Bela
Tarr need it be said? is
Hungary's leading avant-garde, experimental
filmmaker, and is considered in some quarters
to be the top cult director of the past
decade.
For
who else but Bela Tarr would spend three
years (1991-94) trying to bring Laszlo
Krasznahorkai's 1985 novel "Satantango"
("Satan's Tango") to the screen
in an hypnotic seven-and-a-half-hour tour-de-force?
And who else but the Hungarian visionary
would patiently spend another four years
(1996-2000) on Werckmeister Harmoniak
(The Werckmeister Harmonies),
a two-hour-plus screen version of Krasznahorkai's
1989 novel "The Melancholy Of Resistance?"
Asked at the Budapest Festival of Hungarian
Films as to why he has been collaborating
with Krasznahorkai on four productions
over the last 12 years, Tarr shrugged
and said, "We complement each other."
Krasznahorkai,
born 1954 in Gyula, studied copyright
law and literature at the universities
in Szeged and Budapest, spent his socialist
days living and taking odd jobs in towns
across Hungary. Then, at 30, he wrote
Satan's Tango and became a freelance writer.
Bela Tarr, born in 1955 in Pecs, made
several amateur films, graduated from
the Budapest Film Academy (1981), worked
at the Bela Balazs Studio and was a founding
member of short-lived Tarsulas Film
Studio (1981-85).
He subsequently met Krasznahorkhai to
collaborate as a screenwriter-director
team on Damnation (1987),
the short feature The Last Boat
(1989), Satan's Tango (1994),
and now The Werckmeister Harmonies.
Damnation, Satan's
Tango and The Werckmeister Harmonies
form a stylistic trilogy. All photographed
by Gabor Medvigy in black and white,
they come across as apocalyptic parables
pegged to downbeat, isolated, film-noir
settings: a mud-splattered nightclub
called Titanic Bar in Damnation, an
abandoned agricultural machinery plant
in Satan's Tango, and a provincial town
on the frosty Hungarian Plain in The
Werckmeister Harmonies.
In
each tale a stranger happens upon the
scene as a conman 'Messiah' to stir
things up. In The Werckmeister Harmonies,
the arrival of a great stuffed whale
in a circus tent draws crowds from far
and wide and tension mounts with
the presence of the mysterious 'Prince'
hiding behind the whale.
Ron
Holloway
