BÉLA TARR AND ÁGNES HRANITZKY IN CONVERSATION
With András Bálint Kovács
András Bálint Kovács (ABK): Why did you choose this particular Simenon novel for the theme of your film?
Béla Tarr (BT): We first read the novel twenty years ago, and what we liked about it was that there’s someone sitting in a tower, always at night, the town is asleep, and this person sees. It’s about a switchman in a harbour town, who controls the railway traffic from high up. One night he becomes aware of two men in a scuffle, fighting over a suitcase. One of them falls into the sea, together with the suitcase. Maloin, the switchman, goes down to the shore and fishes out the suitcase. Inside it he finds fifty thousand pounds sterling.
ABK: His position is similar to that of the doctor in Satantango, isn’t it?
BT: A little, yes, but otherwise fundamentally different: the doctor documents the world.
ABK: But there is still, in both of them, some quality of being outside, a quality that can be found in many of your films.
BT: It’s loneliness, rather than being outside.
Ágnes Hranitzky (ÁH): The starting point of Prefab People was an article we read in Nök Lapja [a Hungarian women’s magazine]. A married couple are living on a housing estate with their two children, and one day the man just moves out and into the workers’ accommodation block opposite, and from then on he watches his family, and his family watch him. In the end we left this part out of the film. But this situation appealed to us even then.
BT: At the heart of the story, here is a lonely man who is completely cut off from the world, locked in a world of his own, and then something happens that elicits the possibility of some sort of change taking place. This is what is interesting, because this is almost every man’s fate. At one point he rebels, but then he realises that there is an order to life that he must accept, otherwise he will die. This is also what happens to Maloin. He recognises that he has to adapt to this order, and that he too will die. If the heroes of our films have anything in common, it is this. All our films are about the unacceptability of this order in which one is confined. This is why we see Maloin behind barred windows everywhere. He is in prison everywhere; even the sea cannot help him.
ABK: What is this order?
BT: Knowing your place; that the cards have been dealt. True drama is when there is more inside a man than he can live through. There’s more inside Maloin than he can run away from, and it’s my feeling that there a lot of people are like this. I’m not talking about social determination here because this inability can also come from within.
ABK: The location of your most recent films is on the border between the universal and the particular. Events play out in a recognisably eastern European world without, however, any concrete indicators of place or time. This recognisable, characteristic, but nevertheless abstract world becomes universal. With this film you have departed from such abstract, recognisable territory. Why is that?
BT: In this film we concentrate much more on internal processes. Regarding the exterior, it was filmed in Bastia [Corsica] and Pilisborosjenő [Hungary] but is supposed to take place in France. It should be seen as a performance on a set. This is not a landscape film in the way that Satantango was, although Maloin does have his own territories; except much more bleak, prison-like, and very few in number: the tower, the pub, and his home where he sleeps, and then again the tower, the pub, home. This is the order of his life. This is why there is so little of the external world, this is all that Maloin experiences of it: this is his world. And then one day he wakes up to the fact that he doesn’t want himself or his daughter to live like this.
ABK: Here I see a change of direction similar to that where Prefab People was followed by Almanac of Fall, where the world of the typical 1970s Hungarian housing estate suddenly disappeared, and we find ourselves in a wholly artificial, set-like interior, where only human relations have any importance, and whence everything tied to the concrete world has gone.
BT: Almanac of Fall is a good example: we actually wanted to complete it in one shot. The preceding three films followed one mode of storytelling. Of course, it was possible to make another five or six such films, but I’d lost interest in this. We’ve come to the end of a line, and now we want to move on. We’d preserved a lot of things, but wanted to try out a lot more. This turn, however, is not as sharp as that taken in Almanac of Fall, instead, we’re striving for leanness here. We’re increasingly going for clarified, simple, puritan filmmaking; we want to use narration in a different way, for example. In this film, we wanted to almost completely stop the story. Werckmeister Harmonies was almost a fable. There is no fable in this film. We wanted to step out of the epic format into a dramatic structure. The other thing we wanted to leave behind was the romantic aspect. There is much less faith in this film, it’s more cruel, more explicit, and colder than its predecessors.
ABK: To what extent was Satantango romantic?
BT: It was the figure of the doctor who was romantic. But Damnation was also romantic, especially the scene with the dog at the end, Werckmeister more so. We wanted to do away with this romanticism, a desire that comes from our own stage in life and the many experiences we’ve lived through, and finally, it comes from the person of Krobot, who plays Maloin. We wanted exactly such a man, and thank God, we found him.
ÁH: If Krobot hadn’t played Maloin, then the character would have become a good man, according to our notion of him. Luckily, this didn’t come about.
BT: Finally, the film addresses a beautiful human relationship between father and daughter. It’s not about the hero coming into money. When this happens, it stirs up a need in him to liberate his daughter from this life, so that at least something good comes out of it for her. There’s this grumpy mountain bear, this unapproachable figure, and it then turns out that his daughter means the most to him, and he heeds only his heart.
ABK: And this isn’t romantic for you …
BT: It’s not romantic, it’s humanist at most.
ABK: From this point of view it’s interesting that at the end of an earlier version of the film, when Maloin goes home after the detective has acquitted him, he goes past the shop where his daughter is washing the stones, as she was at the beginning. Your film closes on the face of Brown’s wife, so it’s precisely the relationship between father and daughter that has grown weaker.
BT: The original ending was that Maloin punishes himself. Although he doesn’t trust the law, he imposes the punishment on himself. This already deviates from Simenon’s ending, but we never really liked that anyway. Again, we felt it was too romantic. One idea was that Maloin would go to sea, another was that there should be a great fire.
ABK: Nothing but a romantic ending …
BT: Yes, but finally we thought that the worst punishment for Maloin was for him to continue his life as before. This is why we wanted him to see his daughter slaving away in the same place he’d once rescued her from. But the true drama is, once again, that of the innocent victim, and in this story, the real innocent victim is the Englishman’s wife, which is why we decided to end on her. There’s nothing else left. Maloin lives on as he did before, and this doesn’t need to be shown again. We already know this when he leaves the pub. It must not be forgotten that the Englishman’s wife is in ruins. He will not be able to forget this either.
ABK: You mentioned that you exchange the epic form for dramatic structure here. Does this have anything to do with the film’s spectacular references to Fassbinder and Bresson?
BT: The funny thing is that we didn’t even think of this. We hadn’t been watching films by Fassbinder or Bresson before we made this film. The influence probably comes from film noir. For me, Fassbinder, ninety percent of whose films were in colour, conveys the atmosphere of film noir much more than that of so-called ‘genre’ films. And of course, Bresson expresses the dark feelings, desires and secrets of the human soul much better than well-known film noir. It probably follows from the style, then, that some cuts give the impression of Fassbinder or Bresson, but this was not intentional: the material is dictated by the style.
ÁH: Interestingly enough, we’d been watching lots of Hitchcock beforehand. Not even this was a decision though, we’d come across a DVD collection in a department store, bought it, and started watching them.
BT: Hitchcock is like a drug. You watch one and you can’t stop.
ÁH: Hitchcock’s effect on us was such that we realised it isn’t important where filming takes place. He could film anything even in a studio. He could film with dummies. He worked with women we’d never cast, and made wonders with them. What I found liberating in Hitchcock was that I saw he knew that the environment is not real, but a decoration. This was important because for a long time I was unable to stomach the multi-storey houses in this story. This is a story set in a harbour town, and in every harbour town I’ve visited, there have been multi-storey houses everywhere. I always felt that we were in the Eight district [a densely-populated, poorer inner-city district of Budapest]. While with Satantango and Werckmeister we sought these nineteenth-century settlements, now we had to work in a completely different architectural environment that, for me, was alien from the story. This is an eastern European reflex, because for us, multi-storey houses arrived only with industrialisation. Having watched Hitchcock’s films, I too came to accept that where we film must be regarded as a detail.
ABK: You have to escape from the appearance of reality.
BT: Yes, from the documentary-like quality. The screenplay originally included many more scenes. We were in Bastia in a rented flat, with all the scenes from the film taped onto the wall in chronological order, and it was a good day when we managed to remove just one scene from the film. For example, there are two children in the Maloin family, a boy, and Henriette. The boy didn’t appear for practical reasons, because the actor we’d chosen entered his teens during the four years of pre-production. The situation changed completely; originally, we’d imagined Maloin seeing the tower from his flat, his flat from the tower, and this would all be nicely defined. We then realised that this just leads back to the documentary-like epic, and so we cut the whole thing. Maloin looking out of the window at the tower, where the money is – this no longer had a place in our overall conception. And we preferred to have the background set on fire, so that nothing of the scene in which he takes the money out of the box in his flat with the window in the background should remain. We shut off traffic, closed down everything, and then later, sitting in the flat, we realised that this was not a good idea. It was as if we’d gone back five years in time and done exactly what we did then. We had this feeling – not this film. We can’t get bogged down in nature narrative. Something that was already inside us, either consciously or unconsciously, now came to the surface: we don’t have to tell a story, but to render a human condition perceptible. This was a terribly liberating feeling. It’s possible that we had created every condition for precise storytelling, but in the end we didn’t do this.
ABK: So to what extent does France, or the French countryside play a role?
BT: That was of great inspiration, more so than French films. French culture had passed us by, in fact, perhaps because the last time French culture loomed large was in ’68. I had studied French in the Budapest School of Film Art, because then, for me, radicalism meant Godard and Truffaut. It turned out, however, that whatever had constituted progressive culture over the past twenty to twenty-five years, the French were outside of that; French film lost its radicalism a long time ago. German cinema was much more radical, and then came the Americans.
ABK: What was the reception like in France? Had they been expecting some kind of Frenchness from the film?
BT: They had no such expectations. In fact, there was much disapproval regarding why we had filmed a novel by such a lightweight author.
ABK: And what is your answer?
BT: That it’s a stupid question. We filmed whatever we found interesting in this book.
ÁH: Simenon was not the point here. The point was that when we read the novella long ago, we saw that we could realise even more directly that which we had done back then, that he sees the flat from the tower, and the tower from the flat. So it was the form that was interesting, and, that, this was written by Simenon didn’t matter.
ABK: The paranoid enclosure that you have finally left behind.
ÁH: Yes, because people were more exciting.
BT: It was the people that became more interesting than the form given by the environment. Life triumphed over film, thank God. Krobot is an unbreakable nut, Erika is a phenomenon, not to mention Tilda and Ági Szirtes, Derzsi and Papi Lénárt, at 80 years of age. The whole ensemble forced us to leave behind these precious sodding forms, and we acceded. Which was not especially difficult.
AKB: When I first read the novella, it was the psychological elegance that caught me. I’m not saying that this isn’t in the film, but nothing is disentangled for the viewer, as if everything were shut in behind a window. I can see these serious figures, and I have to imagine their inner stories. And here is where I see a considerable difference from, say, Bresson. He doesn’t do psychology either, but there, the people are so pared down that one cannot even imagine their inner lives. With this film it’s entirely the opposite, there is an enormous tension in our figures, but still nothing is dissembled or explained.
BT: This is it. The sole advantage of film, as a genre, is that if you show something, then that’s enough. No explanation is necessary. If someone needs to have explained to them the meaning of the whale’s eye Mr Eszter looks into at the end of Werckmeister, then the writer sits down and writes twenty pages about it, so that you, the reader, feel the same. We just go in with the camera, roll in, and the whole thing’s right there.
ABK: But films have words too, which is how you can solve this “showing.” Now you have condensed human relations, so that there’s barely any dialogue, only the figures, whose faces and movements reveal whole inner worlds.
BT: The viewer does not need to be over-informed; he only needs to be shown. There’s no need for narration, because you see yourself with your own eyes, assuming one has eyes in one’s head. I think everyone can see it, but won’t notice it at first.
AKB: While we’re on the subject of vision, I felt that your composition was more conscious and calculated than in your other films to date. In Satantango, one felt the ratio of professionalism to naivety that belongs to every great artist. The blend was such that it was calculated and professional where it needed to be, and elsewhere amateur and naïve, where required. If these two are blended well, then this blend carries enormous power. In Werckmeister the ratio shifted a little towards the professional, and here, I definitely see that the calculated outweighs the amateur naïve.
BT: No, that’s not right.
ÁH: But it is, there’s far less contingency. Every cut originates in Béla’s head, and so we know precisely what will happen. I was even angry whenever he said the first assistant was to go and start shooting. The French production staff changed so frequently that we had to explain what was to happen, over and over again. And then Béla said that even the first assistant should be able to film this. This always gave me a fit of nerves, in that there is a terrible danger where certain solutions are set in stone.
BT: And when we went there, everything had changed.
ÁH: But its true that contingency has fewer chances, for the scene to come into being there. If we compare with, say, The Outsider, then the difference is clear. In those days we’d go to the location, there was the scene, we’d start shooting any which way, and the result was a film. Now we’re sticking, even excessively, to where precisely the camera has to be, it has to be such and such, and we don’t stop until it is. So you’re right, but it’s also true that one can’t go back.
BT: I wouldn’t call it professionalism then, but what Hanna Schygulla said on the set of Werckmeister: perfectionism. This goes further, in that if we notice that the actor is not happy in a given situation, we have to change the whole thing. For instance, the scene in which Tilda freaks out had been carefully planned, but on set we realised that it wouldn’t work. It had been worked out wrongly, and when we saw this, we had to come up with something else. You can’t make a film from the craft, because this will yield nothing.
ABK: I’m thinking of such scenes as the one in which Maloin wakes up in his flat, gets up and looks out of the window, and there’s Brown on the street. This is a very calculated, and eerie scene.
ÁH: Yes, this had been planned a hundred years in advance, and still it was very difficult to shoot.
ABK: Not even Hitchcock would have been able to film that scene better.
BT: Hitchcock never used regular close-ups, nor regular long shots, which we create by constant cutting between the close-up and the long shot and vice versa. The truth is that I took seriously what Godard said: a proper film director cuts to the camera. Not even he took this seriously.
ÁH: On this subject Béla said that it’s not a story, but that the cut itself contains the situation and the relation.
BT: It’s just occurred to me that in the end, we didn’t do away with the documentary approach, but we did it in an entirely different way. Inspiration always comes from reality. There are two poles to truth and beauty: reality and imagination. The reality we see changes our preconceptions, of how a person becomes film material, how their personality becomes integral to the film and becomes inseparable from it. There’s one scene in which Maloin, the detective and his wife go to the hut. The scene took shape as we did a test with Krobot, and took a photograph of him standing in costume. This photo of him standing there gave us everything we needed for the character’s behaviour. Our point of departure was not the story, nor the figure of Maloin, but the flesh and blood of the actor, namely, his actual existence. Many scenes in the film are composed on the basis of real documentary photographs. We looked at old pictures by Doisneau in particular, and incorporated them, such as the picture of the peasant dancing with a chair on his head. We took exactly the same approach with the environment, too. We realised in Bastia that this world is much more closed in, that too much was visible there. For us, landscape is always one of the main characters of the film.
English translation by Gwen Jones.