Had he not made the seven-hour-long Sotonski tango (1994) and excited the remaining members of the engaged modernist intelligentsia (such as Susan Sontag) with the “choreographed” allegory of Communism, the largest share of Béla Tarr’s opus would probably have remained unknown



Thanks to his scandalous avant-garde film Satan's Tango, international capitals still fight over Bela Tarr, the Hungarian pessimist’s films who only recently turned 50 (born in 1955), and made his first feature film, Family Nest (1977), at the age of twenty two and without any formal film education. After his debut in the form of a direct film, characterized by the darkness of the social margins and psychological naturalism, which was certainly too bitter for such a young man who had grown up under the protective wing of a collective utopia, Tarr enrolled in and successfully graduated from the film academy. An eccentric prone to descriptions of directly opposed states - moral chaos and dystopia, he paid the price of survival in the Hungarian cinema of that time. As we know, he survived within the Hungarian cinema and became as well, at the end of the satanic century for which he wrote the epitaph in his Tango, the most wanted author of international art house cinema.


When looking for the director’s thematic and poetic connections to his country’s cinema, many often remember Miklós Jancso’s Pannonian rhapsodies. However, due to dealing with the (meta)theme of time that is usually restricted by muddy and foggy plains with wandering people from the gutter, comparisons surpass national boundaries. Therefore, it is often said that Tarr is stylistically similar to Tarkovski. These associations are caused mainly by Tarr’s later works while his earlier films from the beginning of 1980s were characterized by social realism, such as The Outsider (1980) and The Prefab People (1982). In this earlier period the author embarked on his first adaptation of classic literature (TV-adaptation Macbeth, 1982) as well as on kammerspiel and Strindberg and Bergman-like themes (Almanac of Fall 1984). Up to that time Tarr was more prone to low-mimetic register, realistic ambiances, amateur actors and achromatic photography, but later he embarked on a psychological dissection of hypocrisy and intimacy. At the same time he tested the stylistic potential of color in typical bourgeois apartments. Human and social diabolism, as well as Tarr’s nihilism, got expressed to the fullest when the director joined forces with the writer László Krasznahorki and the two of them embarked on the final “Satanization” of the world.


In the first act of this decadent mission, called Damnation (1988), the main roles are played by the characters in a love triangle, the clientele of the suburban Titanic pub, as well as the rainy suburban waste land full of stray dogs and lonely people. Satan's Tango (1994), a faithful adaptation of Krasznahoraki’s novel, turns the rural landscape into a metaphysical one, which is ideal for a grandiose narrative simulation of tango (six steps forward, six steps back) and the protagonists’ prolonged swirl in a magic circle of “nowhere”. The film is filled with surprising scenes with amateur actors, extremely long shots, ominous background music, Mihaly Vigo’s music and expressive black and white photography. In spite of being unusually long, Tango managed to survive the competition of the equally expressive and anarchistic film Werckmeister Harmonies (2000, based on the novel Melancholy of Resistance) that talks about disintegration and destruction.


Until recently, this Hungarian pathologist of chaos had been preparing for a directing skirmish with the writer Georges Simenon’s work. It remains to be discovered whether this will be another skirmish involving an outstanding stylist with some new (universal) disharmonies. (Diana Nenadić)