"Tarr is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers left on the planet."-Derek Elley, Variety
The Hungarian iconoclast Béla Tarr is on his way to becoming a new force in world cinema, his films generating an excitement rarely seen in today's ranks of jaded critics. Jonathan Rosenbaum, esteemed critic for the Chicago Reader; Susan Sontag, and Cahiers du cinéma, among others, have acclaimed him as one of the most important directors of the past twenty years. PFA is proud to present an entire retrospective of Tarr's work, featuring several new prints and two screenings of his legendary epic Satantango.
Our series charts Tarr's career from early social–realist pieces inspired by John Cassavetes, to the trancelike moods and prowling visual aesthetics of his later efforts, which have drawn comparisons to the works of his countryman Miklòs Jancsò, the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Greek Theo Angelopoulos. While influenced by the paintings of Breughel and the literature of Dostoevsky and Gogol, Tarr's work is most affected by his frequent collaborators, the composer Mihály Víg, whose hypnotic scores serve as liturgy and lament to the imagery, and the novelist László Krasznahorkai, who co–wrote three of Tarr's most recent films.
After leaving school in 1973, Tarr worked as an unskilled laborer and a janitor while making amateur films and documentaries. Admitted into the prestigious Béla Bélazs Studio in Budapest, he was able to complete his feature debut, Family Nest, in 1977. After a succession of hard–edged, documentary–like films about a working class continually thwarted by a society unable to provide either happiness or peace, Tarr branched out towards a more metaphysical approach, tackling the effects of alienation and despair on a culture still able to dream, but only barely. "We're heading for a catastrophe. It is the end of everything, but still, we must live....We must go towards something," a character from Tarr's 1984 film Autumn Almanac puts it, foreseeing the apocalyptic parables that the director would soon embrace. Sparkling through the madness, though, is a peculiarly Central European flair for dark, understated humor.
"The story is absolutely secondary," Tarr has written about his particular aesthetic, one diametrically opposed to most narrative–driven cinematic conceptions. "The film is about the landscape, the elements, and nature, about a unique world in which nothing remains." His is a cinema that takes what it finds from the wreckage of society, sifting through images from the abandoned edges, where one static, unblinking long take reveals more about the human condition than any year's worth of Hollywood narratives. His films relentlessly burrow into the everyday "undramatic" spaces that most films eliminate; mundane scenes of whispered conversations at night, drinking in taverns, or walking through rain are stretched out into almost biblical proportions, hypnotically explored and scrutinized until they become strangely, wondrously revelatory. No answers are given, no endings spoken. His later works' grainy black–and–white cinematography and brooding, almost palpable atmosphere of decay and melancholia seem exhumed from an unlived time, when cinema existed to tell not the tale but its undefinable, ephemeral mood.
-Jason Sanders, Assistant Film Notes Writer
