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This year's Toronto International Film Festival focussed its spotlight on Hungarian director BéIa Tarr, showing six of his feature films. As part of my thesis work I watched all the films and interviewed the director about his career; my specific interest is in his most recent movie, Satantango (1994), but taken together the films trace a trajectory guided by stylistic, social and semantic changes through the last twenty years of filmmaking history. The point of this article is to introduce the films and bring up these issues.
The subject matter of 1'arr's films is misery in inter-personal relationship, depicted with an unflinching intimacy; this closeness is offset by formal and structural elements that provide a distance from narratives that would otherwise seem overwhelmed by despair, and that point towards political, psychological, and metaphysical interpretations of these problems that devastate the characters. In Tarr's debut film. Family (Wasp's) Nest (1977), made independently at the age of 22, this dialectic can be seen in a crude form that is both appropriate and startling. By the time of Satantango, this dialectic becomes a paradox; it is his most empathetic, yet most rigorously distanced film.
Family Nest, The Outsider (1980), and Prefab People (1982) share the characteristics of the "Budapest School", a group of young directors in the 70's who "struck out against the vestiges of literary and stage traditions with a group of films that employed a considerable degree of improvisation, and non-professional actors" '. Tarr's films of this period also feature such verité devices as hand-held cameras, long takes, rough editing and black-and-white stock (except for The Outsider, which is in colour). The characters are confused contemporary Hungarians, living in cramped apartments and working demeaning jobs in the city, lashing out at one another in cruelty and ignorance. The success of these first three films is, 1 think, directly related to the structural means Tarr uses to contextualize and distance the events he shows, avoiding the pathos and self-indulgence that similar directors (like Cassavetes, Tarr's favourite American filmmakcr)2 often (all into. Of these methods, the two most important are the juxtaposition of scenes of wildly varying tone, and the generalizations about society that arise from the specific characters.
Early on in Family Nest, there is a...