Bela Tarr - 2000
The takes are much longer than damnation, huge pieces. There is also a hell of a lot of movement, almost incredibly slow waltzes, as the camera in its staely manner pirrouhettes, circles as sometimes though tying the characters (this is all in that great first shot). There is a sense of following around rooms often, through the house, from one car to another. Also we track and walk here. This can be over the shoulder, or in one memorable shot quite close to faces, along the street.
This perhaps has more elan than ‘Damnation’, with the themes of violence, the apocalyptic and fantastic, more immediately striking, slimy, unearthly images.
Themes of the artist, compromise, the power of fantasy to dominate, condescend, and raise.
Showing posts with label Hungary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hungary. Show all posts
Saturday, 6 August 2011
Damnation
Bela Tarr - 1988
Those long takes, stiller here. The big black and white contrasts. Similar images to later Tarr pop up, dancing and so on. The people can appear like ants, but incredibly heavy ones. There is a preference for deep framings, often with part of the frame obscured by a wall, or bars. There is often someone watching someone else, hidden. Also note how it can occasionally go very white, airy, ghostly.
Tarr’s slow camera movements are perhaps partly to do with making the camera as unobtrusive as possible. Fast tracks, as well as difficult, would draw attention, while the either imperceptible or very slow movements, slower than the action, gives the sense of slow withdrawals.
The themes are pretty existential; note this was in ’87. Perhaps a bit more abstract, and without the humour of 90’s Tarr, but most pieces in place.
Those long takes, stiller here. The big black and white contrasts. Similar images to later Tarr pop up, dancing and so on. The people can appear like ants, but incredibly heavy ones. There is a preference for deep framings, often with part of the frame obscured by a wall, or bars. There is often someone watching someone else, hidden. Also note how it can occasionally go very white, airy, ghostly.
Tarr’s slow camera movements are perhaps partly to do with making the camera as unobtrusive as possible. Fast tracks, as well as difficult, would draw attention, while the either imperceptible or very slow movements, slower than the action, gives the sense of slow withdrawals.
The themes are pretty existential; note this was in ’87. Perhaps a bit more abstract, and without the humour of 90’s Tarr, but most pieces in place.
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Szegenylegenyek (The Round-Up)
Miklos Jancso - 1966
This is really a great piece of simple filmaking; simple in that it is immensely complex, worlds and difficulties.
The camera, with a great wide frame (2.35:1), is pretty economical in its movements, is calm, controlled. This perhaps is what most contributes to the almost underwater (but clear), slow pace. The camera almost exclusively follows people, without obvious autonomy.
The wide screen us used to great effect. Two qualities of the image strike; firstly, the sheer whiteness of it; the pale, not overexposed, but not blacks. Also interesting is how much of the screen is filled with 'blank'; usually white walls. The image is balanced, but often what is on either side of the screen is different.
Jancso seems to want to avoid the obvious horizontals one might expect. He is known for small figures in the distance, almost abstract shapes, but in this film I found more of a closer focus, delibertely unexact and unsymmetrical (though balanced, one way or another) shapes. Their is no prettification of the image. Their are interesting shapes made by the square flanks of the armies and so on. We very much look forward to seeing, I hope 'The Red and The White'.
The calm oppression, not abstracted but made personal, is revealed by sudden turns, realisations that the execuation will take place, when some hope is achieved. The power is exercised slowly, without hurry, letting a thought of escape, then calmly extinguishing. Why no big surprises? The underlying slow atmosphere perhaps, the unclear narrative that avoids identification. Their are shocks, but they always seem to dawn, rather than strike.
The end is powerful because it doesn't seem to be designed to shock, though it does. It doesn't draw out the misery, is so blatant as a reverse, it discombobulates from the way a classical narrative would introduce such a shock. Then the credits come, and the music hammers.
This is really a great piece of simple filmaking; simple in that it is immensely complex, worlds and difficulties.
The camera, with a great wide frame (2.35:1), is pretty economical in its movements, is calm, controlled. This perhaps is what most contributes to the almost underwater (but clear), slow pace. The camera almost exclusively follows people, without obvious autonomy.
The wide screen us used to great effect. Two qualities of the image strike; firstly, the sheer whiteness of it; the pale, not overexposed, but not blacks. Also interesting is how much of the screen is filled with 'blank'; usually white walls. The image is balanced, but often what is on either side of the screen is different.
Jancso seems to want to avoid the obvious horizontals one might expect. He is known for small figures in the distance, almost abstract shapes, but in this film I found more of a closer focus, delibertely unexact and unsymmetrical (though balanced, one way or another) shapes. Their is no prettification of the image. Their are interesting shapes made by the square flanks of the armies and so on. We very much look forward to seeing, I hope 'The Red and The White'.
The calm oppression, not abstracted but made personal, is revealed by sudden turns, realisations that the execuation will take place, when some hope is achieved. The power is exercised slowly, without hurry, letting a thought of escape, then calmly extinguishing. Why no big surprises? The underlying slow atmosphere perhaps, the unclear narrative that avoids identification. Their are shocks, but they always seem to dawn, rather than strike.
The end is powerful because it doesn't seem to be designed to shock, though it does. It doesn't draw out the misery, is so blatant as a reverse, it discombobulates from the way a classical narrative would introduce such a shock. Then the credits come, and the music hammers.
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.
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.
American Torso
Gabor Body - 1975
Gabriel Body’s 196? American Torso is made up of a series instructions, demands, commands, father’s voices. These words, or actions, are performed by a figure with a disregard for, though they are always directed towards, an other. This series of one-channel communications lines plot from character to character that fail to intersect, combine to form a film that speaks a truth, in its disconnected stabs, of modern warfare and domination.
The play, and the notion of theatre is crucial here, takes place during the American civil war, where it can be established that some kind of technology of long-distance sighting mechanisms is being pioneered. Opening the film, and repeated throughout, are views of people as ‘targets’, between cross-hairs. Others aren’t interlocurs or part of one’s life; they are a shape in a line of sight, for words, and perhaps bullets, to be fired at.
The film neither has a narrative, nor is it anything traditionally called realism. A theatrical distancing is made by the disjointed delivery of lines, and intrusions of incongruous references to the cowboy and other such mild absurdities. It could nearly be called a collection of skits, collected by locale rather than time. The film stock is deliberately torn or flickering in overexposure, the settings are unrealistic. I mean unrealistic in that they employ a theatrical, rather than cinematically real, space; for bar location is a single room separated by spotlights that into a series of non-communicative groups. This idea of separate locations, with a failure to connect between in any meaningful way, is a key thematic of the film. What Body is, through cinematic means, is to juxtapose and create a kind of communication by holding together to the light of the film the two separate elements. This put me in mind of Bela Tarr, who curated American Torso’s recent screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and declares himself deeply affected by the work. Tarr uses few visual cues, overlappings or moves across planes, to indicate depth. The world is of separate, uncommunicative planes. Yet his camera’s framings, and often his depth of field, allow the two separate elements to be seen together, to mediate and connect with each other in a single image. Perhaps cinema is the spider that Tarr frequently uses as a motif, and is also invoked in American Torso; imperceptible, translucent webs are woven across the world.
Lines, imposed non-diagetically across the environment at crucial stages of American Torso, mark paths of connection and separation. Along words fired there, Walt Whitman phrases and Karl Marx theories, one rarely feels that a complete geometrical shape will be made. The lines don’t come together to make beautiful shapes, or run perfectly parallel. They splay out in all directions as if from shotgun. Body does not give us particularly beautiful or totally clear images; his rfrequent cuts to close-up seem designed to break up the smooth running of ‘pretty pictures’.
This harsh view of relations, with humanist or revolutionary tracts working as commands in the military environment, gives the film a peculiarly modern sense of chaos, of miniature power struggle carried out in every word and deed. Yet I wouldn’t call this a brutal film; harsh, maybe, but with a sense of curiosity and even tenderness for its figures. The individuals at once controlled by and part of a system, an abstract conspiracy, still have soft skins that put me in mind of Jacques Rivette. If Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient, Bandes Des Quatres, or Haut Bas Fragile worlds are of the interplay of the sensitive soul and their search for narrative and goodness), Body has pre-empted Rivette in a subtly different way. Body’s film, rather than being concerned with victims, displays the bad guys, the ones who consider themselves to be running the conspiracy (they are, of course, as entrapped as any). His military men have a complacency, a theatrical brazenness about the slaughter. Yet they still fail to deliver a true narrative, military technology is not understood by its consequences, the slaughter still proceeds. Like Rivette’s seekers, they search for a narrative; the difference is that Body’s figures have fooled themselves that they have found this key. Picked up like loose military ‘intelligence’, swatting around in the dark of the midday American sun, American Torso is fine-tuned to an erratic frequency broadcasting a version of the truth.
Gabriel Body’s 196? American Torso is made up of a series instructions, demands, commands, father’s voices. These words, or actions, are performed by a figure with a disregard for, though they are always directed towards, an other. This series of one-channel communications lines plot from character to character that fail to intersect, combine to form a film that speaks a truth, in its disconnected stabs, of modern warfare and domination.
The play, and the notion of theatre is crucial here, takes place during the American civil war, where it can be established that some kind of technology of long-distance sighting mechanisms is being pioneered. Opening the film, and repeated throughout, are views of people as ‘targets’, between cross-hairs. Others aren’t interlocurs or part of one’s life; they are a shape in a line of sight, for words, and perhaps bullets, to be fired at.
The film neither has a narrative, nor is it anything traditionally called realism. A theatrical distancing is made by the disjointed delivery of lines, and intrusions of incongruous references to the cowboy and other such mild absurdities. It could nearly be called a collection of skits, collected by locale rather than time. The film stock is deliberately torn or flickering in overexposure, the settings are unrealistic. I mean unrealistic in that they employ a theatrical, rather than cinematically real, space; for bar location is a single room separated by spotlights that into a series of non-communicative groups. This idea of separate locations, with a failure to connect between in any meaningful way, is a key thematic of the film. What Body is, through cinematic means, is to juxtapose and create a kind of communication by holding together to the light of the film the two separate elements. This put me in mind of Bela Tarr, who curated American Torso’s recent screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and declares himself deeply affected by the work. Tarr uses few visual cues, overlappings or moves across planes, to indicate depth. The world is of separate, uncommunicative planes. Yet his camera’s framings, and often his depth of field, allow the two separate elements to be seen together, to mediate and connect with each other in a single image. Perhaps cinema is the spider that Tarr frequently uses as a motif, and is also invoked in American Torso; imperceptible, translucent webs are woven across the world.
Lines, imposed non-diagetically across the environment at crucial stages of American Torso, mark paths of connection and separation. Along words fired there, Walt Whitman phrases and Karl Marx theories, one rarely feels that a complete geometrical shape will be made. The lines don’t come together to make beautiful shapes, or run perfectly parallel. They splay out in all directions as if from shotgun. Body does not give us particularly beautiful or totally clear images; his rfrequent cuts to close-up seem designed to break up the smooth running of ‘pretty pictures’.
This harsh view of relations, with humanist or revolutionary tracts working as commands in the military environment, gives the film a peculiarly modern sense of chaos, of miniature power struggle carried out in every word and deed. Yet I wouldn’t call this a brutal film; harsh, maybe, but with a sense of curiosity and even tenderness for its figures. The individuals at once controlled by and part of a system, an abstract conspiracy, still have soft skins that put me in mind of Jacques Rivette. If Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient, Bandes Des Quatres, or Haut Bas Fragile worlds are of the interplay of the sensitive soul and their search for narrative and goodness), Body has pre-empted Rivette in a subtly different way. Body’s film, rather than being concerned with victims, displays the bad guys, the ones who consider themselves to be running the conspiracy (they are, of course, as entrapped as any). His military men have a complacency, a theatrical brazenness about the slaughter. Yet they still fail to deliver a true narrative, military technology is not understood by its consequences, the slaughter still proceeds. Like Rivette’s seekers, they search for a narrative; the difference is that Body’s figures have fooled themselves that they have found this key. Picked up like loose military ‘intelligence’, swatting around in the dark of the midday American sun, American Torso is fine-tuned to an erratic frequency broadcasting a version of the truth.
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Satantango
Bela Tarr - 1994
It is, of course, a masterpiece. Let's look at particular visual style. Tarr in fact quite often compartmentalises his images, quite perpendicular (and horizontal), with little overlapping. This means, though there is usually depth of field in the lens, that their are a lack of depth cues. This leads to pictoral abstraction, wonderful, almost comic plays with scale and so on. Their are often only two planes in the staging, and movement across them passes quickly.
As for the film, this is clearly low-key, with the particular tone of the sky used so as to avoid overexposure. With the dispersing clouds light is rarely harsh. Perhaps their is a certain degree of sidelighting, to accentuate the shadows. Their is, I suspect, a filter (red or blue?) used here. Also note how frequently the pallette changes; in the pub, well-lit, for one remarkable shot, the characters appear as merely sillouhettes.
Talking about depth makes it sound like the camera is still; indeed it is, for long periods, but there is also a lot a lot of precise, nerver unsteady, movement. This circles, reframes, in its stately manner, in the long, long, beautiful and long, takes.
Despite what this may sound like, I find this very different from Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky essentially pans and scans, using the camera to capture an event. Tarr's camera is autonomous for long periods, moving past static people, avoiding the source of dialogue (which Tarkovsky obviously does as well), moving on its own way. The above comments on depth are more to do with when it settles in.
This sounds like Tarr is after 'the' perfect image, a kind of Herzogian ecstacy. But this kind of postcardism doesn't seem at all Tarr's point; he is after 'a' image, 'a' framing, rather. He isn't trying to aestheticise what he sees, but just capture it in a certain way.
Nevertheless, for all the movements in the quagmire, Tarr's camera has a seperation from its village that raises it above any talk of 'realism', or indeed Tarkovsky (excepting 'Andrei Rubelev'?). The village is a slightly unreal place, almost abstract, a universal, not in a negative way, but in a king of Kafka-esque way. This is art, not reality, to put it in a vulgar way. The rythmic repetition of lines, the lack of an outside world, the circularity of the place, all enhance this feeling.
The 'action' is a creation of the world, several individual stories woven into a loose, and not entirely clear, one, about false promises, redemption, people's unsuitability for utopia, feat of utopia, misery, sordidness, laughter. It requires closer attention than I surely paid it; for now I can say that Tarr seems to possess a deep intelligence, an ability to balance various aspects of the juncture.
The remarkable way that we watch people doing things, actually walking, not eliptically flying from location to location. The old stick is right; we have a real sense of time passing. But this isn't of a tense time; there is a world here we can enter, feel our way around, not worry about the next point of narrative.
This is blatantly one of the great films of the 90's, and a monument of recent cinema. I look forward very much to seeing it again.
It is, of course, a masterpiece. Let's look at particular visual style. Tarr in fact quite often compartmentalises his images, quite perpendicular (and horizontal), with little overlapping. This means, though there is usually depth of field in the lens, that their are a lack of depth cues. This leads to pictoral abstraction, wonderful, almost comic plays with scale and so on. Their are often only two planes in the staging, and movement across them passes quickly.
As for the film, this is clearly low-key, with the particular tone of the sky used so as to avoid overexposure. With the dispersing clouds light is rarely harsh. Perhaps their is a certain degree of sidelighting, to accentuate the shadows. Their is, I suspect, a filter (red or blue?) used here. Also note how frequently the pallette changes; in the pub, well-lit, for one remarkable shot, the characters appear as merely sillouhettes.
Talking about depth makes it sound like the camera is still; indeed it is, for long periods, but there is also a lot a lot of precise, nerver unsteady, movement. This circles, reframes, in its stately manner, in the long, long, beautiful and long, takes.
Despite what this may sound like, I find this very different from Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky essentially pans and scans, using the camera to capture an event. Tarr's camera is autonomous for long periods, moving past static people, avoiding the source of dialogue (which Tarkovsky obviously does as well), moving on its own way. The above comments on depth are more to do with when it settles in.
This sounds like Tarr is after 'the' perfect image, a kind of Herzogian ecstacy. But this kind of postcardism doesn't seem at all Tarr's point; he is after 'a' image, 'a' framing, rather. He isn't trying to aestheticise what he sees, but just capture it in a certain way.
Nevertheless, for all the movements in the quagmire, Tarr's camera has a seperation from its village that raises it above any talk of 'realism', or indeed Tarkovsky (excepting 'Andrei Rubelev'?). The village is a slightly unreal place, almost abstract, a universal, not in a negative way, but in a king of Kafka-esque way. This is art, not reality, to put it in a vulgar way. The rythmic repetition of lines, the lack of an outside world, the circularity of the place, all enhance this feeling.
The 'action' is a creation of the world, several individual stories woven into a loose, and not entirely clear, one, about false promises, redemption, people's unsuitability for utopia, feat of utopia, misery, sordidness, laughter. It requires closer attention than I surely paid it; for now I can say that Tarr seems to possess a deep intelligence, an ability to balance various aspects of the juncture.
The remarkable way that we watch people doing things, actually walking, not eliptically flying from location to location. The old stick is right; we have a real sense of time passing. But this isn't of a tense time; there is a world here we can enter, feel our way around, not worry about the next point of narrative.
This is blatantly one of the great films of the 90's, and a monument of recent cinema. I look forward very much to seeing it again.
Thursday, 16 June 2011
My Way Home (Igy Jottem)
Miklos Jancso - 1965
Jancso opertaes with such a free camera. Pretty long takes that haven't met a tripod, through the country, moving around it. Not interested in continuity for the sake of it, pretty much the defintion of pan and scan. Except here we are close-in, often staying near, to the faces. Movements far away, unidentified figures fighting, violence, usually start off near the camera before going away. The camera can circle around heads and characters. Often moves are motivated by a follow, but they are also often not. Complete autnomoy is not really the point, but a freedom is.
A key question is; 'when to cut?'. Jancso's takes here are obviously long by normal standards, but at the same time they're not really too long (perhaps this impression is enhanced by their lack of stillness). It seems that a cut occurs simply when an image has no more, now, to give us. There would just be a repetition if the idea. We, ultimately, cut when it seems that we should see something else. The question from this is; 'who does anything else'?
In this mis-en-scene opressors can pop in, without expectations of them. These aren't shocks though, rather the low-key nature has a kind if inevitability. The dread of the place, the random but omnipresent domination, effects the very environment so even the cows seem, with their weight and stubborness, malevolent.
This doesn't set us precisely in a narrative, but is also not abstract; their are no great messages, just, ultimately, an inconclusive search home.
Jancso opertaes with such a free camera. Pretty long takes that haven't met a tripod, through the country, moving around it. Not interested in continuity for the sake of it, pretty much the defintion of pan and scan. Except here we are close-in, often staying near, to the faces. Movements far away, unidentified figures fighting, violence, usually start off near the camera before going away. The camera can circle around heads and characters. Often moves are motivated by a follow, but they are also often not. Complete autnomoy is not really the point, but a freedom is.
A key question is; 'when to cut?'. Jancso's takes here are obviously long by normal standards, but at the same time they're not really too long (perhaps this impression is enhanced by their lack of stillness). It seems that a cut occurs simply when an image has no more, now, to give us. There would just be a repetition if the idea. We, ultimately, cut when it seems that we should see something else. The question from this is; 'who does anything else'?
In this mis-en-scene opressors can pop in, without expectations of them. These aren't shocks though, rather the low-key nature has a kind if inevitability. The dread of the place, the random but omnipresent domination, effects the very environment so even the cows seem, with their weight and stubborness, malevolent.
This doesn't set us precisely in a narrative, but is also not abstract; their are no great messages, just, ultimately, an inconclusive search home.
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