Szenvedely (Passion)

Gyorgy Feher - 1998
The late Gyorgy Feher’s 1998 Passion is usually mentioned, when at all, as an addendum to discussions of the work of Bela Tarr. The two collaborated, they shared a nationality, a style, an approach to the cinema and to life. It would perhaps be perverse not to discuss them together. Indeed, that the more famous Tarr can help introduce, and in a rare screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival curate, encounters with Feher’s work is surely a good thing. This all, of course, leads to the obvious point that Tarr’s presence must not lead us to ignore shadings of, and even quite fundamental, differences between the two Hungarian auteur’s works. Slight differences of style and subject-matter, devices used by one but not the other, can lead to quite different ideas and world created by a cinema. In the case of Tarr and Feher’s Passion, their differences can help to deepen our understanding of both artists’ works.
Would it be impossible for Bela Tarr to remake, or rather attempt another adaption from the source material of, The Postman Always Rings Twice? Clearly not; Tarr worked on Passion’s script and the aesthetic of, to put it vulgarly, slow and long takes, here fits the story very well. Feher also places the action, of an adulterous couple’s attempts to knock off the lady’s husband for freedom and finances, in a setting we know from Tarr. Filthy barrooms, muddy streets, crumbling stonework and faces filled with cross-lit crevices and misery. All dwelt upon in huge (and often mobile) takes, the audience drinking in the obscene broth of bad breath, befouled whisky, sweated stubble, and misogyny.
The aesthetic, shard by Feher and Tarr, creates an atmosphere that is a whole cinema of its won. What seemed especially clear to me in Passionwas the weight the aesthetic gives to quotidities, rather sordid and pathetic events. If the ellipsis and reticent innuendo of Lubitsch and Hitchcock seem to sweep over the top of life (and who is to say the surface is not also the deepest), heavy takes of deliberate movements (Passion perhaps a little elegant, more shaky than certainly later Tarr) takes the world onto its shoulders. Gallows humour in this ugliness abounds, as does a sense of inevitable fate and likely misery, of inevitable punishment by a God retributive and never redemptive. Does it aestheticize a tortured existence? Passion certainly throws up some remarkable black and white imagery, rain and the human face, that ‘beautiful’ is far too prettified a word for. This isn’t an ‘ecstatic truth’ (the image Herzog has enjoyed inhumanely and masochistically circling around) because table truth is, after the death of God, a lie; but it certainly is ecstatic in some way, like a thunderbolt.
These questions apply more to Passion than to Tarr’s works, because the former is more obviously open to charges of aestheticism. His images, inkeeping with his attempt to make the film look as though a mysterious relic, are softer, with a greater sensitivity of tones that Tarr’s. This leads to overexposure, often on faces, and the blatantly non-realistic ‘whiting out’ of areas of the screen. This is an abstraction, in the sense that the how the image is given to us is foregrounded as much as what is being portrayed.
It is this slight removal from everyday life, almost a magical element, that I feel separates Feher’s Passion from any of Tarr’s works while shining a light on both. The fact is that Tarr has not yet adapted The Postman Always Rings Twice. And for all the formal differences from mainstream Hollywood cinema, Feher’s Passion is an adaption; each take just plays out twenty times longer. Giving a summary of a few lines to each scene would reveal quite strict, classical narrative. The images, as mentioned softer than Tarr’s, call to mind 1930’s Hollywood, as does the universal nature of the settings. The rooms and cars seem less rooted in a particular time and space than the locale of, say, Santantango, we have less of the muddy streets or distinct etiquettes of place. It would take little to move Passion to the small town America of Cain’s novel.
This is a kind of abstraction that Tarr does not deal in. Certainly, Satantango has a mythic, enclosed quality, or the farmhouse of his latest, The Turin Horse, has an existence in a mist that calls to mind purgatory. But in Tarr we have at first a temporally and geographically precise setting, that only then takes on a mythic, (anti-)theological resonance. In Feher’s Passion, the feeling and the weight of the image comes before the placing of the content. What we find in Passion is more primarily a discourse on the image, on the power of light and shadow, than Tarr’s cinema, which is not implausibly a radical development of the neo-realist tradition. Of course Feher’s film and the works of Tarr are deeply similar; but slight changes of emphasis can pull the mind into most distinct shapes.