TIMELESS TIME
Yvette Biró
Excerpt reproduced from Turbulence and Flow: The Rhythmic Design, trans. Paul Salamon (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008).
The films of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr generated attention in the last few years. His nearly eight-hour-long Satan’s Tango (1994) and his much shorter and extremely dense Werkmeister Harmonies (2000) offer more recent examples of exceptionally measured presentation.
Satan’s Tango is the exceedingly restrained conjuring of a single theme, a single moment in time, and a singularly thick atmosphere. The story takes place at a ramshackle farm and, while not trying to deny its symbolism, brings its physical reality to almost unbearable closeness. It illustrates with terrifying meticulousness a world of mud, mating animals, decaying houses ready for the wrecking ball, foul-smelling kitchens and smoke-filled pubs. The slow development of the narrative in this miserable environment speaks of trapped human souls. Almost nothing happens to them, yet one senses that everything is determined from above (by faceless authorities) at a distance – helplessness, petty hatred, and mutual distrust dominate the rites of fear, deceit, and vague attempts at escape.
Yet, the social brew is complex and intricately textured. An understanding of the impotence and bitterness of more or less dominant characters requires its own time. They are sunk in a hopeless and bleak mud-existence, as if held by a demonic curse. Like a devastating disease, the farm is eating them alive. A single movement requires a long time, not to mention the reaction and defense needed to arrive at the minimum of consciousness. Tarr’s protagonists are not given the sense to comprehend their condition. They creep blindly into the next situation – to fall and sink into the mud again.
Where nothing happens, deadly silence reigns. Only alcohol brings some life – loss of consciousness and violence. Other than that, there are only the routines of a vegetative existence and the withering desire to get away. Not matter how, where, with whom. Only to escape as far away as possible. Long, slow scenes of subhuman life, lost hope for any change. Dancing a tango, or the play of a retarded girl with a cat as she tortures the animal to death, last forever, until there is total exhaustion, without relief. This is not the work of the will, but that of represses instinct and unconsciousness.
The power of destiny lies in its inevitability: the imperative to follow through, the manifest fatality of things. When the characters are on the move, we follow them on the rain-soaked gravel path, a long stretch of road leading to a frequently mentioned (symbolic) junction. For they have left the normal world behind a long time ago and live in the middle of nowhere, in no man’s land. Even an awareness of the end does not help, as there is no present, only the unbearable perpetuity of existence. The metaphor of the opening shot is also the most bruising summary of the film. It is dark, minutes before dawn. Mooing cattle roam aimlessly in the distance mounting each other here and there, then roll in the mud. The slowly panning camera circles and envelops them. The barely changing scene appears stationary, threatening in its monotony and silence. Then we see a window framing a man’s dark silhouette, and the dirty patterns of the curtain. As the camera moves back a bit suddenly a woman appears bringing a wash-basin, and she starts squatting above it in order to casually clean herself after a presumably finished intercourse. Her action lasts beyond normal time. And precisely this “disproportion,” the unity of length and sharp ellipses, creates the uncanny ambiance, as if projecting the path of an entire destiny. This is it – and nothing else.
Our characters exist in the total uniformity of space, subjected to the pressure of motionless or extremely decelerated time. The quality of time is made apparent by a ceaseless rain with stubborn consistency, offering no hope for a break.
And yet, the inclement weather is not the punishment of nature. It is as indifferent as the vegetation itself. When man abandons himself, there is nothing to stem the power of dark rain crashing down. And the result is unmitigated homogeneity of texture: naked branches in the wind, frail and trembling animals, weather-beaten trench coats, threadbare leather jerkins, unshaven faces, and hideous knitted caps drawn over deep-set-eyes.
Where are we, and when does all this take place? One hundred or ten years ago, or today? The demoralized school director and the permanently drunk doctor remind us of a fatal anachronism: we stay where we have been – from the beginning of time until the inscrutable end. With their relentless obsession, the many similar characters and the host of inconsequential narrative threads weave an increasingly tight web. Satan’s tango? No. It is all creepily banal and hapless – anything but hellish. Even if it has lost all its taste, color, and impulse, this is far from the opposite of heavenly. It lacks even the majesty of pain and suffering. It is merely a vegetative state where living forms take in and unload, empty and decrease only to slowly fade into this life-forsaken void.
Tarr’s descriptive language knows but two extremes: long shots and close-ups, but both are characterized by long duration. The slowly moving, unobtrusive camera makes its presence barely perceptible. The method thus eliminates all descriptive references.
Even among the masters of slow films, Tarr is unique in making the passage of time or its painfully slow-paced movement the essence of his work: this is the existence of human beings deprived of action and events in their allotted time. Therefore not man but time itself becomes the protagonist. And this is why it must play such a prominent role.
If Tarkovsky is solemn, Tarr is the opposite: viscerally naturalistic and tangibly direct. Although he also evokes the sense of the labyrinth, as there is no escape, everything moves in closed space and time, if slithering can be defined as movement. Here too, reduction leads to constant attempts at restarts and the origin of things – all bound to the soil, however, without obvious metaphysical prospects. Man is surrounded by a dead past and a dead future. There is only the present stretching to infinity; once the mind is extinguished there is no memory or ambition. Intention is replaced by distention: the prolongation and inexorable extension of time.
The lack of solemnity does not mean the lack of a ponderous tone: oppressive and grim hopelessness permeates the movement of humans and the camera alike and defines the play of light and shadow. Thus all moments are ominous, emanating a sense of menace and nervous tension.
In Werkmeister the director makes a similar use of the inscrutable and chilling aura of objects and the environment. In the opening scene of the film we follow the path of a huge, metal-plated trailer (carrying the whale, the promise of sensational spectacle). As we continue to watch the vehicle rumbling down streets in the dead of night and know less and less about its mission, the more threatening it becomes. The shadow it casts is more unnerving than the clumsy hulk of the trailer itself, while its clatter shatters the tranquillity of the night.
Werkmeister is also the development of a single theme, that is, a restart at a level of higher intensity reached through accumulation. Thus the rhythm, while deliberately monotonous, produces the impression of a crescendo. Time moves only vertically, downward in the direction of an ever deeper tension. Or seemingly upward, into the direction of senseless madness, where rational sobriety has long got its ground. There are scenes in which the protagonists, wild children or drunken adults alike, no longer know any limits. They go in their unrestrainable impulses until they literally collapse. Nevertheless, the overall nature of the film affects the spectator as evenly oppressive, despite the incidental eruptions.
Valuska, the dimwit, is the smallest unit in this swirling universe. He may observe everything and even execute some orders, but nothing mitigates his utter powerlessness. He may be the carrier of messages; he bounces around among his clients haphazardly, like a small planet set on its course. He comes and goes among other people like a meteorite spinning around larger celestial bodies. This is intimated in the metaphor of the opening scene where, in a dreamlike sequence, he has his drinking buddies dance to the movement of the planets. When the explosive energy of the powerful ones is exhausted, he escapes their orbit and suddenly starts to fall, to crash into the void.
This invisible spiral is the film’s main theme and rhythmic foundation. Valuska follows his own path slowly, surrendering to prevailing winds and external impulses. His path is defined by friction and bouncing instead of inner motivation. For the space where he is allowed to operate also defines the limits of his shunted existence. As he meets his destiny he becomes more innocent, lighter and more weightlessness. Thus, instead of moving at a brisk pace, he simply plods on.
There is one outstanding scene in which the metaphor of the vicious circle becomes fully spectacular. Valuska and his “boss” are required to meet the authorities in order to reinstate order. As they walk next to each other in an increasingly relentless rhythm and tension, the camera focuses on the profile of their faces, very closely, and only after a while do we realize that they are going round and round, circling all around as if under a spell. The growing speed makes it foreboding and disquieting: we have to sense their doom.
In spite of a few sequences when turbulences violently occur, the film’s rhythm is built on the principle of retention. What cannot be stopped cannot be accelerated either: each thing moves at its own speed and tempo, including the most brutal violence and foaming rage. The time of inner impulses is past explanation or measuring (the revolt of workers and their destructive passion, the delirium of the officer relishing power deriving from his adored gun). Everything lasts until full exhaustion, while the battle is constantly joined. Drinking, the time of closing, or the flame flickering and dying on the stove are all natural phenomena, just as the depletion of human energies leads inevitably to self-degradation.
Tarr’s black-and-white films boldly apply the consistency of stylistic and tonal unity. Thus the worlds they present are whole and homogenous even as they apparently play but on a few “instruments.” But, as we know, intensity is never a function of quantity.