The Turin Horse

2011 Director Béla Tarr

This film, in some ways, is the most extreme of Tarr's films and yet the simplest. Co-written, once again, by novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, The Turin Horse is a minimalist distillation of Tarr's cinema: little more than a man, a woman, a horse, a house, some wretched weather, and very few words. The narrative content is so slender that it's barely even an anecdote, yet the film has the disturbing resonance of some ancient imponderable fable.

It all begins in darkness, as a narrator intones the apocryphal tale of how Nietzsche went mad – supposedly after seeing a horse beaten in Turin. After this incident, the German philosopher lapsed forever more into silence. The punchline: "No one knows what happened to the horse".
Thereafter, it's as if the film – indeed, the whole world – turns to near-silence. The story is told with few words but strong images, shot in long, sinuously executed takes.

This is a film of uncertainties – and because there's nothing solid to grasp in the narrative, what we cling to is the texture of the film itself. We become attentive to the ritualistic repetition of actions, to the prowling camera moves that map out the contours of this enclosed but oddly elastic universe, and to the eerie sound design – along with Mihaly Vig's creaky, dirge-like score, a ghastly three-note refrain has been mixed eerily into the sound of the wind itself, not just hauntingly but fit to drive you mad.

Shot in ascetically beautiful black and white by Fred Kelemen, this could almost be a documentary about 19th-century peasant life at its most challenging. But there's a mysterious metaphysical resonance about The Turin Horse that makes for the enigmatic numinousness of a Kafka parable. This is cinema so spare and silent it's on the verge of being Trappist cinema – and that is eloquence indeed.

The Man From London

2007 Director Béla Tarr

This is a dark philosophical drama by Hungarian director Béla Tarr. Although similar in style to his previous films this one explores new directions.

A  switchman at a sea port, witnesses a murder from his watch tower. He had reached a point in life where he was content to embrace loneliness while turning a blind eye to the inevitable decay that surrounds him. Upon bearing witness the murder, however, the he is forced to wrestle with such profound issues as punishment, mortality, and the sin of complicity in a crime he didn't even commit.

As with Tarr's other films the long held shots, slow tracking, long observant vistas unfold gracefully before the eye. The environment is claustrophobic and the mood sombre and menacing. Curiously, though, the film was made in Hungarian and then dubbed into an odd mixture of French and English. Quite why an English Police Inspector would be investigating a murder on French soil is not explained. This dual language aspect gives the film a surreal quality that is a departure from his previous starkly realistic films. Well worth watching, especially the very long sequence involving the murder itself, where the camera swings slowly from one side of the docked vessel to the other like a pendulum clock as events unfold on both sides of the vessel unaware of each other.

Werckmeister Harmonies

2000 Director Bela Tarr

This is Bela Tarr's follow up to his seven-hour epic Satantango. This elegant, haunting work is about the cycles of violence that have dogged Eastern European history.This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain, which is surrounded by nothing but frost.

Jancos is a wide-eyed innocent who works as an occasional postal worker and as a caretaker. He marvels at the miracles of creation, from the planets rotating in the heavens to the animals on earth. One fatal day, a circus featuring jars full of medical anomalies and a massive dead whale entombed in a corrugated metal trailer visits this depressed town. Another more sinister attraction is a shadowy figure dubbed "The Prince," whose nihilist rants incite the town's disaffected to riot. Tension in the town builds until, after one of The Prince's hate-filled speeches, throngs of angry men with blunt instruments ransack and brutalize a men's hospital ward. When the dust clears, lives are irrevocably changed.

Bela Tarr employs all of his groundbreaking techniques that made Satantango so unique. Long tracking shots, long holds on scene after the action has ceased. The only criticism I have is that the violence in the hospital scene is not convincing without the commensurate sound that would have been there in real life. A mob of enraged men is loud and vocal. I admit that the silent angry march was eerie and menacing but silent violence isn't. It's just odd. The way the tables are turned on poor Jancos is unexpected but it's a beautifully cynical twist to the end of a captivating film.

Kontroll

2004 Director Nimrod Antal

This is Nimród Antal debut film. A journey into the Budapest underground. Superficially reminiscent of Luc Besson's Subway, this is a much darker tale.

Set in the Budapest subway system it deals with the lives of a team of ticket inspectors, their trials and tribulations with stroppy customers and their interactions with the denizens of this subterranean world. At the outset their chief remarks that the number suicides,or jumpers, is rising. The team leader of a motley crew of inspectors suspects that the rise is not what it seems and eventually confronts the serial killer with a breathtaking outcome.

The films starts quite oddly with a personal appearance of the real chief of the underground system reading a disclaimer to the effect that the Budapest ticket inspectors are not at all as portrayed and that their transport system is quite safe. That aside, this is a very well made film placing a dysfunctional team into extraordinary situations. I think it benefits a second viewing. Antal manages to generate an uncomfortably real feeling of menace when dealing with the protagonist and the revealing chase sequence packs a punch that will make you sit up.

Damnation

1988 Director Bela Tarr

Bela Tarr began his career making social realist domestic dramas, similar to the work of John Cassavettes. The feature before Damnation, Almanac of Fall, showed Tarr moving toward a more visually stylized form of filmmaking. With Damnation, the first of his collaborations with novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Tarr adopts a formally rigorous style, featuring long takes and slow tracking shots of the bleak landscape that surrounds the characters.

Shot in black-and-white, Damnation tells the story of a depressed man in love with a married woman who sings at the local bar. She dreams of becoming famous, but she herself embodies all of his hopes and dreams. He is offered smuggling work by the bartender but eventually decides to offer the job to the singer's husband. This gets the husband out of the way for a while, but things don't go as he plans. There's a big, drunken dance, which everyone in town attends. Afterwards, one betrayal falls upon another, leaving him in despair, alienated from all of humanity.

This film laid the groundwork for Tarr's next collaboration with Krasznahorkai, Satantango, a seven-hour film which they spent years developing, and which many consider Tarr's masterpiece.

Sátántangó

1994 Director Béla Tarr

This is Tarr's epic seven and a half hour long film dealing with the dissolution of a farming commune following the collapse of the communist regime and with it the subsidies that kept this community alive.It is adapted from a novel by Laszlo Karsznahorkai and took two full years to film. The story is presented through a series of chapters of varying lengths presented in a tangoesque sequence. Hence the name "Satan's Tango".

Tarr employs a series of very long shots, some up to 20 minutes in duration and a variety of techniques to make the viewer feel present in the scene. In some instances the shot is static with action being heard off screen only. In others a shot is held on a character for 5 minutes after the action is complete. After spending so long in the company of these characters the viewer can not fail but to empathise with their plight.

A stunning film and well worth the effort although it can easily be watched chapter by chapter without detracting from the overall experience.

Hukkle

2002 Director György Pálfi

This film defies classification. It is an exquisite example of perfect cinematography. With no dialogue of any kind the viewer is taken on a tour of life in a rural Hungarian village where all is not as it at first appears. A cart driver spies on a young shepherdess. An old woman picks dainty white flowers. A couple excitedly watch their pigs mate. The men folk play skittles. An idyll of tranquil life. The central character is a young policeman who gradually becomes aware of a sinister conspiracy within the village. He contemplates taking action, though he knows it will rock the town to its foundations.

The real skill in this film is that you reach the same conclusions as him at exactly the same time, which is no mean feat on the part of the director considering the complete lack of dialogue.

Punctuating these vignettes is the recurring hiccuping of an old man, who you realise by the end of the film is as aware of the goings on as you have just become.

This is a film I never tire of seeing. There has been a great deal of effort made to make each shot perfect. From the opening snake sequence to the slow motion shot of the jet flying under the bridge, this is a film that should be studied by all those aspiring to good camera work. I am unable to flaw any of it.