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Bela Tarr need it be said? is Hungary's leading avant-garde, experimental filmmaker, and is considered in some quarters to be the top cult director of the past decade.
For who else but Bela Tarr would spend three years (1991-94) trying to bring Laszlo Krasznahorkai's 1985 novel "Satantango" ("Satan's Tango") to the screen in an hypnotic seven-and-a-half-hour tour-de-force? And who else but the Hungarian visionary would patiently spend another four years (1996-2000) on Werckmeister Harmoniak (The Werckmeister Harmonies), a two-hour-plus screen version of Krasznahorkai's 1989 novel "The Melancholy Of Resistance?"
Asked at the Budapest Festival of Hungarian Films as to why he has been collaborating with Krasznahorkai on four productions over the last 12 years, Tarr shrugged and said, "We complement each other."
Krasznahorkai, born 1954 in Gyula, studied copyright law and literature at the universities in Szeged and Budapest, spent his socialist days living and taking odd jobs in towns across Hungary. Then, at 30, he wrote Satan's Tango and became a freelance writer. Bela Tarr, born in 1955 in Pecs, made several amateur films, graduated from the Budapest Film Academy (1981), worked at the Bela Balazs Studio and was a founding member of short-lived Tarsulas Film Studio (1981-85).
He subsequently met Krasznahorkhai to collaborate as a screenwriter-director team on Damnation (1987), the short feature The Last Boat (1989), Satan's Tango (1994), and now The Werckmeister Harmonies.
Damnation, Satan's Tango and The Werckmeister Harmonies form a stylistic trilogy. All photographed by Gabor Medvigy in black and white, they come across as apocalyptic parables pegged to downbeat, isolated, film-noir settings: a mud-splattered nightclub called Titanic Bar in Damnation, an abandoned agricultural machinery plant in Satan's Tango, and a provincial town on the frosty Hungarian Plain in The Werckmeister Harmonies.
In each tale a stranger happens upon the scene as a conman 'Messiah' to stir things up. In The Werckmeister Harmonies, the arrival of a great stuffed whale in a circus tent draws crowds from far and wide and tension mounts with the presence of the mysterious 'Prince' hiding behind the whale.
Ron Holloway
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