearly redundant makes the narrative slow. Such slow narratives are also boring for most viewers, who prefer many spectacular actions, and who are not interested in watching everyday activities in movies. The question is how is it possible that this kind of slow narrative is not boring for everyone? And we are not talking about some idiosyncratic spectatorial mindset here, but about an audience for a widespread narrative form that has been around in art cinema at least since Italian neorealism of the 1940s.
There are basically four ways of slowing down a narrative. The first is showing monotonous movements for a long time. The second is showing insignificant or everyday details of a process. The third is representing extended periods of time between two events, called temps mort. And the fourth is repetition of the same event.
We find memorable moments of temps mort especially in Satantango, like the beginning of the first police station scene, when Irimiás and Petrina are sitting and waiting in the corridor of the police station. However, this method is relatively rare in the Tarr films. His characters are always busy doing something, however insignificant it may be. They very rarely just sit and wait, meditate or stare into nothingness (we find such scenes especially in Damnation and The Turin Horse).
By far the most frequent technique to slow down the narrative in the Tarr films is the following of an action sequence in all of its most insignificant details. This creates a sense of radical continuity, meaning that virtually no element of an action sequence is omitted through the continuous representation of the given action sequence. Satantango abounds with scenes of this kind. The most spectacular of them is the doctor’s episode, in the first part. This episode lasts exactly one hour. It recounts the doctor’s everyday activities, consisting mainly of reading, spying on the neighbours, taking notes of their activities and commenting on them, drinking and satisfying his biological needs. As he is very fat and ill, he does everything very slowly and with great effort. In the first part of the episode, which lasts 37 minutes, almost exactly half of the whole episode, we are in his house, and he barely moves. In the second part he leaves his house to buy alcohol, and meets different people. Each of his acts is followed by the camera in almost real time. For example, the first shot of the scene is a point-of-view shot of the doctor’s peeping through binoculars. It is a five-minute take, a real-time rendering of the doctor’s action. There are very few time compressions in the episode. Usually, when there is a cut, there is no jump forward in time, just a shift of camera angle. Even when the doctor dozes off, it is not certain that when in the next shot he is awoken by Mrs. Kraner his sleep lasts more than the time elapsed while we were watching him sleeping, which is almost a whole minute. When the camera changes angle the doctor is not in the picture, so we don’t see if he is still sleeping or awake when Mrs. Kraner enters the house. And a sound effect suggests that in fact we see the doctor’s sleep in real time: we hear the sound of the door opener during the last three seconds of the first shot, while we can see the doctor still sleeping, which means there is an exact time continuity between the two shots, and consequently there can be no time elapsed between them. The first real-time jump occurs after the doctor’s fall in his room. It is uncertain how much time this jump spans, but certainly not much action is omitted. The first shot ends with the doctor lying on the floor motionless, and the next starts with him crawling toward his bed, so the only phase that is missing from the continuous series of actions is when he starts moving and gets on all fours. The second time jump takes place shortly after this one, omitting the end of the last phase of his recovery, standing up from his bed and getting himself together. From an action sequence which lasts 37 minutes only two short phases are missing; the rest is rendered in real time.
The third technique of slowing down action is a variation of the previous one. It consists of following a single monotonous or repetitive movement over a long time. The second part of this episode consists almost entirely of this kind of representation of actions. There are various ways Tarr makes these scenes suspenseful or interesting to watch, even (sometimes) over several minutes. When such a movement series is clearly painful or uncomfortable, following it at length always involves some tension stemming from the expectation that at some point this movement will no longer be possible to carry on. This is how we follow the doctor walking in the mud in the heavy rain, almost slipping several times, while it is not clear where he is headed, and the viewer expects him to find some shelter, which he does after a couple of minutes. When he finally does, a five-minute long shot follows in which we see him in the hangar. Here the suspense is created by voices that can be heard at the beginning of the shot, and the doctor starting to look for the source of the voices. Suspense is increased in the second half of the shot when he climbs up the stairs and becomes aware of the two women sitting in the depths of the hangar. From this point on the camera does not follow him; rather we see him walking away from the camera for the last thirty seconds of the shot, clearly increasing the viewer’s curiosity.
The fourth technique of slowing down narration is repetition of the same action sequence. This technique is used mainly in Tarr’s last film, The Turin Horse. This consists of a series of repeated events. Each of these events is an insignificant routine everyday act, like getting dressed and getting undressed, making a fire, cooking potatoes, pulling up water from the well, and so on. The narrative is divided into six days, and each of these events is repeated several times. The overwhelming majority of the narrative events in the film belong to this repetitive series. For example, the events of the man changing clothes, the two characters eating potatoes, and one of them sitting in front of the window are repeated five times each. This unambiguously gives the impression to the viewer that the story does not move forward very much.
The dramaturgical key to making slow narration acceptable is suspense. If the narrative suggests that something important is about to happen any time, no matter how slowly it goes, no matter how insignificant the events taking place in it are, it will be able to hold the viewer’s attention. The classical example here is Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Even the most impatient viewers are willing to accept the slow development of the action when they are informed that something will happen soon. To this end it is very important that the story gives the impression that it is ‘going somewhere’, even if it does not. That is the case in Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), where the viewer finds out only at the very end that there will be no solution to the characters’ problem. Until then, however, most audiences are willing to sit through all the meanders of the story.
Likewise, the Tarr films started to become really slow at the same time the illusion of a linear development of the narrative became explicit in them. The best way of characterising the early period’s narrative strategy is to say that these films use a cumulative method. They expose a situation and they accumulate events and changes, which all contribute to the viewer’s understanding of this situation, but accumulating these events does not resolve the problems involved. These narratives can be characterised as static rather than circular, although circularity plays a role in each of them in one way or another. From Damnation, by contrast, narrative suspense becomes an important element, together with the single-protagonist structure and an explicitly circular narrative. These elements together provide the illusion to the viewer that at any moment things may take an important turn. Through the use of this structure Tarr slows down the narrative tempo as much as he possibly can.
All of these procedures are complemented by acoustic and visual elements in the films that raise suspense. Visual elements of suspense include almost exclusively the expressionist features of the composition. Strong black-and-white contrast always carries some degree of anxiety, especially if the dark part of the picture is big enough and suggestive of something hidden. Slow camera motion in such a composition always raises some expectation of something popping up from the dark. Tarr amplifies this expectation by the use of acoustic effects. For example, the opening scene of The Man from London is a slow vertical camera movement showing the front of a ship. The shot lasts 3 minutes and 20 seconds. In fact it contains two different camera movements. The first movement is an upward panning movement from a fixed vertical position (figures 41 & 42).
When this movement reaches a certain tilting angle, the camera starts to change its vertical position too. This way, moving from the bottom to the top takes twice as long as it would if it were only one type of movement of the same tempo. While we are going upwards, the black-and-white contrast between the two sides of the ship gradually becomes sharper, which amplifies the tension in the picture. The slow elevating movement in itself raises expectation (what are we going to see when we arrive at the top?), but when we arrive at the first peak point from the initial camera position it is clear that from this position we will not see anything of what is on the front deck of the ship. That is when the camera starts changing its vertical position and amplifying the expectation, because at this second position there is already a chance that something will be disclosed. The shot lasts until it is clear that nobody is on the captain’s deck or on the bridge (figure 43).
During the whole sequence we can hear continuous music of a dark tone that slightly changes its chords from dark to lighter and back again. The viewer’s expectation is satisfied only in the next shot, which starts the elevating movement all over again from a still higher position, which already represents a specific point of view. This time the vertical movement shifts into an in-depth movement, closing in on the two persons on the front deck of the ship (figure 44).
Figures 41 & 42
Figures 43 & 44
We can only guess what is happening between them, because we join them at the end of their conversation, but the suspenseful visual and acoustic introduction of the scene already tells us that something very bad will happen. The reason why it is absolutely justified to say that the visual and acoustic effects ‘tell’ us what will happen is that when we finally see the two men on the deck we realise that while the camera was ascending to the level of clear sight of the deck these two had already been there discussing something, which was hidden from us. So, in actual fact the ascending movement of the camera functions as an action preparing us for an exciting and tragic outcome. Instead of narrating the preparations for the outcome, Tarr gives us a dark and suspenseful atmosphere with the help of one of his revealing camera movements, amplifying the suspense effect through visual composition and acoustic arrangement. The image and the sound tell us what the narration hides.
This example clearly shows that slowing down the narrative has nothing to do with the strict duration of time. It has to do with the relative density of action during a given time span. A five-and-a-half-minute-long almost totally monotonous camera movement hides an action sequence that could easily last even twice as long; still the viewer would not feel it as slow as the camera movement that covers it. Whether or not it is boring is a question of spectator psychology, but there is absolutely no doubt about its being slow and suspenseful.
The other way of making these long following movements interesting is to invest them with some particular aesthetic quality through rhythm, composition or peculiar visual elements. One example is the scene in Satantango where Irimiás and Petrina are walking toward the police station, the camera following them from behind. Their monotonous walking is accompanied by a strong wind blowing a lot of garbage, especially papers, around them. This visual element is so particular that it keeps the viewer’s interest alive for more than two minutes while nothing else happens. Another example is the scene from Werckmeister Harmonies when Mr. Eszter and Valuska are walking in the street. In this case it is the particular rhythm of the sound of their steps and the rhythmic wavering movement of their bodies that create an aesthetic quality out of the monotonous movement.
Slowness of narration is clearly accentuated and radicalised in the second-period films, and it comes to represent a cornerstone of the Tarr style. It is one of the main ingredients of the circular structure, a structure producing the feeling that the return is inevitable.
Circular form
Circularity of dramatic form characterises stories in which characters go through a series of events but these events do not get them closer to the solution to their initial problem. Not only does this remain unresolved, but at the end they lose the perspective to resolve it that they may have had at the beginning. At the end of the film they find themselves in a situation that is the same as or worse than before. Circular dramatic form is traditionally based on the exploration of a given environment by the protagonist, looking for a solution. In Tarr’s case, this applies more to the films made after Almanac of Fall, and to The Outsider among the early films. In Family Nest and in The Prefab People the physical environment plays no particular role, and the human environment is very restricted. There are only a few characters in the stories, and everything remains in a confined physical and human environment. Still, in Almanac of Fall the same conception prevails, but the environment is already emphasised to a much greater degree than in any of his earlier films by the theatricalised sets.
As mentioned earlier, it is with The Prefab People that circular form becomes explicit or even self-conscious in Tarr’s films. By an ‘explicit’ circular form I mean a narrative which in one way or another emphasises a return to the same place. That is what we find, for example, at the end of Almanac of Fall, where in spite of the fights they have had with each other, we can see the four main characters together again celebrating, while the fifth character, Tibor, who arrived later in the story, is taken away by the police. Or in The Man from London, where at the end Maloin returns the money he found, thereby falling back into his miserable situation, from which he hoped the money would help him to get out. Self-conscious circularity may appear through some stylistic or narrative element that explicitly calls the viewer’s attention to this structure. The best example is the narrative frame of The Prefab People, in which we can see the same scene at the beginning and at the end of the film.
However, in The Prefab People as well as in Almanac of Fall circularity is rather a formal element and does not greatly inform the dramatic structure. And in Tarr’s first two films, circularity is not even a formal element; these narratives make a rather static impression. What we see in all of these films are different interactions between the characters, which disclose the nature of their relationships. No incident moves the protagonists toward a solution to their initial situation. What we have is rather an inner development of a psychic situation from which the characters cannot escape, which is why before Damnation the stories are mostly confined to a narrow space, in most cases an apartment. In a sense, they end up where they start, but in reality they don’t move forward too much; they rather sink deeper into their trap situation. The stories end when all the relevant aspects of some characters or of a given relationship are explored by slightly changing the situations and altering the characters’ interactions.
The thematic motif that appears in Damnation and that is missing from the early films is the one the circular structure is based upon, the illusion that there is hope for a big change. It is due to this story element that the linear development of the stories provides the illusion that it is developing in some direction. At the end, however, instead of leading to a solution the plot brings the characters downward, which makes the end result all the more disappointing: nothing is resolved and the chance or the only chance for them is gone. That is when they realise that everything was going the wrong way from the beginning. A passage at the beginning of Krasznahorkai’s Satantango that is repeated at the end of the novel explains clearly this idea:
… for by then he will have learned already that he got involved in a card game with swindlers where everything was settled in advance, and at the end of which he will be robbed of the only weapon that was left for him, the hope that one day he’ll find his way home.4
This thematic element is missing from the early Tarr films. Not that some of the characters do not have some hope that they can live a better life. These are not big ideals, however, just very concrete small steps toward some kind of improvement of their lives, and they characterise only two of the four early films. Irén hopes to be able to move out of her father-in-law’s apartment, and Judit hopes to get a job in Robi’s factory. But we know at the outset that this is not their main problem, and what their main problem is, they cannot see. The protagonists of The Outsider and Almanac of Fall do not have any big ideals to follow; they just want to continue their lives as they are. That is why these stories are static rather than circular, even though the idea of circularity appears around the end of this period.
From Damnation on, by contrast, the characters’ situation has real potential for change, sometimes radical change, but at the end, where the characters start out from and where they end up is not very different, or is different only in that it is worse. Most of the time the only thing that really happens during the story is that the only hope for the characters to escape their pathetic situation disappears. But, unlike the early works, these films have a linear plotline, which finally brings the characters back to where they started, but as the plot develops it seems to have the potential to change their situation for the better. And this linear plotline is what turns out to be a circle.
The more hope gets frustrated, the more explicit the circular structure, and this is why single-protagonist dramas are more frequent in the second period. Three of the four early films are ensemble plays centred on a group of characters, and even the one that has a single protagonist, The Outsider, locates most of its scenes within multi-character situations, which means that we almost never see the protagonist alone. From Damnation on, until The Man from London, single protagonists are more emphasised, certainly, due to the literary background of the stories, in which the exploration of the environment is based more on spatial elements, and involves many more characters, even crowds in some instances. The Turin Horse, however, returns to the early formula: an extremely confined space with an extremely low number of characters, and a radically repetitive story pattern given variation according to the permutation principle.
In the following section I will discuss the different manifestations of the circular structure in the individual films. As I have already dealt with this more or less in detail regarding the early films, and since circularity is more explicit and spectacular in the second-period films, this time the focus will be on this particular corpus.
Two recurrent thematic motifs which do not appear before Almanac of Fall can be identified in the second-period Tarr films: conspiracy and betrayal. The earliest appearance of this thematic motif is in Tarr’s work for television, Macbeth, made in the same year as The Prefab People. Even though this was a Shakespeare adaptation, the choice as to which Shakespeare piece to adapt was his own. This choice clearly shows Tarr’s interest in the themes of conspiracy and betrayal in the early period. This is another element that makes Macbeth a key film in the early period, foretokening the second-period stylistic system. Almanac of Fall makes a step in this direction, but Damnation was the film in which this new thematic orientation was the main determinant, and this remained the main determinant for the next three films.
Topic 3: Betrayal and conspiracy
Damnation
This is a story about a man named Karrer, who has nothing else to do in his life but to wait for the woman in his life, a local bar singer who is married. They live in an incredibly run-down small town that was once an industrial centre, but now everyone is poor and appears unemployed. Karrer tries to convince her of his love, but she rejects him violently. Although she supposedly doesn’t love her husband either, Karrer does not represent any improvement for her, and she wants to get rid of him for good. Karrer is given an opportunity to make some money by smuggling something from abroad for the owner of the pub where he is a regular. Instead of taking this opportunity, he recommends his lover’s husband for the job, knowing that this would remove the husband from the scene for two days. As in this way he actually also helps the husband ease his very delicate financial situation, Karrer hopes that the woman will show him some gratitude. And that is indeed what happens. The husband has no choice other than to take the opportunity, and the woman goes to bed with Karrer as ‘compensation’. But when the next day Karrer behaves as if this were the beginning of a relationship, the woman violently rejects him again, calling him a ‘dirty little snooper’. A little later, however, they make love again, but when Karrer sees the woman ‘compensating’ the bartender too for providing this opportunity for her husband, he understands that he will never really have this woman. He decides to go to the police and reports the bartender’s illegal trafficking business.
During the film, Karrer is told several times that he will end up in a bad way. Actually, all those who tell him this will end up in a bad way, but the story has no happy ending for Karrer either, of which he is entirely aware. This woman was the last thing of value in his life, however rude she was to him. After Karrer understands that he means nothing to her, he has nothing to lose, and brings down everyone around him, including the people who could possibly give him some hope in life. His trap is closed, and he was the one who closed it.
This story is not similar to any of Tarr’s narratives of the early period. It does not consist of scenes whose function is to reveal different aspects of a given situation which fundamentally remains the same from the beginning to the end. Damnation’s plotline has a linear development with a real chance for change. Karrer seems to be given an opportunity to escape his miserable existential and psychic condition. He goes after it, but expects everything from someone who despises him and does not want him. Right at the beginning of the story he is told several times to leave the woman alone, because she will only bring him down. Also, at the beginning there is a scene in the bar where the woman sings her extremely bleak song ‘Everything is Over’.5 This is also a sign for the viewer not to expect any positive outcome from the story. At every step Karrer or the viewer or both are alerted in one way or another by different signs that something bad will happen, yet the story progresses slowly in a monotonous way, as if following someone marching toward his inevitable downfall. Thus, the narrative discloses the possible negative outcome right at the outset, but makes the viewer believe that Karrer might escape his destiny, because he ignores those signs and pretends that there is some hope nevertheless. As he explains to his lover and to her husband when he offers them the job: ‘At the same time there might just be a way to arrest this inevitable ruin. Mainly with money and not by playing the hero. Needless to say, it doesn’t help the inevitability of this breakdown. It can merely cover over a crack for a moment.’
He tells them what he tells himself: the only hope they have is to push back the inevitable bad ending a little. His only hope is to slow down the process leading to his downfall, or, in other words, slowness is his only hope. We can see now how the only positive element of the story is intimately linked to slowness. Slowness postpones the tragedy, thereby making the characters and the viewer believe that there remains some hope. On the other hand, slowness together with suspense raises a presentiment of something inevitable to come. This is what I called earlier the most important aspect of Tarr’s narrative art: encouraging belief in an illusion without hiding the truth. Narrative circularity finishes the work of slowness: it is with the help of the circular structure that the viewer becomes conscious of this process. At the end, the viewer realises that everything was clear and uncovered right from the beginning, yet he or she fell for the same illusion as the characters and thought that something better could come out of all this.
After Karrer makes his deposition to the police, he finds himself in a situation that is more hopeless than his situation at the beginning. His act of destruction, aimed at harming the people who deceived him, has also become an act of self-destruction. He had one thing to lose at the beginning of the story – the hope that he could conquer this woman – and he lost exactly that. However, the viewer has a special perspective on all this. The first shot in the film shows Karrer sitting in front of the window, staring at the wire carriages that come and go in front of his house. As the carriages go back and forth endlessly on the same track, the image already suggests that there is something immutable and eternal in this world which makes any progression or change illusory. For Karrer this is his natural environment; for the viewer by contrast, this is a statement about this environment. It is with that statement in our minds that we follow Karrer making an attempt to change his life. The fact that he fails is shown only by another image of circular movement. As he returns from the police station in the rain, a gutter-dog attacks him, and he starts barking at the dog, squatting down and moving around the dog (figure 45).
Figure 45
This scene, with the ruins of a collapsed building behind Karrer and his lowering himself to the level of a dog, represents the situation his story ends up in.
The film’s story does not fit into the earlier Tarr films’ thematic pattern. No exterior circumstances are indicated as constraining the characters (as in Family Nest). No particular personal relationships are exposed in detail which are to be blamed for the character’s final situation (as in all the early films). This situation is not socially typical in any way (as in the films up to The Prefab People). It is as if the forces that motivate the characters’ acts were exterior to them, like the forces of nature, which equally constrain nature, society and individuals. One cannot evoke society, history, morality or psychology to explain why things happen, just the way they happen. Causes and effects go round and round and everything is part of the same web of circumstances that makes it impossible for anyone to step outside of this infernal circularity. This conspiracy-like structure is what evokes the universality of this human condition, which is not specifically moral, social, historical or psychological. It is not geographically located either. It is also natural (no consolation in natural beauty), meteorological (constant rain and mud) and physical (run-down environment): universal, in one word. The character of the checkroom attendant lady is the representative of this apocalyptic vision in the film. She alerts Karrer several times through biblical citations to his inevitable perdition. Karrer listens to her carefully each time, but he cannot help proceeding his own way. Forces of nature that are the same inside and outside tell him to.
The story’s recurrent thematic element is betrayal. Everybody betrays everybody else in this story. The singer cheats on her husband, but betrays her lover too by having sex with the bartender. The husband betrays the bartender by stealing from the package he had to smuggle into the country; in turn, the bartender has sex with his wife. And Karrer betrays every one of them by reporting their business to the police. In this respect Damnation is a variation of Almanac of Fall, but also an important step forward. The main difference is that in the previous film the characters betray one another in order to stabilise their position. In Damnation the characters are treasonous because they want to get out of their current position, which is too stable, seemingly eternal and unchangeable. This difference shows better than anything what the element of hope means with respect to how Tarr’s films change after Almanac of Fall. From now on the characters have an idealistic perspective that, in their imagination, leads them way beyond their current social and existential conditions. As the singer says to Karrer: ‘I will be applauded by audiences of big cities…’ And it is this ideal that turns out to be the greatest delusion of all. Satantango is the most perfect manifestation of this idea.
This is the second-period film where the theme of conspiracy is developed and exposed fully. This is also the film in which circularity is the most fundamental structural element at different levels of the narrative. Krasznahorkai’s original novel already contains this element in a spectacular way. It is safe to say that one of the most important reasons why Tarr found the manuscript of Satantango inspiring was the explicit and all-embracing concept of circularity, which became increasingly important at just the same time in his own films too.
The novel consists of two parts, each part consisting of six chapters. The numbering of the chapters goes from chapter I through chapter VI in part 1, and it goes back from chapter VI through chapter I in part 2. The title of chapter I of part 2 (i.e. the last chapter of the novel) is ‘The Circle Closes’. Moreover, the first two and a half pages of the novel are word for word the same as the last two and a half pages. And the novel ends in the middle of a sentence, suggesting that the whole story starts over again in exactly the same way. Circularity for Krasznahorkai, just like for Tarr, does not appear in a static closed form, but rather in the form of an eternal return of the same situation, always flashing the possibility of a change and always falling back to the same misery. In a particular way, the same idea is expressed in The Prefab People, where the film emphasises not only the return but also an endless continuum. The closing of the circle does not mean a singular occasion of one particular story, but rather an eternal continuous movement starting all over again. Krasznahorkai’s and Tarr’s stories are not tales of people or life conditions with problems that can be solved, thereby changing those people and their life conditions; they are about unchangeable situations which do not go away but just return in another form.
Satantango’s narrative structure is the most complicated of all Tarr’s films. In fact this is the only non-linear narrative, where the events are not represented entirely in chronological order. Especially in the first two-thirds of the film, parallel plotlines are narrated one after the other, so that the narration always goes back to the same point in time, which means Satantango’s narration consist of several cycles. In some instances events are recounted twice from different points of view, and in one instance the narration goes back to the same point three times through different plotlines. This is the event when the villagers gather in the pub, dance and get drunk. The narration arrives at this moment from the doctor’s plotline and from Estike’s trajectory, and it is recounted directly from the villager’s point of view too.
Some viewers may feel this narrative structure to be ‘chaotic’. Whether Satantango’s world is chaotic or not is a matter of subjective feeling. What is certain, however, is that the narrative structure of the film, which is very complex and non-linear in the beginning, gradually straightens out and becomes entirely linear at the end. From the point where the villagers start an argument in the manor, the narration proceeds in a strict chronology, with no more time loops and repetitions. Although the time relationship between two of the last three episodes – the villagers being separated at the train station and the clerks editing Irimiás’s report on the villagers – is not specified, there are no events contradicting the suggestion that they are represented in their real chronological order, since the episode featuring the clerks at the police station takes place in the evening, while the episode featuring the villagers and the doctor takes place during the day. The last chapter, ‘The Circle Closes’, is definitely the last event series in the story’s chronology too. So, while the first part of the film abounds in time loops and repetitions, the second part becomes increasingly simple, and in the last 94 minutes of the film what we find is a linear and chronological narration. The image I would use to describe Satantango’s narrative structure is that of a whirlpool. It starts as a wide and slow stream that goes round and round, as if there is no progression in it, and we return several times to the same point from different angles; later the streams become narrower, and there are fewer returns: we return only once to Irimiás’s farewell speech; and at the end the parallel streams are all moving in the same direction: there is no return, just a strong ‘suction’, which pulls everything downward.
What is unusual in Satantango’s narration is not the existence of parallel plotlines, but the fact that they follow each other in such a way that the viewer is surprised at the discovery of their simultaneity. This effect is created as the result of several factors. One is the extreme length of the individual linear episodes. In Satantango the shortest linear episode is thirteen minutes long, and the rest range between twenty-five and sixty minutes in length. Another factor is the extreme slowness created through the radical continuity in the representation of the events. Radical continuity implies absolute linearity, and if such a scene goes on for more than thirty minutes the viewer is likely to forget about anything that is happening in the meantime. A third factor is that the fact that the events in the different episodes overlap is revealed only at the end of each episode. This way the viewer loses the sense of simultaneity of the episodes. Yet another factor is that the exact timeframe of the overlaps is sometimes very difficult to reconstruct, and sometimes it is clearly impossible.
The chronology of the story:
One morning, Irimiás and Petrina go to the police station, where they have a meeting with the captain. At the same time in the village Estike goes out with his brother, Sanyi, to bury some money in the ground to make it grow into a money tree. Both events take place during the daytime when the rain is not falling. Later Irimiás and Petrina drink in the pub in town, where Kelemen sees them. Halics visits Estike’s mother. Estike tortures and finally kills her cat in the attic of their house. In the meantime a heavy rain starts. Halics leaves their house, and Estike finds out that the money has disappeared; someone has stolen it. Kelemen returns to the village, enters the pub, and reports to the bartender on his meeting with Irimiás and Petrina in town and on the road to the village. Halics is already in the pub.
It is around that time that Futaki wakes up in Mrs. Schmidt’s bed, but they are surprised by Schmidt’s unexpected early return. Futaki has a hard time sneaking out of the house, but he returns later as if he has just arrived. At the same time the doctor watches the whole scene (Schmidt returning, Futaki sneaking out and hiding before returning to Schmidt’s house). Halics crosses the space, probably going home from the pub to relate the news about Irimiás’s return to his wife. Futaki and Schmidt start an argument over the distribution of the money the villagers earned and that Schmidt and Kráner want to steal, but Mrs. Halics arrives with the news that Irimiás and Petrina are approaching on the road, and maybe they have already arrived at the pub. Mrs. Schmidt leaves for the pub to check out what has happened; Schmidt and Futaki follow her later.
The doctor spends almost the whole day in front of the window in his chair, taking notes and drinking. At some point in the day, around noon probably, Mrs. Kráner visits him, announcing that from now on she will no longer bring him lunch. The doctor throws her out. Realising that he has run out of brandy, he puts on his coat and leaves the house to buy alcohol. He walks in the heavy rain, and enters a hangar where he meets two prostitutes. In the meantime the villagers arrive at the pub to be there when Irimiás and Petrina arrive. First, they distribute the money Schmidt and Kráner originally wanted to steal in the morning, then they start to drink heavily. That is when Estike’s mother arrives and tells the bartender that she cannot find her daughter. She also drinks, and then leaves the pub. It is already dark outside. The villagers start dancing, and that is when the doctor arrives in front of the pub. There he meets Estike, who peeps inside the pub through the window. She carries a dead cat in her arms, yells at the doctor, and then runs away. In the background we see Irimiás, Petrina and Sanyi arriving. The doctor tries to run after her, but very soon he gets out of breath, and finally he collapses, and is unable to get up again. He remains there lying on the ground until the next morning, when Kelemen finds him, and loads him on his cart.
The time that elapses from this evening until the next morning is missing from the narrative. This is when Irimiás and Petrina meet the villagers in the pub, and we don’t know where Estike spent the night. We meet her again, still walking with the dead cat under her arm, and soon after that she poisons herself. There is another jump in time: we don’t see when and how Estike’s body is found and carried to the pub. The next plot event is when the villagers gather around Estike’s dead body, and Irimiás makes a speech. The result of the speech is that everybody hands over his or her share of the money to Irimiás, who promises them he will immediately start the project which will help them get out of the village and start a new life. He tells them to pack up everything and move immediately to a neighbouring manor, which will be their new home where they will start their new business together. Estike’s coffin is loaded on the bartender’s car, and the villagers go home and pack up. They hit the road while Irimiás and Petrina go back into town. Petrina tries to convince Irimiás to flee with the money rather than continue to play games with the villagers. But Irimiás knows that this story can’t finish that way; the villagers should not discover immediately that they have been duped. The villagers arrive at the abandoned manor, which is a huge, entirely empty estate with no doors or windows and no furniture in it. They spend the night there. In the meantime Irimiás and Petrina arrive in the town in Steigerwald’s pub. They spend the night there. Irimiás has Payer come to see him, and wants to buy explosives from him. The next morning the villagers have a fight, because Irimiás didn’t show up at the time agreed. Some of them are convinced that Irimiás has deceived and abandoned them. Shortly afterwards Irimiás and Petrina arrive, and announce that they have to postpone the realisation of the project, and for the time being the villagers have to be separated and dispersed in the region before they can gather again to start the project. They are driven to a railway station, and each of them is assigned a place to go to stay. At the police station two clerks edit Irimiás’s report on the villagers. The doctor returns from hospital after three weeks, sits at his desk writing his notes, and leaves the house as he can hear bells ringing. He walks to the lonely chapel, where a madman rings the bell. He goes home and boards up the window.
The structure of the narrative:
The film does not replicate the explicit circular structure in the numbering of the novel’s chapters, even though the film also consists of twelve chapters and the titles of the episodes are the same, and they are in the same order as in the book. Structurally, one can discern the two-part division in the film too. The narrative structure of the first set of six chapters is considerably different from that of the second set of six chapters. The narrative is woven of different parallel plotlines all through the film, but the individual chapters are completely linear, with some jumps forward in time. In the first part, however, the order of the episodes does not follow the chronology of the story, and they contain considerable jumps back in time, or time loops, as well as repetitions of plot events represented from different perspectives. Moreover, all of the episodes of the first half take place in the same timeframe describing the events of one whole day, from the point where Irimiás and Petrina go to the police station on the one hand to where Estike and Sanyi hide the money on the other, and to the point where Estike commits suicide on the one hand and Kelemen finds the doctor on the other. But only chapter 5 (C5), telling Estike’s story, covers the whole timeframe. The rest of the chapters from the first set cover only time fragments of this timeframe and consequently are contained in the timeframe of this one. From this point of view C5 is the ‘master story’ of the first part of the film, and all the other stories are just fragments converging on the ending of this one: Estike’s suicide.
In the second half, by contrast, there is no ‘master story’ covering the whole time-frame, and the episodes follow one another in a chronological order, except C9, which jumps back in time to the beginning of C8. But this is the only jump back in the second part. Other than that, C8 picks up where C7 finishes, and C10 where C9 ends. The order of C10, C11 is not specified, but as stated earlier, there is nothing that would contradict the suggestion that they are represented in their chronological order, and this is also what logically fits in the structure of the second half of the film, while C12 is also the last chronological event series of the story. After C6 the narrative becomes considerably less complicated than before, and after C9 it becomes absolutely linear. The narrative’s process is one of a gradual simplification. It starts as several parallel streams in a rather mosaic-like structure, and these streams are gradually canalised into one single stream, ending up in a simple gesture of closing down everything: the doctor’s act of boarding up the window, making everything dark.
The different chapters in part one are organised such that from the end of each one the narration jumps back to an earlier point in time. Futaki’s and Schmidt’s story of C1 starts sometime before noon, and goes on till late afternoon; C2 jumps back to early morning and runs till late at night; C3 jumps back to sometime before noon, just where C1 started, and runs till early next morning; C4 jumps back again to around the time when C1 and C3 started and runs till early afternoon; C5 jumps back to early morning and runs till early next morning (this is the only one that covers the entire twenty-four hours); C6 jumps back to late afternoon and runs till late at night. The only pattern in this arrangement is the constant jump back in time at the beginning of each chapter. This is how the narration creates an opportunity to see some events more than once. These events include Futaki’s sneaking out of the house, which we see twice, and Halics’s crossing the doctor’s yard, which we also see twice. One of the functions of these repetitions is to help the viewer locate the given episode in time in relation to other episodes. Another function is to gradually reveal the integrity of the repeated events. For example, we see Futaki sneaking out of Schmidt’s house, but that is all we see in this chapter. We learn how he did it from another chapter, where we see him from the doctor’s point of view. The same goes for the dance episode. We can see in the doctor’s episode that Estike is looking inside the pub through the window, but we don’t know what she sees. That is the first appearance of the dance scene, but we can hear only the music, and we do not have any information about what is happening. In the return of this scene we have Estike’s point of view and see the villagers’ drunken and reckless revelry. And the third time, we see her looking inside through the window, which shows that her face was visible from the inside, so someone could have seen that she was there. The repetitions have yet another function, which is most important in the dance scene, because this is the only scene where the narration returns as many as three times. That is where three of the four thus far independent plotlines converge. And the reason is that this is the last point where Estike could have been saved. If anybody from the drunken company saw her peeping inside the pub, or if the doctor didn’t push her away, or if afterwards he were able to stop her, things would probably have turned out differently.
Estike’s death has a very particular place in the narrative system of the film. It has no direct motivational relationship with any other event. As shocking as it is, this event is not what the story is about. In conventional dramaturgical constructions, deaths, especially children’s deaths, are triggers of dramas or ultimate motivations for solutions to dramas. In this case such a horrible event – the suicide of a mentally retarded child who nobody, including her alcoholic mother, took care of – remains marginal relative to the main plotline’s constructional logic. The only real tragedy that occurs in the film is not at the dramaturgical centre of the story, and it does not even change the course of the events. In Irimiás’s speech, in which he so eloquently characterises the villagers’ moral responsibility in the tragedy, Estike’s death is only a good opportunity for him to humiliate and disarm the villagers with his rhetoric, appealing to the remnants of their human feelings in order to con them out of their money. The fact that Estike’s death does not change anything in the story is a statement in itself, but what is an even more explicit statement is that it is utilised by Irimiás for his most sordid purposes. The only dramaturgical function of Estike’s death is to make it easy for Irimiás to deceive the villagers again. However, the narration makes Estike’s plotline stand out in an indirect way, and makes it the structural gravitation point of this part of the film. One thing to note here is that this story is made the ‘master story’, as mentioned before, owing to the fact that this is the one that covers all of the narrative time that elapses in the first part, in relation to which the other plotlines cover only time fragments. The other thing to note is that all other plotlines converge at the last point where Estike could have been taken care of. This is a very particular narrative procedure. A story that covers the entirety of the narrative time and at which other plotlines converge remains nevertheless a marginal event with respect to the causal structure of other narrative events. This way the narration creates a dramaturgical ambiguity: an event which is not taken into account in other narrative events is, nevertheless, given priority by the narrative structure, as if the narration were structurally compensating for the diminished significance of this plotline, missing from the causal logic of the story. Or, to put it in other terms, if Estike’s death has little importance for everyone in the story, it is still given the greatest symbolic importance in the narration of the film.
This is also the reason why the narration becomes considerably simplified after this event. Irimiás’s return, his ‘miraculous resurrection’, coincides with Estike’s death. While Irimiás is the ultimate evil, the unscrupulous conman, in this story, Estike is the ultimate innocent: humiliated, abused and ignored to a point where death becomes more appealing to her than survival. The resurrection of the figure of evil is accompanied by the disappearance of the innocent. But this is not a direct causal relationship. Estike’s death is not caused by Irimiás’s return; it is accompanied by it. But this coincidence is not a random event either. It is like a natural order of the things in this world, whereby a certain moral balance does not allow both elements to exist at the same time. In a peculiar way, Irimiás refers to this in his speech when he says, ‘Don’t forget the child who may have to perish to make our star rise.’ Other than being an extremely cynical statement, appropriating Estike’s death for the sake of an ideological manipulation, this sentence also alludes to the fact that this is a very good opportunity for Irimiás to gather again the villagers, by referring this time to their guilty feelings. Estike’s death does not contribute to Irimiás’s plan, but it makes it simpler for him to manipulate the villagers emotionally. This is why the narrative structure becomes considerably simpler once she is out of the story. Without Estike, the villagers’ downfall is irrevocable.
The narrative circle – the order is restored:
The most conspicuous tool with which the novel achieves the circular form is the repetition of the first two and a half pages at the end in a way that gives the impression that the novel itself is nothing else but a quote from the doctor’s diary. This device is preserved in the film, but the effect it has is not quite the same as in the novel. For one thing, the film, unlike the novel, does not start with this text. In the film there is a long prologue before the story starts. For another, it is very unlikely that viewers will remember after more than seven hours just what the exact text was somewhere at the beginning of the film (whereas in the case of the novel it is just a matter of comparing the first and the last pages). For yet another thing, and most importantly, in the novel the repeated text is introduced as the text the doctor is beginning to write just at this moment. This is what gives the impression that the reader is starting to read the novel all over again. In the film, in both cases the text is recited by an off-screen voice while the screen is black (the same question, whether or not the viewer would remember that the two voices are different, can be raised in this regard too). We do not see the doctor writing the text, which would be impossible anyway, since he made his room completely dark. Therefore the viewer cannot have the impression that the narration starts over again as written by the doctor. Rather than creating the feeling of the narration’s return to the beginning of the story, this repetition creates the impression in the film that the doctor has remembered and is reciting the beginning of this story before everything comes to an end.
Clearly, the signs of circularity in the film’s narration are much less explicit than in the novel, and technically speaking, the narrative does not return to its starting point. With the villagers leaving the settlement, this story is over at this particular location. This is what is emphasised by the doctor’s act of boarding up the windows. This signals the end of the story as well as the end of the film, whereas in the novel only the book ends in the end; the narration seems to continue forever. The film’s narration also lacks the self-referentiality of the novel’s ending (which returns as a text written by one of the novel’s protagonists), which enhances the reality effect a film text usually has as compared to a literary text. Seen from this angle, the weakening of the formal features of the circular structure fits better into the series in the Tarr film, because it reduces the literariness and increases the reality effect of the story. The idea of circularity is transposed onto another level in the film, much like in the earlier Tarr films. The narrative is not circular in the strict sense, only in the sense that the main characters find themselves in the same position they were in at the beginning, or in a worse position; and the apparent progression of the story turns out to be a return to a trap from which there is no more hope of escape.
The main idea behind Tarr’s kind of circular form is a process of the disintegration and the restoration of some kind of ordinary life-world. This is the same idea that we find at the beginning of Tarr’s career, only there this process is represented as rather static. Family Nest and The Outsider depict a life situation that does not change, only gets more hopeless. In The Prefab People and in Almanac of Fall the process becomes circular in the strict sense of the term, which means that the story returns to its starting point. From Damnation on the stories become structurally linear, with a clear plot development. The starting and ending situations are not the same, and the trajectory of the protagonists brings them to an end-situation from which there is no way out. These stories are all about the vanishing of the last hope. The difference between the starting and ending situations is that the latter’s structure seems to be more merciless than the former’s. In the beginning, the protagonist’s effort is always directed at dismantling some kind of order that keeps them trapped in a given position. In most stories (The Turin Horse is the exception) this process necessarily involves destructive or illegal moves, because the characters are in such a low position that it seems impossible that regular or legal actions could ameliorate their situation. In Damnation illegal trafficking and adultery; in Satantango embezzlement of the community fund and imposture; in Werckmeister Harmonies retuning the piano and destroying the town; in The Man from London appropriation of the stolen and smuggled money – these are the moves that hold the promise of changing the ruling order. In all cases the ‘order’ proves to be stronger, and the protagonists wind up in the same or a similarly bad situation, and without any hope of improvement. Paradoxically, the ‘only hope’ for them is a specific unlawfulness, the breaking of the laws and rules, which in itself is a guarantee of their failure, because, given their social and economic position, they are so much weaker than the ruling order. They are doomed to fail right from the outset, because they start the change in the wrong way, by trying to dismantle the order which makes them prisoners of their situation, and against which they cannot win. As stated earlier, Tarr’s main narrative procedure in the second-period films is to drag the viewer into the same illusion the protagonists fall for. The films make the viewer believe that things can change even though the initial steps (cheating or stealing) are dangerous. The viewer somehow knows that nothing good will come out of this, but she is ready to follow the story because of the empathy the protagonists’ situation invites. So, after all, it is the viewer who finds herself in the same situation at the end as the one she was in at the beginning, even though the protagonists’ situations may change. The viewer’s assessment of the protagonists’ situation is emotionally established in the beginning, it is then questioned, and in the end it is restored. But in the meantime the viewer goes through the same hoping for a better life as do the protagonists, although she knows right at the outset that this hope is unfounded.
This form of circular structure is more complex than what we find in the early Tarr films. It is no longer the case that the protagonists follow a simple circular trajectory; rather they gradually come to understand a complex situation from which there is no escape. What is understood is that what seems to be hopeless in the beginning is also hopeless in the end. This understanding is made possible through a systematic and slow disclosure of the web of relations constituting the structure of an unchangeable situation. We come to understand that in fact everything is what it seemed in the beginning. It is not a strong power (natural, social or political) against which the characters are helpless. It is an indefinable ‘order’ of things and human relations which is impossible to go against. This web-like structure is quite explicit in Satantango. The idea is explicitly referred to in two chapter titles – ‘The Spider’s Work 1’ and ‘The Spider’s Work 2’. Also, at the end of ‘The Spider’s Work 2’ a spider appears in close-up as it makes threads connecting a bottle and a glass on the table. This is how the narrator’s text comments upon this:
And to the tender sound of an accordion the spiders in the pub launched their last attack. They sewed loose webs on top of the glasses, the cups, the ashtrays, around the legs of the tables and the chairs. Then they bound them together with secret threads so that in their hidden corners they notice every little move and every little stir until this almost invisible web is not damaged. They sewed a web on the sleepers’ faces, their feet, their hands. Then hurried back to their hiding place, waiting for an ethereal thread to move to start it all again.
The spider’s web metaphor brings several things to mind here. Firstly, the unmovable, unchangeable nature of this world, which remains the same in spite of the fact that many things happen. Secondly, the fact that even if the villagers finally leave the settlement, an invisible web will keep them in their places, wherever they might go. Thirdly, the invisible nature of a structure that is under unnoticeable surveillance and that reacts immediately when something in this structure moves and makes sure that what tries to move remains a captive of the web. Fourthly, the fact that the web restores itself immediately after it is disturbed; it is flexible and reactive, so in whatever way the characters’ positions may change, the web will be swiftly extended to these new positions.
But this is only the metaphorical level of such an idea in the film; the idea of the hidden web appears also on a very concrete level, in Irimiás’s plan to separate the villagers to destroy their own network and create a new one which is invisibly connected to another secret network, that of the police. The villagers ignore the fact that they are treated as parts of a police informer’s network, which makes it impossible for them to escape, since they are now on the files of the police. While in the beginning they were only prisoners of their economic and social situation, now they become prisoners of a vast web or network that will never let them go. This is what gives the idea of circularity a more general meaning. Poverty and social depravation or even moral corruption are not sufficient and strong enough to make it impossible for the protagonists to escape. But if all the ways ahead of them are interconnected and none of them leads out of the web, however hard they try, they will remain captives of the system. The villagers may go as far as they can from their original starting point, but they are still part of Irimiás’s conspiracy, which means the police’s conspiracy.
Werckmeister Harmonies: ‘The conspiracy of the details’
This film occupies a very special place in Tarr’s career. This is his only film with a story that crosses the borderline between the level of personal relationships and that of social or political relations. To be sure, this level is as unspecific as in other second-period films, having no concrete historical or geographical coordinates. Nonetheless, in no other Tarr film is there any reference to political and military power or to social unrest.
Werckmeister Harmonies is special in yet another respect. No other Tarr film has a protagonist represented in such a way as to engender unequivocal empathy. In The Outsider, the only single-protagonist film in the early period, András may have the viewer’s sympathy, but it is very difficult to imagine ourselves in his place, simply because his character’s main features are a serious undecidedness and a lack of engagement and of precise goals. Other first-period Tarr films are multiple-protagonist structures with characters lacking the potential to engender sympathy or empathy. The same can be said with regard to Damnation and Satantango. Werckmeister Harmonies is the only film which focuses not only on a single protagonist but on a protagonist who does not have any traits that would make him repulsive, ridiculous, frightening or despicable.
The script of Werckmeister Harmonies was based on the second part of Krasznahorkai’s second novel, The Melancholy of Resistance (Az ellenállás melankóliája), published in 1989. It is very difficult not to remark upon the novel’s date of publication: the year of the overturn of the communist regime in Hungary, and in other Eastern European countries. This series of events is generally referred to in a broad way as ‘the fall of the Berlin Wall’, the first milestone of which was the creation of the first non-communistled government in Poland on 24 August 1989. In Hungary the official day of the turn was the proclamation of the Hungarian Republic on 23 October, which declared political discontinuity with the hitherto existing legal entity of the Hungarian People’s Republic, established in 1949. The opening of the Berlin Wall by the East German authorities was announced two weeks later, on 9 November. In Czechoslovakia, mass demonstrations demanding the resignation of the communist regime started on 17 November. In Romania a series of demonstrations started on 16 December, followed by violent fights and bloodshed resulting in the execution of the Romanian communist leader and his wife. Although large-scale economic reforms and radical changes in foreign policy began in the Soviet Union in 1985, which led to the rise of grassroots political movements in Hungary and Poland around 1987, nobody foresaw even in the spring of 1989 that this process would lead so quickly to the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In this period, the prevalent general feeling in these countries was a sense of the slow disintegration of a world which had been non-viable for too long, yet had seemed never-ending. So, the process of erosion also seemed endless, and no one had any idea about the aftermath. In Hungary, at least, a potential spontaneous popular unrest was considered by all parties as dangerous rather than as desirable, mainly due to the tragic experiences of past revolts against communist regimes in 1956 in Hungary, in 1961 in East Germany, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and in 1981 in Poland. Thirty-three years of experience confirmed that on each of these occasions the communist regimes’ reactions were violent, and the result was destruction and the establishment of an even more cruel order of repression. Accordingly, the wish to overturn the communist regime by force was viewed as purely destructive rather than heroic and revolutionary, and so the slow erosion of an authoritarian, corrupt, cynical and unproductive social and political system seemed to be the future for generations to come.
This is the political sentiment expressed in Krasznahorkai’s novel, without specification of any historical or political details. It depicts the irrational and destructive rage of a mob fuelled by a shady and irrational ideology, with no identifiable social or political goals. This is why Krasznahorkai’s novel is not political in the sense that it could be linked directly to the concrete historical events of the period in which it was written. It contains only a remote reflection of this period, representing a situation in which the frustration of the people is not articulated in political terms, only by excessive emotional response. It is not directed against some form of order, but against order as such. As is clearly stated in the ‘Prince’s’ discourse:
Whatever they build and will build … whatever they do and will do, is disappointment and a lie. Whatever they think and will think makes one laugh. They think because they are afraid. And he who is afraid, knows nothing. He wants, says he, everything to become a ruin. Ruins contain every construction, thus disappointment and lies are like air in the ice, that is what it is like. Everything is contained only in half in construction; in ruins, everything becomes a whole.6
The ‘Prince’s’ ideology is focused on the common recurring and most frightful element of every social unrest or revolution, the desire for destruction as a self-contained goal. Political ideologies appropriate this desire and utilise it to their own ends, whether or not the destruction is justified. This is what is symbolised by the whale, the biggest attraction of the circus. To show something really ‘big’ can be enough to gather people around it; and if their dissatisfaction is great enough they will follow whatever ideology is presented to them. And herein lies a paradox contained in the novel: the emotional response is justified, as the political order is represented as repressive and corrupt, as shown in the third part of the novel. A justified emotional frustration ignites a justified movement, which is in turn unjustified by its sole rationale, which is mere destruction. Therefore restoration of the order is desirable, but what will be restored is the same repressive order, which must be overturned again, and the circle is closed. The order is unnatural and repressive, but overturning it causes death and destruction and will bring back the same unnatural and repressive order.
More explicitly than Satantango, this novel ends with the restoration of ‘the order’ as an even more oppressive system of powers from which there is no escape. The whole circular logic appears as unavoidable and as a process of nature. The forces of order appear as the forces of nature. Already in Satantango there are many allusions to large-scale natural processes like the geographical history of the Great Plain region in the notes of the doctor’s diary. In The Melancholy of Resistance the parallel between the forces of nature and the forces of society is even more explicit, inasmuch as the last chapter of the book ends with a detailed description of the chemical process that takes place during the disintegration of a dead body. Krasznahorkai describes these processes as a battle the aim of which is to destroy the biological structure of a living being, and he makes it seem like the continuation of the preceding violent events on the social scale. The description makes disintegration appear as the inevitable final goal of everything in the world of the living, which includes human relations as well as society. Disintegration is hidden in the smallest particles of the organism on the small scale and of the social organisation on the large scale. The relationships of the details have their own natural order that cannot be overruled and that makes things proceed in their own way rather than in the way we want them to. This is what Krasznahorkai calls in the book ‘the conspiracy of the details’: an artificial structure, like a social order, cannot help but succumb to this conspiracy. Artificial and social orders are unnatural and oppressive; natural order, on the other hand, is impersonal and destructive. The same conception can be found in this novel as in Satantango: social order is a conspiracy, abusing human desire, feeding it with deceptive ideologies the only goal of which is to maintain the existing oppressive hierarchy. The only power that is greater than this is the unstoppable natural process of disintegration, the result of which is decay as well, and thus the circle closes.
The same paradox is represented on the most sophisticated and abstract level in Mr. Eszter’s attempt to return to the musical order of nature by retuning his piano to a world of harmonies that is different from the artificial one European music has been using over the past three hundred years or more. He claims that our whole musical universe is built upon forgery, because it gave up the pure and heavenly harmony of the Pythagorean musical system. However, with this tuning according to clear intervals, the musical art of the past is destroyed, and becomes unbearable to listen to. So, finally, Mr. Eszter can’t help but restore the ‘unnatural’, artificial order of musical harmonies introduced by Andreas Werckmeister in the seventeenth century. He appears in the novel as someone who destroyed the clear intervals of the tones for the sake of an all-embracing equalised system: ‘Werckmeister divided … the universe of the twelve half-tones to twelve equal parts, so that – to the understandable satisfaction of the composers, and after the quickly evaporating resistance of the uncertain desire for the absolutely clear intervals – the situation has become sealed.’7 Thus, the paradox of the repressive order versus the destructive resistance doomed to failure is represented both on the most brutal and physical level and on the ethereal spiritual level. The novel’s title, The Melancholy of Resistance, refers to the state of mind generated by this paradox.
Tarr used the second part of the novel, entitled ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’, where the two processes – the social destruction and the restoration of the order on the one hand and the intellectual process (tuning to another system and retuning) on the other – are placed in parallel. The plot has very little linear development. The protagonist is a slightly mentally retarded young postman, Valuska, who, thanks to his job, meets different people at different locations in the small town. He comes and goes, visits places, and brings news from here to there. He takes care of the elderly composer and musicologist, Mr. Eszter, whose ex-wife, Tünde, left him and now lives with the alcoholic police chief of the town. One night a circus arrives in town. Its biggest attraction is a whale. Another attraction is ‘The Prince’, a dwarf speaking some foreign language – Slovakian, in fact – and protected by the circus’s caretaker, who has the appearance of a bodyguard. More and more people follow the circus from town to town, and rumours spread regarding the destruction caused by this ever-growing dangerous crowd. The dwarf acts as a ‘spiritual leader’ of the mob and fuels their angry ferocity with his sinister ideology of universal destruction. The circus director is unable to stop him, even though originally it was his business idea to call the dwarf ‘The Prince’. Valuska visits the circus in the main square of the town and he is also scared by this mob, still quiet for the moment. A group of citizens, including the police chief and Tünde, ask Mr. Eszter to be the leader of their movement aimed at restoring calm in the town. His ex-wife sends him a message saying that if he refuses to take responsibility in this, she will move back into his house, and sends her suitcase back as a warning via Valuska. The second time Valuska visits the main square, the director announces that the next show is cancelled and asks the crowd to go home. The third time he goes to the main square, it is already dark. He sneaks into the huge carriage containing the whale, and overhears the director and the dwarf’s argument, during which the dwarf declares his disobedience to the director, and his intention to continue to excite the mob to destroy. That night, the crowd devastate the town, set fire to buildings, lynch people on the street and patients in a hospital, and break into and loot shops. The next morning the military, led by the alcoholic police chief and his mistress, Tünde, occupies the town. When Valuska goes home, his landlady warns him that he is on the list of those wanted by the forces of order, and suggests that he flee before he gets caught and then hanged. Valuska escapes, but a mysterious helicopter arrives, circles above his head, slowly comes lower, and hovers over the ground in front of him. Next we see Valuska in a psychiatric ward as Mr. Eszter pays him a visit, and tells him that he will be cured and that he can come to live with him, even though his ex-wife and the police chief occupied his whole house too. He also tells him that he retuned his piano to the conventional tempering system, and now it is like an ordinary piano again.
Metaphorical narration:
The plot has a linear development, yet most of the plot elements are causally unrelated, or their relationship is puzzling. There is no relationship whatsoever between the riots and Mr. Eszter’s act of tuning his piano to the pre-Werckmeister system, yet he restores his piano when after the military coup the social order is restored. These are two parallel events that are similar on a very abstract level, and their relationship is only based in this similarity, not in their causal relationship. It is unclear why Valuska is wanted by the military, since he has a good relationship with Tünde and Mr. Eszter, the leader of the civil group; moreover, he did not do anything wrong, and everybody knows that he is harmless. Tünde’s blackmailing of Mr. Eszter is also very strange, even absurd. It is unclear how Mr. Eszter’s decision about whether to become the president of the civil group is related to Tünde’s moving back into his house. This is a manifestation of an absurd logic that is also manifested in the crowd’s riot, the social motivation of which is unclear, and can hardly be explained solely by a circus dwarf’s speeches. The fact that the military commander reports to Tünde and asks her opinion about military tactics is also one of the story’s absurdities. All these events and relations are impossible to explain on a concrete and practical causal level; they make sense only on metaphorical terms. Since the most important events fall into this category, we can say that this film – unprecedented in Tarr’s oeuvre – has something that can be called a metaphorical narration. It is only from this perspective that the film’s many other elements, which are puzzling on a concrete level, obtain meaning.
By ‘metaphorical narration’ I mean a kind of narrative where metaphorical interpretation is not only an option but the only possible way to get the narrative to make sense. In this case, the metaphorical level of the narrative is not a ‘surplus’ or an extra level, but the only meaningful level. Metaphorical narration is based on impossible or highly unusual connections between events that are not motivated by genre conventions such as those of science fiction or comedy. Metaphorical narration particularly characterises styles such as surrealism, dada and absurd drama. In Tarr’s case absurd drama is the closest reference in his films of metaphorical narration.8 But only two of Tarr’s films are of this kind: The Turin Horse, where the whole narrative is permeated by this kind of narrative mode; and Werckmeister Harmonies, where this mode appears for the first time. The rest have very concrete narrative meanings that can be interpreted on the basis of everyday logic, and the viewer does not have to resort to metaphorical interpretation to accept them, even if in some rare cases individual events seem excessive in their improbability, like the rape scene in Family Nest. But in Werckmeister Harmonies the above-mentioned events are not only improbable but clearly nonsensical or absurd from an everyday perspective. Metaphorical narration is another way for Tarr of reaching universality on the interpretative level.
This is clearly shown by the first scene of the film. Valuska is in a pub with a bunch of weary drunkards. ‘Show us’, they demand, aware that the pub will soon close. ‘Showing them’ involves Valuska arranging a little scene with the participation of the pub’s clients which represents the Earth and the Moon as they revolve around the Sun. A total eclipse is created as the Moon gets between the Sun and the Earth, and then the Moon slowly moves away, so that light and warmth come back again (figure 46).
Figure 46
At the end of the show all the people in the pub join the ‘Earth’ and the ‘Moon’ who revolve around the ‘Sun’, enjoying the returning ‘warmth’ and ‘light’. Apparently this is a regular ritual in this place, since the drunkard who asks Valuska refers to it without explaining what he is talking about. The repeated and ritual nature of the show is even more explicit in the novel: ‘when they told him and encouraged him to show “how this thing is with the earth and the moon” was absolutely not unexpected for Valuska, since that is what they also did yesterday, and the day before too, and who knows how many times over past years…’ This introductory scene has two interpretative levels. One is the eternity of natural laws and processes, engendering the alternation of coldness and warmth, darkness and light, which allows the return of hope, and assures us that nothing is closed down forever. (In the novel the text explains that this ritual is performed every day before closing time to divert the bartender’s attention from closing. Moreover, the people in the pub do not allow Valuska to change anything in the ritual; they want to watch it unaltered over and over again.) This ritual, then, metaphorically represents the stability of nature for those it is performed for. A second metaphorical aspect of this ritual is the one that connects the individual human being with the cosmos. The show brings the cosmic nature of human beings down to the deepest and most hopeless levels of human existence. Since this is the most important aspect of all of Tarr’s films, this ritual is the most telling metaphorical representation of this aspect of his oeuvre.
This introductory scene is different from other introductory scenes of second-period Tarr films. In other films the introduction’s main function is to attune the viewer to the rhythm and emotional atmosphere of the subsequent story. Except for in Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, the first scenes represent some static situation from which the plot develops: Karrer sits by the window and stares outside; Maloin watches the ship that has just arrived in the port; the father arrives home with his horse. Satantango’s introduction has the same ‘attuning’ function, except that the scene – cows come out of the cowshed and slowly wander around – makes neither concrete nor metaphorical reference to the subsequent story. Werckmeister Harmonies’ introduction has no place in the subsequent narrative flow either. The story never returns to this pub again, none of the characters return later in the story, except Valuska of course, and there is no mention of the show again in the story, except someone asking Valuska a little later in the post office, ‘How are things in the cosmos?’
The scene that could be seen as an introduction similar to the other films’ introductions is the second scene: Valuska leaving the pub and walking along the street to go to Mr. Eszter’s house. It is a single 80-second tracking shot similar to the introductory shots in the rest of the second-period Tarr films, attuning the viewer to the rhythm and atmosphere of the whole film. Hence, we can say that this film has two introductions. The first is an unusual metaphorical one; the second is the regular ‘attuning’ type of introduction. The only explanation for the existence of the metaphorical introduction is that many parts of the subsequent story can be interpreted only metaphorically, so this kind of introduction is necessary, alongside the regular attuning type of introduction.
Other than the metaphorical introduction there are four important events in the film that seem excessively strange or make no sense on the level of everyday logic. They are all part of the film’s metaphorical narrative structure. The first is Tünde’s gesture of sending her suitcase back to Mr. Eszter’s house as a threat that she will move back if Mr. Eszter is not willing to become the leader of the civil group. This gesture is nonsensical, all the more for the fact that after Mr. Eszter accepts Tünde’s conditions she moves back anyway, and with her lover the police chief. Tünde and the police chief’s moving into Mr. Eszter’s house makes sense on a metaphorical level, where it symbolises the loss of any intellectual and personal independence, which is confirmed by another metaphorical gesture: resetting the piano to the conventional temperament.
The second instance of a metaphorical structure in the film is the end of the ravaging scene in the hospital. When the mob breaks into the hospital, destroying everything and beating up the patients, they find a naked old man in the shower. The sight of this naked old body seems to cool down their anger and destructive impulse. They stop smashing the hospital and behaving aggressively towards the patients, turn back and slowly leave the place. On the level of psychological realism, this change in behaviour makes no sense. A mob carried away by rage in the middle of lynching and breaking is not likely to be impressed and stopped in its tracks by the sight of the naked body of an old man. On the contrary, the perception of helplessness and weakness usually fuels violent impulses. Among all the metaphorical scenes this is the least realistic; therefore this is most vulnerable to spectatorial rejection. In fact many spectators feel that this scene is rather unrealistic and, with the melancholic music added, is even embarrassingly implausible and sentimental.9 Others are clearly moved by this scene and, turning to the metaphorical interpretation, consider it the expression of the ultimate absurdity of violence. The next important metaphorical scene is the helicopter hovering in front of Valuska when he flees the town. It is unclear whether this helicopter is real or only Valuska’s hallucination, since in fact it does nothing except hover in front of Valuska, and nobody descends from it to capture him, which would be the obvious realistic motivation for its appearance. Because of this ambiguity, its presence can be most plausible interpreted on the metaphorical level, at which it represents Valuska’s going crazy. Finally, the last clearly metaphorical gesture in the film is Mr. Eszter’s resetting the piano, which has no realistic motivation; this gesture only represents a complete surrender before the return of the oppressive power.
The theme of conspiracy, which is just as central to this film as it is to Satantango, also becomes rather metaphorical, unlike in Satantango, where it is very practical and concrete. In Werckmeister Harmonies there are three instances of group organisation. The first is related to the mob, whose movement is organised, or at least initiated, by the dwarf. This movement does not seem to have any specific goal other than that referred to by the dwarf: destruction of everything. However, in the eyes of the town citizens this movement looks like a conspiracy against their order. The second is the organisation of the civil movement against the mob, but this cannot be called a ‘conspiracy’, since it is public and aimed at upholding law and order. The third is the most interesting. It concerns Tünde’s different manoeuvres to grasp power, these manoeuvres being closely connected with the official power through the police chief. The fact that she gives orders to the military shows that in fact she is behind the forces of law, which makes her acts the most ‘conspiracy-like’. Tünde uses the military and politics for her own personal ends. She benefits from the chaos caused by the mob, and manipulates not only the civil movement, but the law enforcement powers too. Not surprisingly, the idea here is the same as in Satantango: conspiracy is not a complot against law and order; rather law and order are the means of conspiracy for those who control the means of oppression and who aim to keep down those who do not.
Circular trajectory:
In Werckmeister Harmonies circularity prevails not only at the macro level of the narration, but also on a micro level, as seen in Valuska’s trajectory in the film. The narrative follows Valuska’s route from one place to another, which is dictated partly by his duties, partly by his interests. There are ten different locations in the story, six of which are recurrent. There are two locations that we return to the most. One is the square where the circus is and where the mob is gathering, appearing four times. The other is Mr. Eszter’s apartment, appearing three times. Valuska’s home, the hotel and the hospital appear twice, while the other locations, the pub, Tünde’s home, the police chief’s home, the hardware shop and the railroad tracks, appear only once each. In most cases the film shows Valuska walking from one location to another, which makes the streets of the small town an important location and the most frequently pictured one in the film; however, we don’t see the same street segment twice, even though Valuska obviously returns to the same places. There are as many as eleven scenes in which Valuska is walking on the street, sometimes at length, sometimes just for a couple of seconds. There are nineteen location changes in the film, and only five of them are ‘sharp’, where we do not see Valuska walking on the street between the two locations. It is through Valuska’s constant movement between places, giving the viewer a sense of motion, that the circular structure becomes perceptible. The narrative is organised in three major sequences of locations, which can be described as three big circles. These circles are framed by two special scenes, the first and the last. The first is special because none of its elements return in the film, and it does not participate in the narrative causal order. The last is special in that it is the only one in which Valuska is missing. This way there is a remarkable rhythmic symmetry in the narrative structure at the level of sequence length (the numbers show how many locations the given sequence contains): 1-4-8-5-1. The following are the location sequences of the narrative (the abbreviations stand for pub (p), Mr. Eszter’s house (Eh), post office (po), hotel (h), square (sq), Valuska’s home (Vh), Tünde’s home (Th), the police chief’s home (pch), hospital (h), shop (sh) and railroad tracks (rt). Two dashes mean a street sequence; one dash means a ‘sharp’ location change):
p --
Eh -- po -- h -- Eh -
sq -- Vh - Eh -- h -- sq -- Th - pch -- sq --
H - sh -- Vh - rt - H -
sq
All three sequences are framed by the return of the same location. The first sequence takes place between Valuska’s two visits to Mr. Eszter’s house, the second of which closes the first part of the narrative. The second part and the second circular sequence starts with Valuska’s first visit to the square, and ends with his third and last visit there. The third part and the third circular sequence starts with the scene of the ravaging of the hospital, and ends with Valuska’s and Mr Eszter’s scene in the hospital. This way the narration creates structural circularity (in the narrative) through physical circularity (in Valuska’s movements, his returning to the same locations), which can be interpreted metaphorically (the return of the oppressive order). This is the most consistent and complete circular system of all of Tarr’s films.
The Man from London
In an interview Tarr called Werckmeister Harmonies a ‘too pleasant fairy tale’, after which he felt he had to make something ‘more dry and cruel’.10 In the mid-1990s Tarr was approached by an American producer wanting to do a film with him. Tarr didn’t like the script proposed; instead, he suggested making a film of a George Simenon short story he had read many years before, The Man from London. Together with Krasznahorkai they wrote the script, and the producer purchased the rights of the short story. However, the film was ultimately produced by his own production company, which he had established in the meantime, T. T. Filmműhely. To set up the co-production consortium was not particularly difficult, at least not more so than for any other previous film. What was unprecedentedly complicated was finding the appropriate location for the shooting. The original literary work mentions a small French port of call, Dieppe in Normandy. What Tarr needed was an enclosed hilly harbour area where the port is closely connected with the railway. Today’s Dieppe had nothing of that sort. Tarr took several months to travel around Europe to find the right location for his film. Finally, he found Bastia, Corsica’s northern port. The problem with that choice was that shooting in Corsica meant a considerable rise in expenses, not least because of the very expensive set element, the watchtower, which had to be constructed in Hungary, transported to and assembled in Bastia. Producers tried to talk Tarr out of this location, but Tarr was intransigent. He needed a real location where he could show the port, Maloin’s house on the hill and the watchtower at the port in one shot, and he also needed to ‘see’ the tower from Maloin’s house. Paradoxically, these particular images were left out of the film. Finally he managed to convince everyone of the merit of his idea, and the production started under the supervision of Humbert Balsan as executive producer. What could not have been anticipated was Balsan’s unstable psychological state, and the financial situation of his production company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. A couple of days before shooting would start Balsan committed suicide. Right after learning about Balsan’s death, Tarr still hoped that he did not have to stop, so he started shooting. As if this situation alone was not difficult enough, the work itself did not start well either. Two days after starting, the director of photography, István Szaladják, unexpectedly announced that he would discontinue his work on the film. He claimed that the psychological atmosphere generated by Tarr’s working methods as well as the impossible working conditions the Corsican crew had created made it impossible for him to stay. Being a practising Zen Buddhist, he found too much tension in the production, which he couldn’t accept.
In spite of having lost both his executive producer and his director of photography in a matter of days, Tarr did not give up. He summoned Fred Kelemen, a former student of his from Berlin, to immediately replace Szaladják. But things went wrong in other ways too. The Corsican and Hungarian crews were in constant disagreement, their arguments becoming violent at times. Negotiations did not go well with the bank, and it was not long before shooting had to be suspended, and the crew repatriated to Budapest. The tower had to be dismantled and stored somewhere in Corsica in the hope of an eventual continuation. Over a year later shooting could resume, after lengthy negotiations with new banks and even with the Hungarian and French governments. None of Tarr’s films were easy to produce and most of them, especially in the second period, were financial gambles. But the difficulties that afflicted the production of The Man from London were unprecedented. And that is what exposed Tarr’s extreme intransigence and extraordinary battle skills. After the collapse of the financing for the film, he was able to rebuild it within a year without having to compromise whatsoever.
All of this raised the expectations for the film in terms of critical success. Everybody wanted to see that all this trouble had been worthwhile. But the film fell short of this expectation. At its Cannes screening the audience’s response was rather hostile, and it received many poor reviews. Even though in his review in Cahiers du cinema Cyril Neyrat considers the ‘quasi unanimous whistling of the French and international press’ as an event that ‘counts among the dark pages of film criticism’, and talks about a ‘general blindness’,11 the good reviews, such as his, could not change the general atmosphere of disappointment. Yet I think that it would be to hasty to say that the lack of a breakthrough success influenced Tarr’s decision to give up filmmaking after his next film. Obviously, no one knows, including Tarr himself, what would have happened had this film been a big success. Judging from previous cases of lack of success, and considering Tarr’s stubborn character, what others say does not count for much regarding decisions about whether or not to make a film, or about what films to make. Neither is there some ‘objective’ quality of his film that can be identified as leading to his decision. He does not consider this film as ‘worse’ than any other of his films. It is the future rather than the present or the past that counts in this decision. As mentioned already in the introduction, what Tarr says about this is unequivocal: he has nothing more to say. In other words, he feels that the Tarr style is no longer productive, and he could certainly see this before anyone else.
If it were not clear so far that Tarr and Krasznahorkai consciously look to construct circular processes everywhere in the stories, The Man from London presents a striking example. The way they modified the original plot in the script is very telling in this respect. Simenon’s novel tells the story of Maloin, a railroad switchman working at the port of Dieppe, controlling the railroad traffic from a watch tower. One night he becomes aware of two men fighting over a suitcase near the edge of the jetty, not far from his tower. One of them pushes the other into the water together with the suitcase. The man sinks, and the one who pushed him tries in vain to recover the suitcase, before leaving. Maloin descends from his tower and manages to pull the suitcase out of the water. To his great surprise the suitcase is full of banknotes. The next morning he meets the man, named Brown, he saw on the jetty, who is obviously looking for the suitcase. Maloin has a feeling that the man suspects that he has the suitcase, but he decides to keep the money, and tells nobody about what happened. Yet he starts spending the money. He buys an expensive fur for his daughter and forces her to quit her humiliating job at a shop. His wife becomes furious, as she does not understand Maloin’s seemingly irrational and irresponsible acts. As the days pass, Maloin regularly sees Brown on the street; he has nowhere to go, nothing to eat, and somehow knows for sure that Maloin has the money, but never approaches him directly. Maloin gradually develops some sympathy for him, because he reckons that he is also responsible for Brown’s desperate situation. When a private detective arrives from London to look for him, Brown becomes a fugitive, and looks for a hiding place, choosing a shed on the waterfront, which happens to be owned by Maloin. Maloin wants to help Brown by bringing some food to the shed, but Brown thinks he has come to deliver him to the police, and attacks Maloin as he steps into the shed. Maloin has to defend himself, and before he can explain the situation, he inadvertently kills Brown. In the meantime Brown’s wife also arrives from London, and it turns out that she knew nothing about his husband having robbed his patron. Maloin reports what happened in the shed, and gives the money to the detective. And this is where Simenon’s story and Tarr’s story differ considerably. In the novel the detective proposes to save Maloin from the French police by testifying that Maloin found Brown dead in the shed and did not kill him. But Maloin refuses this solution and gives himself up to the police, accepting the murder charge. In the film, instead, not only does he accept this solution, but he accepts a little bit of money too from the detective.
Although it seems like a minor change at the end of the story, it changes everything regarding the structure of the plot. Simenon’s story has a linear development leading from a miserable existential situation and an alienated psychological state toward moral gratification, which changes considerably Maloin’s life in all respects: he goes to prison but he gains moral integrity by discovering in himself the feeling of solidarity with the outcast, and his capability of acting accordingly. By contrast, in the film, Maloin’s trajectory is circular. With the choice he makes at the end, he falls back into the same hopeless existential situation he started out from, without any moral gratification. Simenon’s Maloin was nobody and became somebody, even if he was a criminal in the eyes of the police. Tarr’s Maloin hoped only to become somebody, but did not go all the way, and remained a poor nobody, losing even his self-esteem.
Uniquely among Tarr’s films, this story is constructed upon coincidences. In no previous Tarr film do coincidences play a role. This is how the conspiracy theme could easily develop together with the circular structure. In this story the two most important events are coincidences: Maloin sees the two men fighting on the jetty, and Brown hides in Maloin’s shed. There is no intentional conspiracy behind the events here, like in Satantango or, in a less direct way, Werckmeister Harmonies. Yet Maloin cannot avoid his destiny any more than the protagonists of the previous films. The ‘order’ of things keeps him, too, captive in his situation, from which there is no escape. The only difference is that this time no one and nothing can be held responsible for this except ‘the conspiracy of the details’, which this time is in the form of the power of randomness.
Speechless drama:
The incorporation of coincidences into the narration is not the only way in which Tarr moved away from his earlier films. Another very important change in the narration is the dramatic tension caused by silence in the film. Dialogues are always a central element throughout Tarr’s career, especially in the early period. Two of his films have nothing but dialogue scenes in them (Family Nest and Almanac of Fall), but the rest of his films in the second period are full of lengthy dialogue scenes as well. One of the most important changes in his career is also related to the status of dialogues: prewritten and poetic dialogues in the second period took the place of the improvised everyday-style dialogues of the first period. But that was not the only change regarding the dialogue. Between Almanac of Fall and Damnation the quantity of the dialogue decreased dramatically. While in the first film the rate of dialogue scenes is 90% relative to the film’s running time (107’:119’), in the latter this rate is only 41% percent (47’:115’). In other words, in more than fifty percent of the film the characters do not talk. This rate remains relatively stable during the whole second period until The Turin Horse, in which there are virtually no dialogues.
The Man from London is special in this respect. Although the dialogue scenes take up approximately as much space overall in the film as in the previous second-period films (a little less than fifty percent), the impression created in the viewer is of a conspicuous lack of dialogue. This is due to two things. Firstly, in these dialogue scenes there is much less information than in the previous films. The characters remain speechless during big portions of the dialogue scenes, as for example in the scene with Maloin and Henriette in the bar. This is a four-minute scene in a single seven-minute long shot. The dialogue portion of the sequence is divided into three almost equal parts: between Maloin and Henriette’s two dialogues, another dialogue is inserted between the bartender and a woman, which is basically the bartender’s monologue. Maloin and Henriette speak in very short, mostly one- or two-word sentences. During the whole time they say altogether fifteen such brief sentences. When the camera travels sideways to show the bartender and the woman’s dialogue, keeping Maloin and Henriette in the background of the picture, they don’t speak at all. The bartender’s monologue is in sharp contrast to Maloin and Henriette’s dialogues, which last twice as long and contain half as many words.
In other scenes only one person speaks, and the other just listens, as in the scene with Morrison and Brown, or the one with Morrison and Mrs. Brown. On the other hand, in the longest dialogue scenes, which are with Morrison, the saying of a simple sentence takes twice as long as it normally would because he speaks extremely slowly. If Morrison spoke at a normal pace, his scenes would be much shorter, and the dialogue-scene rate would certainly show a considerable decrease compared to the previous films. What is remarkable therefore in this respect is that Tarr did not change dramatically his mise-en-scène as far as the dialogue scenes are concerned; he only extracted most of the dialogue out of the dialogue scenes. Thereby he reached an effect that is new in his career.
Together with this effect, another thing creates the impression that there is very little dialogue in the film. This is the highly dramatic mise-en-scène style. This consists in staging scenes where there is a high tension between the characters, yet they speak very little or not at all. The tension is increased by the total lack of or excessive reduction of dialogue. This is a technique that Tarr had never used before. This technique stems from the narrative inasmuch as Brown and Maloin’s exchanges are wordless, as Brown never approaches Maloin directly, yet Maloin feels that Brown knows that he has the money. In all the scenes where Brown and Maloin meet there is this tension between the metacommunication and the lack of dialogue.
Lack of communication characterises most scenes in the film. This is most conspicuous with regard to the relationship between Maloin and his wife. There are three scenes with the two of them. The first is when Maloin goes home after the night he found the suitcase. This is a five-minute scene, and each of them has two short sentences to say to the other about their daughter. Neither talks about the other or him- or herself; there is no sign of tenderness or of any human contact. The second is a three-minute scene at the dinner table, where the two of them start an aggressive verbal fight. Maloin, obviously irritated by having seen Brown, who is clearly after him, starts nagging his daughter without any obvious reason. His wife does not understand his behaviour and defends the girl. Instead of explaining his state of mind or simply backing off, Maloin turns his anger against his wife and yells at her with excessive violence. Technically, this is of course a kind of dialogue, but it serves only to vent tension and rage. The third scene with Maloin and his wife is the one when she discovers that her husband took their spare money to buy an expensive fur for their daughter, and furiously demands an explanation. Maloin is not any more communicative than before, so this scene too is just a scene of their yelling at each other instead of engaging in reasonable discussion. It is obvious that their problems could be solved by simple words which explain their feelings or at least calm down the other person, enabling the development of a human dialogue, but this is exactly what is missing in this film. Nobody speaks really to anybody else.
The dramatic speechlessness has a visual consequence too in the film with respect to Tarr’s use of close-ups. Close-ups have always played an important role in Tarr’s films, precisely because of the overwhelming role of dialogue in the films. Now that dialogues are reduced, and dialogue is missing from the dialogue scenes, the close-ups show not people who speak but people who are silent. Tarr did not change the rate of close-ups in this film, so these images convey a very different atmosphere: that of an inner tension that cannot find a proper way to dissolve.
Communication is just the exercise of power or manipulation of the other person. It is a little bit like most of the dialogue in Family Nest, where most of the time the characters, instead of exchanging ideas or attempting to come to a mutual understanding, used conversation to fight the other person. But this kind of use of conversation is more striking in this film, because there is so little. The character who is referred to in the title, Brown, the man from London, speaks only a few sentences in the film, during his conversation with the detective. He otherwise remains speechless. Likewise, his wife, who arrives in Dieppe from London to look for her husband, says only one sentence: ‘Where is my husband?’ Other than yelling at her husband, Maloin’s wife has only three short sentences, two said to her husband, one to her daughter. The person who talks at the greatest length is Morrison, the private detective from London. His dialogue scenes are in fact lengthy, but not because he says a lot of things, rather because he speaks extremely slowly. The effect this has is, again, to create the impression that it is not the information that counts but the tone. It conveys a feeling of an unavoidable fate. This is the same effect slowness has in general in the Tarr films.12
The scene in which the silence is the most striking, even embarrassing, is when Maloin enters the shed. He remains in there for one and a half minutes, with the camera staying close in front of the door, and we can hear only the sound of the waves. When Maloin comes out of the shed heaving, the viewer is not in a position to know what happened inside, since there are no sounds coming out of the shed. The viewer is perplexed and has to wait until the next scene to find out what happened. And yet, even then the viewer does not know in what circumstances Brown died. When Morrison tells Maloin in the last scene that this was a case of self-defence, we can only imagine what happened, but we cannot be sure (unlike in the novel, where the scene inside the shed is described in detail). This is another scene where one type of sound (that of the waves) takes the place of speech or of some other sound that would develop the situation. There is a striking lack of acoustic information: in other words, silence.
Lengthy monologues are missing too in this film. Even though dialogue scenes become reduced in the second period, the main characters of the films deliver monologues of various lengths. In this film nobody speaks more than is absolutely necessary to convey the required information, and sometimes they speak less than that. When this is not the case, as in Maloin’s two arguments with his wife, speaking is just a way of venting emotion. There is another case of this kind of use of speech. It is in the scene when Maloin buys the fur for his daughter. The two salesmen grotesquely talk for thirty seconds, very fast and in parallel, to Henriette, trying to sell her the fur. Again, what they say is not very important. It is only the tone of their speech which plays a role in their attempts to impress Henriette. When they see that they have succeeded, they immediately stop talking.
For the second time in his career Tarr effected a radical shift in the function of dialogue. In the first period dialogues were an essential or sometimes the most essential part of the narrative process. In the second period situations are not constructed solely or mainly around dialogues, but they remain an important element, and many times monologues take the place of dialogues (this is most spectacular in Satantango, but it is clearly perceptible in Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies too). In The Man from London the important change is that long monologues are entirely missing, and dialogues are not constitutive elements of the narrative any more. They hardly convey any important information, since most of them have as their only function the expression of emotions. Thus, the way Tarr uses dialogue changes and becomes part of the process of increasing the expressivity of the film.
Topic 4: Being lost in one’s life (2)
The Turin Horse
I wish to make one more film about the end of the world and then I am done with making films.13
In many ways Tarr’s last film is the most radical of all of his works. And this is not a coincidence. This film is meant to be the closure of a whole career. Should this career in fact continue in the future, Tarr made sure that it could not be a continuation of the Tarr style, which is brought to its extreme point here. The radicalism of this film resides entirely in its narrative and not in its visual qualities, which are similar to those of the earlier Tarr films. For one thing, the permutation principle that characterises Tarr’s choices of stylistic tools is made explicit through its expression, for the first time, in the narrative structure. For another, partly as a consequence of the former, Tarr’s narrative minimalism reaches a point which is very difficult to develop any further. To be sure, this minimalism is not the most radical in the history of cinema. In the 1970s the European art cinema created many more radical forms (Straub and Huillet, Philippe Garrel, and Chantal Akerman are just the best-known examples). Also, in contemporary art cinema, forms approaching art-gallery video works, such as Benedek Fliegauf’s Milky Way (2008), are obviously more radical in their minimalism. However, within the realm of the Tarr style, and with regard to Tarr’s moral attitude, this film is the one that is reduced to its minimal essential ingredients. Shots are the lengthiest of all Tarr films. Satantango was the longest Tarr film, but its shots were not much longer on average than those of Damnation, the first extreme long-shot Tarr film. But the shots in The Turin Horse are twice as long as in Damnation, and eight times as long as in Tarr’s first film, Family Nest. The story has no linear development; it consists of repeated events, and during most of the time we see only two protagonists who barely talk to each other.
The story, written by Tarr and Krasznahorkai, is based on a short essay by Kraszna-horkai published in 1990, Legkésőbb Torinóban (At the Latest in Turin). The story takes as its starting point a biographical fact about German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1889, Nietzsche was found weeping, embracing the neck of a horse on a street in Turin, Italy. This was his final mental breakdown, from which he never recovered. He was mentally ill until his death in 1900. The first paragraph of Krasznahorkai’s essay tells this story in a reconstruction according to which the horse was being brutally beaten by the coachman when Nietzsche embraced it, as if protecting it. The last sentence of the paragraph is this: ‘What happened with the horse, we don’t know.’ The film script, taking this paragraph as its starting point, tells the story of what happened with the horse. Krasznahorkai’s story obviously cannot be a historical reconstruction, since historically nothing is known of the identity of the coachman or of the destiny of the horse. It is rather an apocalyptical vision of a meteorological, human and social catastrophe, a total collapse of the world following this incident.
Other than this first paragraph, which is inserted as a voice-over at the beginning of the film, there is no mention of the German philosopher or of the incident in the film. One could ask what is added by involving the great German philosopher in this story. The first thing that comes to mind is one of Krasznahorkai’s fundamental story patterns, which is the immediate relationship between the most abstract, subtle and highest level of the poetic and philosophical sphere and the lowest and most desperate human existence. This relationship can be found in all of the second-period Tarr films. In this story, Nietzsche is the representative of the most poetic visionary philosophy of a new human existence, and the beaten horse represents the most humiliated, helpless and miserable subhuman existence. Not only do the two meet, but their encounter is the only human connection occurring in the story, or, more precisely, in the film (since it occurs before the story begins). And since the last human connection is the manifestation of the final mental collapse, the apocalypse occurring in the story can be interpreted in a way as a result of or as a metaphor for Nietzsche’s mental breakdown, as if Nietzsche’s collapse were a premonition, the first sign of this apocalypse. Or else, as if the latter were a consequence or the physical continuation of the former. So, the fact that the story is about the specific horse provoking Nietzsche’s reaction, and not just about any horse beaten by its master, makes Nietzsche’s story and the horse’s story reflect each other. That this story is about the horse gives Nietzsche’s story a moral aspect, and Nietzsche’s story gives the horse’s story a philosophical dimension.
The narrative is broken into six parts, which cover six entire days. The events taking place during this time are the simple everyday activities of two people, the coachman and his daughter, in a small and poor farm. The events do not add up to form a goal-oriented sequence; they are highly repetitive and have the simple aim of satisfying the needs of everyday survival. There are altogether twenty different events, of which ten reoccur at least once. The action recurring the most often (six times) is one of them sitting in front of the window and staring outside. The second most frequent event, recurring five times, is the two of them eating potatoes and the father changing his clothes with the help of his daughter. During the whole time a constant and extremely strong wind blows outside, which means everything they do outdoors requires extra effort. The events of the day are very small, mostly everyday activities that do not make the narrative go forward, like washing, sewing, doing leatherwork, and so on. There are two instances of extraordinary events. On the second day a neighbour comes over to buy brandy, and gives a long speech about the collapse of everything. The other extraordinary event is the arrival of a company of gypsies, who stop for water and give the daughter a religious book before the father sends them away. Later on the daughter starts reading from the book out loud. Both extraordinary events are related to the two lengthiest monologues of the film, which emphasises the extraordinary nature of speech in this story. The only thing that represents a developing process is the dying of the horse and the natural conditions, which become more and more severe and strange. First, the bark beetles stop eating the wood. Second, the horse will not pull the carriage any more. Third, the horse won’t eat. Fourth, water disappears from the well. Fifth, when the farmer decides to leave the property, they pack everything up and leave the house; then they suddenly turn back without any obvious reason. The next step is that the horse won’t even drink. And finally, in the middle of the day, everything becomes dark and even the fire goes out.
The most spectacular thing about the narrative is that there is no progressing element in it related to the characters. The characters have no intentions, goals, plans, or desires that could become the motivational basis of the narration. This total lack of human motivation is unique even in Tarr’s career. Two films are the closest in this respect to The Turin Horse. One is The Outsider, in which the lack of specific goals is the driving force of the narrative, and the other is Werckmeister Harmonies, where the main character, Valuska, becomes the victim of the events around him without ever playing an active part in anything. In both films, however, human actions make the story develop. By contrast, in The Turin Horse not only do human actions not play a part in what is going on in the world, but also no attempts are made by the characters to influence the events. They are absolutely helpless as they face the dying of the horse, let alone the wind and the disappearance of the water and the light. There is nothing they can do about these things, and they have no plans for survival.
The only thing they try is to go away, but this seems hopeless too and they turn back. Neither the scenario nor the film makes it clear why there is nowhere else to go. The scenario reads: ‘They stand there motionless for some time, and as time goes by it becomes increasingly obvious that no matter which direction they may take it will be just totally hopeless.’ In the film, even those uncertain clues disappear. As they get to a certain distance from the house, we see them in long shot as they disappear over the horizon. For almost forty seconds we see only a lonely tree on the horizon and the leaves blowing in the strong wind. Suddenly they reappear on the horizon, and slowly return to the house. Tarr does not try to explain what it means that ‘it becomes increasingly obvious’ that all directions are equally hopeless. He does not even show the moment of the decision, as if this were not even a decision they made, rather the effect of some exterior power which brings them back from where they wanted to leave. This must become obvious from the simple fact that they return. They don’t speak, they don’t express any emotions, they just adapt to the circumstances. And as they unpack everything again, and the daughter sits down in front of the window, and we see her face from outside, framed by the window through the haze of the storm, the spectator surely understands the overall hopelessness of their situation, which no human act can change (figure 47).
This film is different in many ways from the previous Tarr-style films. First of all, there is no circularity in the narrative. Even though this is the most repetitive of all Tarr films, neither explicit nor implicit circularity characterises the story. He thus returns to the static character of his early films. The characters go through a simple linear trajectory, which is neither long nor complicated. It extends from the point where the father arrives home, through the moment they realise that there is nowhere to go, to the point when everything becomes dark. If someone felt the need to find the idea of circularity within this film, the only way to do it that I can think of would be through an interpretation of this story as something like a ‘counter creation’. The fact that this story lasts six days obviously refers to God’s creation of the world in six days, starting with the sentence, ‘Let there be light’. This story tells of the last six days of the created world, when gradually everything disappears and finally even the light goes out. This is the end, when everything falls back into the darkness from where everything was created. This film closes the circle of creation, as it were. Clearly, the idea of circularity appears here on a very high interpretative level, but nowhere can it be detected in lower level structures.
Figure 47
Secondly, none of Tarr’s usual topics are present in the story. This is an apocalypse, not an everyday hell. There is neither conspiracy nor betrayal in the film, since everything that happens is a process of nature rather than the result of human action. Also, this is Tarr’s only film where no human relationships develop. The two main characters, father and daughter, basically have no human contact with each other. They speak very little, and when they speak they relate only the necessary minimum of information about the immediate physical environment, or give orders to one another. The few other characters who appear in the film for a very short time have no relationship whatsoever with the main characters. The neighbour who comes for brandy delivers a long monologue, but there is no reaction to it. The gypsies who arrive, even though they want to take the daughter along at first, are very quickly sent away.
Thirdly, as a consequence, the narrative element that is so crucial in the early period, and that remains important until The Man from London, the dialogue, disappears almost entirely in this film. We saw in relation to The Man from London in what ways and to what extent the dialogue disappeared from the dialogue situations or lost the function of conveying information and served only to vent emotions. In The Turin Horse there is only one real dialogue situation, the one with the neighbour, but in this scene there is only a monologue. The rest of the scenes are not dialogue situations, and the few and very short dialogues that occur in them refer to external events rather than human relations.
This is what makes the neighbour’s speech so spectacular. In a story where the characters almost never speak, a long monologue becomes exceptional, especially if it is as abstract and philosophical as the neighbour’s monologue. This pattern is well known from earlier Tarr films, especially from Damnation and Satantango. Characters make speeches in situations where the tone and the content of the monologue seem displaced. The viewer wouldn’t expect weary characters in conditions of extreme poverty and in the midst of rude human relations to deliver highly abstract or poetic monologues. In this film this paradox appears in its most extreme form, since the neighbour’s philosophical monologue appears in a situation in which it is not only unexpected, but also totally unrelated to everything the viewer knows about this world. This is exactly the main role of this monologue. It is the only source that gives the viewer any information about the world outside. Without this monologue the whole story would be out of context, given that Nietzsche’s story is just an occasion and not a real context.
However, this monologue is also too obscure to provide exact information about what is happening outside, especially because the neighbour speaks about some large-scale political happenings from a moral point of view, and it is hard to see how these are related to the dying of the horse, the well’s drying up, or the disappearance of the light. This context is rather metaphorical. Since the neighbour speaks about the final victory of evil powers over moral order, which causes everything to go wrong, we must suppose that the natural events taking place in the story are, somehow, also part of this general break-down. The collapse of the moral universe means in fact the end of the world in the concrete sense. So, once again, just like in Werckmeister Harmonies, most of the key events of the story are related metaphorically rather than causally, which makes this film another Tarr film with metaphorical narration.14 No wonder that the father has only one thing to say in response to the neighbour’s speech, which puts an end to it immediately: ‘This is nonsense.’
Related to the reduction of dialogue, the role of music and noises increases considerably in this film. Since Almanac of Fall composer Mihály Víg has had a distinguished role in all Tarr films. This role is fundamental in this one. There is an almost constant musical accompaniment in this film, and the character of the music is indicative of the film’s structure and atmosphere. There are no individual numbers in the music. We hear a repetitive minimalist music constituted of variations on a single three-note musical motif using different instruments, orchestration and harmonies.
Whatever remains of Tarr’s narrative motifs becomes radical owing to its being reduced to its very essence. Narrative slowness is more radical here than it is in any other Tarr film because no clues are provided for the viewer as to where the narration is going. All the means by which narration can be slowed down are used in this film: extensive repetition; real time and detailed description of everyday acts; representation of monotonous movements; and extensive representation of temps mort.
There is no other Tarr film in which narrative repetition is as prevalent as in this film. In this respect Almanac of Fall is the most similar to it. In Almanac of Fall, the narrative structure is constructed upon the permutation of dialogue situations. However, the variations of the dialogue add up to create a developing process of human relations, whereas in The Turin Horse repetition of scenes means repetition of the same scene in the same way, where the difference between the scenes appears only on a very small-scale visual level, and the repeated events do not generate a progressing series. Real-time representation of everyday events is not as radical as in Satantango for the simple reason that this film is not of as excessive a length as Satantango, so the time which description of everyday acts can last is much more limited. The everydayness of the characters’ acts is emphasised more, however, than in any other Tarr film by contrasting them with the extraordinary circumstances. Tarr’s usual procedure of making the banal extraordinary is achieved here through this contrast. In the midst of the apocalyptic circumstances the two characters carry on their ordinary everyday activities. Representation of monotonous movements at length is also less radical here then it is in Satantango, again because of the film’s normal length, and also because of the fact that the characters do not go outside the house much, and if they do, they only go as far as the well or the stable. But still, there is as much monotony in the suspenseless repetition of the same movements of changing clothes or eating potatoes. Finally, extensive representation of temps mort is more excessive in this film than in any other Tarr film. In fact, what is represented all through the story is empty time, since nothing is envisaged in the plot, nothing adds up, and the characters’ acts lead nowhere. The story represents the time elapsed between two extraordinary events: Nietzsche’s final mental break-down, related to the beating of the horse, and the final apocalyptic blackout. But this is not the empty time within a process between two significant events representing important turns in an event series. The empty time in this story will not end. This is the process of time emptying out for good, which is represented on the concrete level by the events contributing to the disappearance or the fading out of the world. The last event, the fade out, therefore, is not an event. It is the end of all events, the end of time. The time of the plot takes place in a kind of ‘day after’, where the apocalyptic event is Nietzsche’s mental break-down followed by an undetermined natural catastrophe where the chances of survival are zero.
This process is somewhat similar to what we see in Antonioni’s L’eclisse (Eclipse, 1962), which also starts with an ‘end’: the breaking up of a couple. The rest of the film represents the ‘days after’ the separation, which after all lead nowhere, and the main characters disappear from the story, leaving the camera alone, as it were, on the empty streets. The idea of the disappearance of the light is also present in Antonioni’s film in the title, even though the notion of the eclipse suggests only a temporary fading out, whereas in The Turin Horse the blackout is not associated with a known temporary natural phenomenon. The story suggests that this is final. Not only does natural light go out, but artificial light is impossible to turn on. The important difference between Antonioni’s eclipse and Tarr’s apocalypse is that Antonioni’s film is about the disappearance of human relations, while Tarr’s film is about the disappearance of nature, as human relations are already missing at the outset.
This is an absolutely dehumanised world, and all of the differences between this film and the earlier Tarr films are due to this radical dehumanisation. No human act is capable of affecting any of the processes of nature, and attempts are not even made to this end. Living beings are only helpless observers and victims of what is happening. This is also what makes any communication between the characters superfluous. The destiny of the humans becomes similar to the helpless dying of the horse, a pure natural process that cannot be remedied. Although according to the title the horse is the protagonist of the story, the horse remains in the background of the plot events. This story is about the Turin horse inasmuch as the humans around him become reduced to the same helplessness, to the point where there is no difference between them. They become as helpless as the horse, and when they understand that, they start acting like the horse. The final event of the film is that the daughter stops eating.
The power of compassion:
This story is a metaphor for ultimate human helplessness, which is the main idea of the story of Nietzsche in Turin, according to Krasznahorkai. In his original essay, Nietzsche’s story in Turin is about the power of compassion. The man, whose philosophy despises ‘humanist’ feelings like compassion and pity, suddenly, and certainly unwillingly, manifests the deepest compassion for a helpless living being, a beaten horse. This event, says Krasznahorkai, is ‘the flashing recognition of a tragic error: after such a long and painful combat, this time it was Nietzsche’s persona who said no to Nietzsche’s thoughts that are particularly infernal in their consequences.’15 This is the example which leads to a conclusion about the universality of this feeling: ‘if not today, then tomorrow… or ten, or thirty years from now. At the latest, in Turin.’16
Herewith, we arrive at the most important thematic element of Tarr’s stories, which is not even a topic or a theme, but rather an attitude or an approach to human conditions, which Tarr fundamentally shares with Krasznahorkai. This attitude concerns all of his films, and not only those he made with Krasznahorkai, and this is certainly what makes their collaboration an exceptional success. Both authors have a fundamentally compassionate attitude toward human helplessness and suffering in whatever situation it may manifest itself, and of whatever antecedent it may be the result. This is what connects all of Tarr’s films, of both periods, together. This attitude also becomes radical in The Turin Horse. In no other Tarr film is the helplessness of the characters laid bare so powerfully as in this film. Although the neighbour attributes the apocalyptic conditions primarily to human intervention, the story contains no events contributing to the apocalypse that could be seen to be caused by any of the characters. Everyone in this film faces ultimate helplessness, and for the first time in Tarr’s oeuvre, the characters do not make their own life or others’ lives harder. They are entirely at the mercy of exterior circumstances, and these circumstances have no mercy for them. No real human qualities are manifested by the characters of this film; be it good or bad, there is only bare human existence reduced to its simplest physical and biological substance. That is why the last sentence uttered in the film is what the father says to his daughter: ‘One must eat.’
If there is no reason why the characters would cause their own miserable situation, there is no reason either why the viewer should particularly like them. Tarr in all of his films generates compassion for his characters not by making them seem to deserve it owing to their behaviour, but simply by making them human. Tarr never judges his characters, and this would be simply impossible in this film. While the characters of the other films have different attributes, good and bad, the father and the daughter in this film are beyond moral characterisation. They struggle for their mere survival, and their cooperation is reduced to the basic utilitarian level, like when the daughter helps his father in changing his clothes.
If the universality of the ultimate power of compassion in Nietzsche’s story stems from the philosopher’s pity felt for a horse, in the film the viewer is driven to feel the same. If we feel compassion for the characters it is not because of their noble human qualities, but because lives – that of a horse, of a man, and of a woman – are about to flicker out.
This brings us to the problem of Tarr’s characters, which I find the most fundamental of all the subjects I have dealt with so far. Tarr’s whole attitude regarding his stories and filmmaking in general can be explained through his attitude regarding his characters. This is the topic of the next chapter.
Notes
