In his newest film The Man from London Tarr exchanged the humid and rainy Hungarian wasteland for the wintry sun of Corsica, but his followers still listen to the author’s unpleasant sounds, which come into the muddy space of each shot and destroy our insides



In an interview with Susan Sontag, she says that she has seen the seven-hour-long film Satan's Tango by Bela Tarr fifteen times without a pause and was never bored with it. However, you do not watch Tango, you dive into it. To watch is indeed an ecstatic experience. In his newest film The Man from London Tarr exchanged the humid and rainy Hungarian wasteland for the wintry sun of Corsica, but his followers still listen to the author’s unpleasant sounds, which come into the muddy space of each shot and destroy our insides, ranging from Kornel Mundracz (Johanna) to Benedek Fliegauf (Dealer) and Attila Janisch (After the Day Before). Nevertheless, Tarr’s influence is more on the formal side and spiced with the authors’ morbid fascination with death, like when in Fliegeauf’s film a solarium becomes the hero’s coffin, as well as the archetypal choreography of hopelessness and fissure that echoes through the semi-darkness of the hospital’s hallway and rooms (see the introductory scene of Dealer with the coarse monologue of the fried patient). In the same way, Janisch’s almost deformed landscapes transform his film into the Hungarian version of Van Sant’s Gerry. Therefore, it is not surprising that both of these directors claim Bela Tarr as their role model (Van Sant said that the satanic Hungarian completely bewitched him and inspired him to do the trilogy that he started with Gerry). Tarr’s influences in Mundracz’s Johanna are visible in fake prophets and self-proclaimed messiahs (Irimias, Petrina) when the hero, after waking up from a coma, starts healing other terminal patients with erotic touches.

Unlike Tarr, who was never very fond of interpreting his films as political allegories, Szabolcs Hajdu is the only director in this program who flirts with the Hungarian political mainstream, even though because of his masochism and fascination with bodies he is no less innocent than dark the offspring of new Hungarian film when he exchanges Tarr’s mud on the hero’s palms with gymnasts’ chalk. This chalk is a colorful transition from the dark and humid landscapes of Hungarian films to its lighter tones, so the interiors in Agnes Kocis’s eccentric film remind us more of Kaurismäki. However, that still does not mean that we have found ourselves in fresh Hungarian air, as is ironically alluded to in the title of this film (since Lynch’s Inland Empire there has not been a more bizarre use of Nina Simone’s song). Similarly, György Pálfi’s feature debut is set in the same ambiance as Janisch’s film (Midsummer Night in Pannonian Village). The critics have described his mis en scene as a screwball version of Bruno Dumont (Humanite), even though author’s hiccupping (Hukkle) is much more effective than his notorious Taxidermy, which honestly made us yawn. In his debut, besides hiccupping onomatopoeic elements include snoring, birds’ singing and cows’ bells. Taxidermy is replaced by toxicology. Only words are missing. Not even Pálfi’s fake earthquake has stopped the blissful ecstasy of Hungarian author film. (Dragan Rubeša)