I at first toyed with the notion of going through his works, which are not as numerous as last year’s winner (Spielberg), chronologically. However, if I were to start at the very beginning, and I likely will head there at some point, we would discuss films that pre-date the metamorphosis of his aesthetic.

Bela Tarr is fascinating for myriad reasons, but one of the most apparent is that rarely has a filmography featured so strong a departure in style. Tarr’s early works in the 1970s were in the zeitgeist, which was stark documentarianism. Cinéma vérité was the vogue amidst a wave of talented Hungarian filmmakers. Starting in 1982 he became increasingly more stylized.

Tarr was my doorway into the world of Hungarian cinema. It’s a culture I do like to explore periodically and have learned more about since being introduced to it through his eyes. What the chronological approach would seemingly negate is the veritable reason he won this award. It’s not that his earlier works aren’t good, there is in the scripting his essence. In fact, a title like Family Nest translated his insistence that all his films are comedy better than any others. However, his early films featured his voice speaking a seemingly foreign tongue. His real cinematic voice was not truly heard, did not differentiate itself, or make itself unique until his style broke off from its initial sensibility.

Some have referred to his hour-and-change rendition of MacBeth for Hungarian television, that was shot in two takes, and Almanac of the Fall as more transitional titles than ones that show the true power of his later style. However, if one watches The Prefab People and then MacBeth back-to-back it’s fairly staggering. You may not even realize it’s the same director. Whereas if you sample the Prologue from Visions of Europe you very soon know Tarr and if you see a famous tracking shot from Satantango, The Turin Horse or Werckmeister Harmonies you know it’s the same person.

So next week when I do return and write about a specific film, I will begin after the break and then if I feel so compelled I will backtrack to the beginning and deal with his earlier works before he revolutionized his own style.

While in each post I will focus on the specific film at hand when you have a writer/director who insists on challenging an audience, on letting us “use our eyes,” a man who also is disinterested in stories in the traditional sense, you will have running themes. Throughout his career, especially after he broke the mold, his films were creating thematic dialogues. The culmination of which was his masterful dissertation in The Turin Horse. When you have running themes there will be parallels between films to be drawn. I will try to keep those to a minimum and focus on the title at hand.

While Tarr got me into chasing down Hungarian cinema, I knew pretty quickly he had a unique voice. However, I soon also found out that his voice could have only been developed in the Hungary’s film culture, on the arthouse end of the spectrum, of course.

Like any filmmaker, Tarr’s work as auteurist as it is, is a collaboration. As he worked towards his reportedly last film the pieces started to come into place to solidify his style. The editing of Agnes Hranitzky since The Outsider in 1981; Fred Kelemen as DP for some of his later projects starting with Journey on the Plain; novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai had writing or co-writing credit on all of Tarr’s features starting with Damnation in 1988; composer Mihaly Vig has been on board since Almanac of the Fall in 1984. Together these people shared a commonality that helped to accentuate Tarr’s vision and bring it to the world such that it could not only be admired, but challenge the way it was intended to.

In the end, I got in my first revisit just in time to start this series on time. However, so as not to under-serve the challenge I’ve set for myself I decided on a true introduction piece to be followed by film-specific pieces. Tarr’s cinema is not one that is suited for “hit-me entertainment,” it insists you prod back and in deference to that fact, and out of respect, I will ruminate on Werckmeister Harmonies‘ mesmerizing and brilliant brutality a bit more.

To get a bit more of a glimpse into this creative mind, to see where he’s coming from. Here’s an excerpt from a piece he wrote called Why I Make Films, which he wrote during preproduction of Damnation:

Because I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being – all stories have become obsolete and clichéd, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that is still genuine – time itself: the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds. And film time has also ceased to exist, since the film itself has ceased to exist. Luckily there is no authentic form or current fashion. Some kind of massive introversion, a searching of our own souls can help ease the situation.

Or kill us.

We could die of not being able to make films, or we could die from making films.

But there’s no escape.

Because films are our only means of authenticating our lives. Eventually nothing remains of us except our films – strips of celluloid on which our shadows wander in search of truth and humanity until the end of time.
I really don’t know why I make films.

Perhaps to survive, because I’d still like to live, at least just a little longer…

Visions of Europe is a 2004 anthology film wherein various acclaimed European directors made short films about Europe, specifically their own corner. Bela Tarr‘s short acts as the prologue. As those who know him will attest the attributes of this short are not surprising: it is comprised of one long take and the haunting, soul-encompassing, cyclical score by Mihaly Vig. This short makes me want to watch the rest of the film and and is a perfect introduction to Tarr I feel.

E U

Visions Of Europe / Varios cineastas / Europa / 2004

 La premisa es sencilla, 25 cortometrajes dirigidos por 25 cineastas europeos (cada uno representando a los 25 estados que componen la Unión Europea); tendrían un presupuesto limitado (el mismo para cada uno), una duración máxima de 5 minutos y la consigna de mostrar un instante de la realidad actual o futura de la supuestamente unificada Europa. Así en 2004 se concretó este experimento llamado Visions of Europe, contando con la interesante participación de directores consagrados junto con otros nóveles, y teniendo como bandera la plena libertad de expresión. Nombres como Christoffer Boe, Fatih Akin, Sharunas Bartas, Béla Tarr, Theo van Gogh, Peter Greenaway y Aki Kaurismäki redondearon la ecuación. Como era de esperarse el resultado es un tanto desigual, pasando de la bizarra experimentación a la mera descripción; con geniales momentos y un amplio espectro que nos permite ver una interesante fusión de ideas, conceptos y creatividad. Dentro de mis favoritos el elegante tributo que el lituano Bartas ofrece al Stalker de Tarkovski y el bellísimo y poético corto de Tarr sobre el desempleo y la crisis económica en los países de la Europa del este.

There is this concept that anthology films are rare as there is nearly no scholarly literature written about these productions. However, this is a false perception as anthologies have already invaded theaters and film production and have been doing so for a very long time. Paris Je T’aime, New York I Love You, The Animatrix, Halo Legends, Monty Python’s History of the World Part I, Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life, Fantasia, Pulp Fiction, Grindhouse; these films have all either been largely commercially successful or have gained cult followings. They are also all anthology films.

Anthology films are a style of film which approaches feature length but rather than being one long, singular film is comprised of several short films. Anthologies often have different directors for each short section, though this is not always necessary. These short films are put together around a similar binding concept, theme, genre, location, object, or actor which create the framing device to relate all of the short films together into a cohesive unit.

The concept of anthology films comes out of the old nickelodeon movie houses of the early years of cinema. These movie houses would put together film programs which would consist of several related films of a genre or with similar actors. The Charlie Chaplin Film Festival (not to be confused with the “Charlie Chaplin Shorts” segment of the St. Louis’ International Film Festival [SLIFF] ) collection of shorts put together in 1938 to present his 1917 shorts as a signal program is a good example. This collection is comprised of four shorts; The Adventurer, The Cure, Easy Street, and The Immigrant and follows the basic idea of creating an intertextual relation between the films through their shared actor, genre, or theme.

Now as for the “Charlie Chaplin Shorts” segment of the SLIFF, and indeed all short film segments of any film festival that have different categories per subject or idea, this can also be considered a kind of anthology film. With the Charlie Chaplin section, all of the shorts follow the same actor in different, but similar situations. Other short film programs from the SLIFF, for example, the “Documentary Shorts: Iraq and Islam” are also run together like a feature as they share a main idea. However, with this section unlike Chaplin’s, all the shorts are made by different directors to showcase different perspectives on the Iraq War and terrorism in the middle east. Such collections are presented in this manor in order to make a stronger point because by showing various ways these issues have caused problems in people’s lives. This method of presentation leaves the audience with a broader view of the situation that is being displayed on the screen, which they might not have gotten out of a singular feature film with one, longer plot. As such, anthologies do not necessarily have to be on a modern commercially available format in order to be labeled anthologies, it just helps broaden distribution.

Nevertheless, while the old nickelodeon short programs and modern film festival programs are akin to anthology films, they do differ from commercially produced anthology collections. Commercially produced collections are specifically commissioned and designed in their production for their specific compilations to achieve a predefined goal or effect where as the previously mentioned programs are collected after their production. Often these commissioned collections aim to highlight a problem. Anthologies such as 11’09″01 September 11, All the Invisible Children, or 8 all have a particular aim they wish to achieve; showing sympathy to and other historical events akin to the September 11th attacks, displaying various ways that children fall through the cracks of society and get exploited, or looking at various angles of a specific political agenda meant to address key global issues. Yet this is not all anthology films are for, often anthologies are also made to honor an event in cinematographic history. Collections such as Lumiere and Company, To Each His Own Cinema, and Ten Minutes Older were all commissioned to celebrate milestones; the one-hundred year mark of the first Lumiere film, the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, and to reflect on how cinema uses time in the new millennium. Of course an anthology can be a commentary and an anniversary marker at the same time. Visions of Europe is a celebration of the twenty-five EU members, with each of the twenty-five directors creating a five minute short film, that is also a commentary about the conditions of Europe and the values of the EU member states. Please see my commentary on The European Showerbath, Europa, Prologue, and Invisible State if you are interested in further information about some of the short film selections from Visions of Europe.

The thing about all of those anthologies however, is that while they work on a DVD where a viewer is free to watch each segment as they feel, they do not necessarily work as well in a mass culture theater setting. People who go to movie theaters expect to pay a certain price for a film and that that film will be a certain length, generally a two hour long feature. If the masses wanted to watch short films specifically, they would just stay at home and hop on youtube or vimeo. Thus what I am going to be calling “hybrid-production films” were born. These are films designed with the mass theater market in mind, but with a short film anthology’s soul. This hybrid-production film concept is where films like Pulp Fiction, Paris Je T’aime, and Kerala Cafe get their format, flow, and style from. Now admittedly Pulp Fiction was out in 1994 before the internet was such a big deal, but I mention it since the plot (five separate, but still interconnected murder stories) was really what, in an attempt to be postmodern, ended up carving the path for hybrid-production films. A hybrid-production film works by connecting its shorts through transition sequences so that they can all be watched in a signal sitting without interrupting the flow like constantly showing ending credits would. Paris Je T’aime achieves this effect by use of panoramic photographs of Paris in between sections in order to create a connected sense of events through common location, which aim to created the perspective that the viewer has “zoomed out” of one story or short film and will be “zooming into” the next one in sequence. Kerala Cafe achieves its sequential narrative flow by just fading into and out of each short directly, to later connect each short film via the characters interactions with the Kerala Cafe. It is also the first major anthology production created for Malayalam audiences by Malayalam directors (find out more at KeralaCafe.in).

In regards to all the notes made here, it can be seen that anthologies have played a part in the development of cinema from its early years through modern times. Anthologies have also worked to achieve new points of view while experimenting with cinematographic styles. This mode of production of short films also shows the value of short film across the globe; from the United States, to Europe, to India, and back around the world again. Each anthology works to show the viewer the world as it is, complex and varied, while working in a visual style suited to showing different preservatives. As such the old format of short films stays fresh and modern for a new era of viewers.

European Showerbath (2004) was directed by Peter Greenaway.  This film is the United Kingdom’s installment in the Visions of Europe project.

This film reeked of sarcasm from the start.  Obviously, it had a different outlook considering it used a giant shower bath for people with painted flags on their bodies to wash in.  The flags made it a lot more clear to that sarcasm because there were more French, German and United Kingdom flags before any other European flag should up.  The idea of unity was presented as a joke, especially once there wasn’t any room for anyone else who seemed incompetent compared to who had the chance to get under the water.  This film was extremely critical and really pointed the idea of an “elitist” group and how certain countries definitely have more power, and resources to survive and “clean” themselves than others.  And the main three countries clearly have the most.  As a viewer, I liked the idea that all of these people seemed extremely different, which obviously makes sense considering the whole melting pot idea, and each country in Europe is so diverse in their cultures and citizens.  And the only thing they had in common was the shower and the fact that they were all nude with the exception of their painted country’s flags on their bodies and they all had to squeeze – no matter how “different they were – to fit, much like the Union, or what I’ve learned from the Union just by these movies.  This was my favourite out of the ones we watched in this collection.  It was a lot more understanding and kind of started off the next few films pretty well because it established the whole vision of the project itself.

Europa (2004) is unfortunately not anymore to be found while I was researching.  I have in my notes that it is directed by a Croatian director and I apologize if I possibly copied that wrong but this is a film that is apart of the Visions of Europe project.

This is just a great example of the grass is always greener on the other side, or at least it seems that way.  Two sides interacting with one another and while still keeping their differences in mind, they still communicate.  I like that there is a Soccer Championship reference and that it weighs heavy against the Union because both of those things are pretty significant in unifying parts of Europe, even if it involves disagreements and unsatisfactory results.  This film as a particular vision was well done and really shined through as a real truth in parts of Europe.  It’s interesting to see it in this type of perspective when the border is that small and even if it’s just an invisible line, it’s still there and separates a lot between people and environments.  There wasn’t a lot to find about this film, unfortunately.  I think it was a very simple way of looking at the European Union and this director must’ve felt like it didn’t need a lot of complexities to explain the Union, which is most likely really complex already.

Prologue (2004) was directed by Bela Tarr.  This film is the Hungarian installment of the Visions of Europe project.

This film was a lot more familiar in terms of a “Union” environment.  I really liked the shot value, though.  I liked the black and white, the detail of each person waiting in the line, the diversity was still maintained and even enhanced without a color film shooting it.  I think it was extremely powerful without dialogue and had such a huge message that portrays the fact that these workers go through extremely long days (much like the line). It was really hard to think of how long it would take the very last person just to get something to eat, probably not too much long before his break finished.  These films are difficult to track down on the internet but it’s evident that this film probably took a really long time to have that dramatically long line and the number of people that had to get together to produce this 6 minute film that showed at least 150+ people in that amount of time.  It was extremely impressive in terms of something that seems pretty simple to shoot and put together, but there is a lot of complications that had to of gone into this, much like the Union itself has a lot of complications it has to go through daily.  This film was much like the European Shower bath, except for the evidence of the different countries, Prologue still made it more recognizable that the Union has a lot of diversity, in their people and their situations and after watching this particular film in this project, it seems like it just can’t get worse.

Invisible State (2004) was directed by Aisling Walsh and is the Irish installment of the project.

This was by far the most powerful film that we watched in this collection.  It was hard-hitting and very straightforward which I think was fully the intention of the director of this one.  It’s hard to not feel the compassion the speaker has as he is speaking about the Union and the people involved and how affected everyone is.  It’s clearly a visual statement against the European Union and it’s presented very clear and thoroughly.  The camerawork and images  that accompanied the speech were also extremely powerful and helped the film’s message immensely.  Since we talk a lot about director’s styles, I think this collection of films really has a lot to do with the director’s styles and their personal take on the European Union.  The director’s had the freedom to present a visual component to their personal opinions, or their country’s perspectives and it was all in their hands to present it well.  I think out of the films we watched, they all had many differences about the same topic but each had a different style behind them that defined the director.

An anthology film is a collection of short film projects by different directors for a common aim. Usually they are unified by a common theme – in this case, the European Union. The nature of an anthology is collaborative, transnational, and purposeful. They are not collected after the fact, they are made with the understanding that they will add to a collective vision on one DVD. Our own Dr. Deshpande explains Lars Von Trier’s Visions of Europe project as an anthology in his article:

…collective and collaborative anthologies are made across national boundaries, across cultures, bringing together a group of filmmakers to interpret and express a common theme. These projects are by their very nature “transnational” in some sense, even as one of the objectives of the projects is to search for and establish a context or parameters of a new entity, the collective, multinational form of European Union. The anthology film Europaische Visionen: 25 Filme, 25 Regisseure/ Visions of Europe (2004) was produced by 25 directors from the member states of the expanding European Union.

Indeed, the idea of an anthology film perfectly represents the collective idea of the European Union. The individual films on this DVD represent different countries in the Union with very different ideas about their role as a member. Peter Greenaway’s European Showerbath seems wary about the sharing of resources and what the larger countries of the EU will leave for coming generations, represented in the simple visual metaphor of a group shower. Everyone on screen is naked, highlighting their unity – everyone looks basically the same with no clothes on. One analysis states:

Fifteen countries of Europe, brightly identified with their national flags body-painted on their vulnerable naked flesh, and personified in their political economic history by older or younger, fatter or thinner corporeality, step one by one, optimistically into the warm showerbath of the European Community. First the original six; sturdy if plump-bellied Germany, voluptuous if a little over-extrovert France, young introspective Belgium, confident if a little vain Luxembourg, self-effacing Holland and elderly if a little frivolous Italy, followed, in order of membership by the remaining nine, each with their own physical identities, making up a community self-revealing in their camaraderie, all trying to maximise their position in the European warm water community, shoving a little, flirting a little, laughing and joking, if a little self-consciously, exuberantly demonstrating their togetherness a little too over-eagerly, enjoying mutual, frank, self-exposing, self-revelation, all dipping their heads and limbs and exposed bodies into the limited water-shower of benefits.

Other films on the anthology, like the Slovenian filmmaker Damjan Kozole’s Europa, make smaller statements, like those who are part of the European Union don’t value it as much as those outside of it. Hungary’s Bela Tarr, with the film Prologue, meditates slowly and liltingly on the black and white sameness of the EU, a bleak sharing of too-little resources. Irish filmmaker Aisling Walsh’s Invisible State employs spoken word poetry and flashes of disturbing images to make a heavy-handed yet powerful comment. I’ll leave you with that film…

Travellers are very low class Irish with gypsies ancestry and they generally travel in caravans through Ireland doing odd jobs. Hence names like “Tinkers” which are more job descriptions turned derogatory as now Country / Settled people and Travellers hardly mix since the stereotyping is so negative. The point being Walsh mentions Romanians, Lithuanians, and then says Irish during his rant when the government called them non-nationals – these are the nationals that Irish Travellers originally were as gypsy people’s so he is correct, by degree and some time removed those people are now considered classically Irish even if the mainstream society tends to marginalize them. Likewise is also says something about Ireland’s treatment of Travellers as more outsiders than anything, which is weird because Travellers tend to be more what people think of as “traditionally Irish” minus the moving around so much bit.

This short film is also rather American Irish as well due to the mass of Irish people coming over to American during their times of hardship and the signs of “No Irish Need Apply” – Ireland knows these people’s plights because they too have walked that path and they know what it is to be the smuggled bodies.

Basically what Walsh is saying here is that human smuggling is a problem, partially caused by the movement of people due to hardships who just want to have a chance at new life, and who might even be from countries which are part of the EU. However human smuggling involves a contract and an understanding about what is going on, there is consent given. Generally with human trafficking there is no consent given and it is just for exploitation purposes. The two are related but not the same, and Walsh wants us to learn the difference so that we can stop confusing the issues at hand and fix the real exploitative trafficking.

This short film clip can be watched below:

This short film is shot in black and white done in one long dolly shot to the music of Mihaly Vig. It has a feel to it of the end of a war, or during a war even. I think that is suppose to make it more universal, all countries have had wars and recessions and things that cause massive amounts of people to be in need of food and other assistance. This film is saying, as it is called “Prologue” that all good, strong economic countries started out in similar ways (or have at least had moments of weakness) where they could not keep themselves feed. It is also a story of hope, very Horatio Alger rags-to-riches. But then it is also a warning, all nations can rise just as easily as they can fall.

From a historical Hungary context, Tarr seems to be saying that before Hungary was in NATO and the EU and joining together with the rest of Europe it was in a sad state. And it was. Hungary was in a horrific recession in the early 90′s. The country had just finished it’s Soviet Era and became a republic, a shock so powerful to the Soviets it had a part in bringing down in the Berlin Wall. But the economy end up in a sad state afterwords, broken off from that Union that had created subsidies to keep things cheap, it had trouble keep itself together.

This short film can be viewed below:

This short film takes place on the river that divides Slovenia from Croatia. The man in Croatia ask the sign-hole-diggers if they were going to Europe, where would Croatia go. The two Slovenia’s answer that Croatia gets to go to the European Football Championships while Slovenia gets to go to the EU because “Everybody goes somewhere” but the thing is both side want what the other sides has – Slovenia want the football championships and Croatia wants to be in the EU.

The thing about them discussing football is that it is quintessential European – and the country that is winning it is not in the European Union. It is a critique on what makes Europeans what they are, and they put so much pride into their football clubs to have the country that is outside of the EU be winning at football challenges that ideal of the football as a cornerstone of European excellence. Think of Paul the German octopus that got honorary Spanish citizenship for it’s World Cup predictions this past year, that is an example of how serious European countries get into football. Now Croatia is still in Europe no matter what, so it gets a but muddy, but that is part of the point as well – the “grass is always greener” idea. But identity is such a muddy idea to start with that I find I do not mind the little technical bits here that muck it up.

This short film can be watched below:

Basically various people with flags painted on their bodies hop into a shower and mull around in the water together as the paint runs off their bodies, mixing into the drain at the bottom. However not all the countries get to be in the shower, by the end the Czech Republic and what looks like little Estonia are left outside the showerbath but still in the shot, much like that they are in the European Union but they are only side characters and not major players. The shower is too crowed for them to come in since the water is drying up.

This has to do with the allocation of resources, Germany and other founders started off strong economically, which is part of why the European Union works. However, once you start to bring in other players who might not be as stable you see fissure cracks in the whole system, until eventually it collapses and everyone is stuck out in the cold together. Yes, all of their economies are still separate but they work together and the value of money is impacted by each player. Hence why England still uses pounds, they are worth too much on heir own, and they see no reason to risk weakening their economy for Euros. There are other countries as well that have kept their monetary unites separate for various reasons. But that is part of what this short is about, if the countries are suppose to be together and they are not equally sharing than it damages the whole and everyone looses resources in the end then.

This short film can be seen below:

Visions of Europe (2004), directed by Faith Akin, Barbara Albert, Sharunas Bartas, Andy Bausch, Christoffer Boe, Francesca Comencini, Stijn Coninx, Tony Gatlif, Sasa Gedeon, Christos Georgiou, Constantine Giannaris, Peter Greenaway, Miguel Hermosa, Arvo Iho, Aki Kaurismaki, Damjan Kozole, Laila Pakalnina, Kenneth Scicluna, Martin Sulik, Malgosia Szumowska, Béla Tarr, Jan Troell, Theo Van Gogh, Teresa Villaverde, Aisling Walsh.

The idea was simple:

Twenty-five countries, twenty-five visions from respected film directors from each of the respective countries that formed the European Community in 2004. Each director gives a personal vision of life in this cultural melting pot.

The conditions were equally simple: absolute freedom of expression.

The hope was to have a powerful manifestation of the cultural diversity of Europe as opposed to the idea of globalization and conformity. The ambition was also to celebrate the artistic freedom and freedom of expression as this should be a key value of the European community.

www.visionsofeurope.dk

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