bela tarr – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse (2011)
Written by László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky

The world is dying. The world will die. This has been the world’s fate since before humans stood upright and began their intellectual evolution. The Turin Horse is a film about the brutal toil it is to be alive in this world, to experience death at all times, and to be able to do nothing about it. The world is going to die whether we are here for it or not. Eventually, billions of years from now, our sun will expand as it goes into its death throes and consume the inner worlds of our solar system. That is beyond the macro view; that is the omni view. On a smaller scale, we have the perpetuation of our species. Will one of us be able to observe this solar gargantuan devour our old homeworld from a safe distance, our species spread out across the Milky Way? That is something that feels very uncertain at this point in our history.

Movie Review – Werckmeister Harmonies

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
Written by László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky

Janos, a philosophical young man in a small isolated European town, arranges the patrons of a tavern one night in a simulation of the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth. He uses this to tell a story about a total eclipse of the Sun. When the orbiting bodies achieve this conjunction, he tells a brief fable:

The sky darkens, and then all goes dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful incomprehensible dusk, even the birds, the birds are too confused and go to roost. And then… Complete silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don’t know. For a total eclipse has come upon us…. But… No need to fear it is not over. For across the Sun’s glooming sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away… And the Sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth there slowly comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness.

With that, he walks out of the tavern, and the rest of the film unfolds as a realization of this story.

Movie Review – Sátántangó

Sátántangó (1994)
Written by Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai
Directed by Béla Tarr

Seven hours and thirty minutes. That’s what will stand out for most people when they learn about Sátántangó. That is certainly something that makes it unlike most films. A runtime that long feels overwhelming, and that’s the reason Béla Tarr made this movie. Based on the novel of the same name, the film’s structure is a piece of wonder modeled after the actual tango dance. Broken into twelve parts, the story does not move chronologically and follows the steps of the tango – six steps forward, six steps back. It’s a daunting cinematic challenge, but I found it a very fulfilling experience and felt things I never had before about films.

Movie Review – Damnation

Damnation (1988)
Written by Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai
Directed by Béla Tarr

You must remove any of your expectations when you sit down to watch a Béla Tarr film. He’s a filmmaker I’d heard of for years and even seen films influenced indirectly & directly by him. The Chinese film An Elephant Sitting Still by his late protege Hu Bo was one of them. But I’d never seen anything by Tarr himself. I decided to watch his four highest-rated movies, made during the second period of his career, where he changed his style and produced work that is considered some of the finest films ever made. These are definitive slow cinema stories in no hurry and use their plodding nature to emphasize some cruel truths about being human.