In about 1986 Béla Tarr jokingly remarked on his festival participation: ‘Since I have become Béla Tarr, I am treated decently on international festivals.’ In Hungarian the first name and the family name are in reverse order as compared to other European languages; that is, the family name comes first and the given name comes second. So, when Hungarians address a foreigner they usually reverse the order of their names, so that the foreigner knows which is which. When we see or hear a Hungarian name written or uttered in reverse order, we know that the person evoked either is an expatriate or is mentioned in a foreign context. ‘Becoming Béla Tarr’ stood for ‘now having an international reputation’. Somehow, this bon mot was retained in my mind, probably because it signalled an important split in the role Béla Tarr has played on the Hungarian and on the international stage. At the time Tarr was gaining an international reputation and growing in status, his acceptance at home was far from being comparable to the respect he enjoyed abroad. For about sixteen years Béla Tarr was not the same as Tarr Béla.
For the international art-film audience the names of three Hungarian filmmakers may sound familiar: Miklós Jancsó, István Szabó and Béla Tarr. For those in the audience that have appreciated the contemporary cinema of the last twenty years, there is only one name: Béla Tarr.
In 2002 a panel of seven British film critics named the forty best art-film directors in the world.1 Béla Tarr, the only Hungarian on the list, is at 13th place, before masters like Lars von Trier, Kitano Takeshi, Alexander Sokurov, Michael Haneke, Aki Kaurismaki, Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodovar and Wong Kar-Wai. Ranking is not that significant. Being listed with these names is indeed.
One can always claim that such lists are ephemeral, subjective and one-sided, but if we have a closer look at the list, three things become striking: first, the top five places are occupied by American filmmakers; second, names such as Godard, Resnais, Antonioni and Bergman are missing from it. To be sure, Antonioni had been inactive for a long time by that time; Bergman not so much, but he also had withdrawn from the international film market since 1982. But Godard and Resnais were active contemporary filmmakers, and they still are. The third thing one can say is that there are two British directors on the list in the top eleven. All of this leads to the conclusion that one cannot claim that this list reflects an elitist, old-fashioned modernist art-film taste, and that it even may show a specific national sensitivity too. If this list is biased, it is certainly not in a way which would easily favour the kind of films Tarr makes.
In 2007 fifty-one American film critics and academics were asked to compose a list of the top twenty-five non-English-language films of all time.2 From the fifty-one lists a list of a hundred films was composed according to the frequency of the films on the individual lists. Satantango, the only Hungarian film, is the 97th on the list.
In 2000, a list of the ‘best 12 Hungarian films’, composed by Hungarian film critics, did not contain any films by Béla Tarr.
Such lists, just like festival awards, obviously cannot be taken seriously as guarantees of aesthetic quality. They represent a momentary general aesthetic taste, which may change considerably from time to time and from country to country. But the discrepancy between the appreciation of Tarr’s films on the international and on the national level is striking. And I am not talking about the discrepancy between an elite’s taste and the popular taste. This would be obvious and needs no explanation. What I am talking about here is a discrepancy within a Hungarian art-film audience, which right from the appearance of the Tarr style in 1988 became divided about its value. I mentioned already in chapter one that during the 1988 Hungarian Film Week Damnation received incredibly negative comments from the jury while, at the same, receiving the international critics award. And this was not the only case. In 2001 a controversy appeared in the Hungarian press in which some young critics, on the occasion of the release of Werckmeister Harmonies, attacked not only Tarr, but also the critics who had been sympathetic to Tarr’s works over the past years.3 Until about the middle of the 2000s Tarr not only was ignored in the wider context of Hungarian film culture but on occasions was subject to harsh and passionate attacks too. Even in 2008 on the occasion of the 39th Hungarian Film Week, The Man from London, the only imaginable candidate, was not accepted to be the opening film of the festival by the board of directors.4 What is responsible in the Tarr films for such a curious discrepancy, which means that the only Hungarian filmmaker receiving high-prestige awards and recognition in a given period is ignored and damned in his own country?
On both occasions those criticising Tarr mentioned the unconditional and absolutely negative attitude with which Tarr creates his stories and represents the world. Obviously, nobody could claim that the negative attitude these critics see in Tarr’s films is just an illusion. This book has listed a number of arguments underpinning the opinion that the general atmosphere of Tarr’s films has indeed a considerable negative ingredient in it. The narration is slow; the environment represented is poor, shabby, dirty and run-down; and the stories’ atmosphere is bleak. The characters are sad and frightened; they often suffer and often cause others to suffer; nobody in any of the films smiles or laughs; and nobody is cheerful. The visual atmosphere is dark, with no colours. The stories do not develop, just turn in cirlces, and there is no hope in them for anybody.
The difference is definitely not to be found in the fact that those who like the Tarr films cannot see their depressing side. It may appear as though the difference in the appreciation of these films is to be found in the personal attitude of the appreciator, whether or not he or she likes this particular atmosphere. This could be the case indeed, but to argue for this seriously, we would have to make a psychological survey of the different viewers of the Tarr films. Not to mention that the discrepancy between national and international appreciation definitely cannot be explained by this psychological factor, unless we claim that international critics like more depressive films than most of their Hungarian colleagues.
We could also say that probably the image Tarr makes of the world, which is composed of sceneries that vividly remind us of the Hungarian landscape, is offensive to someone living in Hungary and having very different everyday experiences. The only real experience a foreigner may have of Hungary, on the other hand, may be what he or she can see in these films, so he or she may not find the films in any way offensive, not living in Hungary, and may consider only the aesthetic quality of the films. This claim is also not entirely ungrounded, although no official explicit statements that I know of can corroborate it. In private, many people have this view, and some of Tarr’s own statements may support this stance. When in an interview he was told that his films are often about ugly landscapes and ugly people, he said: ‘That is my nation.’5 It is well known that Tarr was nominated in 2002 for the highest national decoration which is awarded by the government, which, conservative and nationalist at the time, rejected Tarr’s nomination. He obtained the decoration a year later, when another government was in power. This shows that even though the Tarr films can in no way be regarded as political, there exists a view that identifies their radically negative attitude with an opinion expressed about the nation. And on this view the national sentiment overrules aesthetic quality.
Someone could also argue that, after all, foreign critics are not unanimous either in highly appreciating Tarr; there are just many more foreign critics than Hungarians, and those who like the Tarr films mainly work at high-prestige, high-visibility newspapers or film journals, just like their Hungarian colleagues, among whom those who like Tarr also usually work at the elite film magazines. According to this argument the reason why Tarr’s international reputation developed earlier than his national recognition is that this elite taste is stronger outside of Hungary than it is inside Hungary. This is also partly true. In Hungary Tarr has a very restricted audience, even among high-brow intellectuals, which in a small country such as Hungary means really just a handful of people.
Taking all of the above into account, we still need an explanation for Tarr’s outstanding international reputation.
One part of the answer could be that Tarr did not just make ‘interesting’ or ‘good’ films. He created an original version of stylistic features that are part of recognisable and important international art-film currents. Inexpressive acting and quasi-religious dialogues: Bresson; slowness and partly static compositions: Ozu, Bresson and Tarkovsky; long takes: Antonioni, Jancsó and Angelopoulos; complicated continuous camera movements: Resnais, Jancsó and Angelopoulos; self-reflective citations: Godard; representation of cruel human relations without psychology: Fassbinder. The first thing a critic with a taste for international art-film culture would see in Damnation at the end of the 1980s was that this film reached back to the great period of modernist art cinema, but was not a follower of any single current. It created a style that was familiar yet never seen before.
The other element is the ‘added value’ to this stylistic mixture, which was threefold. First, an incredibly grim, depressed atmosphere; second, a landscape entirely unknown to the international audience yet very typical of a geographical and historical region: Eastern Europe; and third, a historical situation: all of this appeared when international art-film culture had just started to rediscover the value of these elements in the films made in regions far from Western Europe: Iran, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. Although Hungary was not part of these regions, it became exotic itself owing to the historical event of the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Thus Tarr was seen not as part of the good old European art cinema tradition, but as one of the first representatives of a globalised art cinema the centre of which was not France, Italy or Sweden any more, as had been the case from the beginning of film history, but countries outside of Europe or small European countries like Denmark and Hungary.
The third element is a consequence of all this. With Tarr’s films a very strange form of realism emerged in art cinema. This form is unprecedented in European modernist art cinema. It consists of an accumulation of the effects of the real to the point where the real becomes exaggerated and starts creating strong negative emotions. Even in Hungary there is only one film that could be remotely compared to it. This is a 1979 film by András Jeles, A kis Valentino, which has run a totally opposite path to Damnation. It has received no international recognition whatsoever, but it has become a widely appreciated Hungarian cult art movie. With very different stylistic tools, Jeles also created an exaggeratedly sinister picture of society which simultaneously had a strong realist effect, but with the help of its stylistic tools it rendered the realist image visionary, creating strong subjective emotional effects without ever resorting to highly fictional or conventionally melodramatic narrative motifs. When asked in an interview why his films are full of mud and dirt, full of people getting drunk and falling over, Tarr’s answer was: ‘I would create the same impression if I made a movie about some other people. This is our nation. This is our role. That is what I see.’6 This is a real world filtered through an admittedly subjective approach, which turns a specific social experience into a universal image about the world. Some films of Russian and Romanian cinema of the 2000s rely very much on the same structure, without Tarr’s radical stylistic solutions. This kind of realism is not a correct and balanced representation of a social environment. It is an excessively biased, emotionally intensified vision of it, which at the same time remains remarkably close to the ground and never turns into surrealism. Tarr’s utilising natural elements such as rain, wind and mud are good examples of this. Tarkovsky has often been mentioned in this book, and with reason. He also used these natural elements in his films, especially in his Russian films. However these elements have a very different role in the Tarkovsky films. They represent nature’s blessing, the manifestation of a transcendental world. In the Tarr films rain is what it is for those who have no shelter: it makes life even harder. Wind is what it is for the poor: it dries up wells; it makes moving forward even more difficult. Mud is what it is: the lack of a civilized road, something that doesn’t let people leave.
I claimed in the introduction that there is nothing Hungarian in Tarr’s films of the second period. But what these films accomplished in the 1990s was not unprecedented in Hungary. The cinema of Miklós Jancsó in the late 1960s and early 1970s became widely known and acclaimed for a very similar set of reasons. For about ten years – from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s – Jancsó’s cinema represented Hungarian cinema’s innovative spirit. Without entering into the details we can summarise the importance of Jancsó’s films of this period as offering a style that radicalised a well-known international art-film tendency, the long-take continuity style initiated by Antonioni in the 1950s, and at the same time integrated it into typical and recognisable national traditions. This latter process involved using topics from national history and representing a characteristically Hungarian landscape. For the international audience Jancsó’s films had an idiosyncratic regional atmosphere, expressed through the stylistic texture, which was one of the most prominent currents of international art cinema. On the other hand, the themes of these films – the turmoil of national history – were represented in a recognisable but unspecific way, so that they became atemporal and ahistorical, and could be transposed into very different national and historical contexts.
Tarr’s method is very similar, with some important differences. He took the same track Jancsó took twenty-five years before him. He radicalised the long-take style again, but in a period when it was not a current practice. He also depicted a landscape which was very typical of a region, yet remained unspecific as regards concrete space and historical time. Tarr managed to reach the same level of universality, not on the level of national history as did Jancsó, but on the level of sociological representation, without ever eliminating the specific regional atmosphere. This is the reason why one can share Tarr’s vision of Eastern Europe without having any knowledge about Eastern Europe, because Tarr’s vision brings something universal of this region into relief: the image of the underdog, the image of a helpless life.
Notes