Metaphysical essentialism – the pictorial harmony of Béla Tarr’s films

Valkola, Jarmo (2017) Metaphysical essentialism – the pictorial harmony of Béla Tarr’s films. Hungarian Studies, 31 (1). pp. 3-18. ISSN 0236-6568

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Abstract

In the following article, Jarmo Valkola investigates the originality of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s filmmaking practice. Tarr represents European pictorialism that is motivated by the commitment to develop and increase the function and effectiveness of images, sounds and performances that aesthetically formulate, translate and change the effects of contemporary cinema to higher dimensions and qualities of art. Tarr emphasises the selective and manipulative role of the camera in orchestrating his narrative concerns. The significance of the form comes forward, and the photographic dimension of the narrative creates static and momentarily captured intensities. Like Jancsó before him, Tarr also invests the narrative with plan-sequences. Some of them can be very long, involving continuous and intricate camera movements, like simultaneous track-tilt-pans, compounded by the ‘virtual’ movement of the omnipresent camera. Tarr’s filmic iconography sets standards for pictorial filmmaking in the sense of an increasingly personal touch of dramatics defining and distilling a cinematic language that is endless in its search for the almost silent colloquy between the artist’s visions and aspirations. Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies, The Man from London, and The Turin Horse are the films referred in this article.

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