Bela Tarr

This work sets off to offer a polemical response to postcolonialist theories advanced by Homi Bhabha in his seminal work The Location of Culture, particularly to Bhabha’s famous notions of ambivalence and mimicry purportedly used as methods of struggle against colonialism. Reading Béla Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000) as an allegory for the colonization of a former colonial agent in the guise of an ambiguously framed post-imperial Hungary now on the eve of Soviet invasion, I turn Bhabha’s notions on their heads, and thus de-stereotype the simplistic hierarchy that sees the colonial agent dominate the colonized subject in a top-down approach. To achieve this, I bring into play KuanHsing Chen’s notion of deimperialization as well as the psychoanalysis of Octave Mannoni in order to show that rather than being a straightforward misreading of the Other by an uninformed Self, the relationship between colonized and colonizer appears more like a failed attempt at acquiring the most basic knowledge of the psychological functioning of the Self on both sides of the colonized/ colonizer divide.

L'articolo tenta di costruire una riflessione sul rapporto tra il concetto di città e quello di rovina. Quest'ultimo si riferisce ad un resto inattingibile, che a sua volta rimanda ad una "intesa segreta tra le generazioni passate e la nostra", come scrive W. Benjamin.
La questione viene affrontata attraverso l'incontro con tre" icone" che incarnano il problema poetico - e, quindi, politico - della rovina: un film, "Il cavallo di Torino" di Béla Tarr; un tempio, l'Olympeion di Akragas; una silloge poetica in dialetto siciliano, "Ciuri di strata" di Francesco Guglielmino.

The key thesis of this chapter is that there has been a resurgence of modernism in the European cinema of crisis. This revival of a movement that had been declared passé by the majority of contemporary film scholars has to be understood against the backdrop of social crises whose symptoms resemble the crises experienced by modern societies in the first half of the twentieth century. These crises need to be seen in the context of modern societies’ separation between the private and public sphere, as well as their inability to generate conditions of economic/social stability and prosperity on account of their vulnerability to economic shocks and pressures. Henri Lefebvre’s argument formulated in the 1960s that modernity generates more crises in its ‘fruitless attempt to achieve structure and coherence’ (1995: 187) is equally applicable to the contemporary experience of late modernity and neoliberal capitalism. As such, to understand the current crisis in Europe, we need to expand its historical parameters and see it not as the exception, but as a systemic reality that has characterised modern societies since the entrenchment of neoliberalism in the post-1989 world.

This paper proposes a reflection on the cinematic act of Béla Tarr and his crew in dialogue with some ideas present in Gilbert Simondon's work. Through the first scene of his latest film, The Turin Horse (2011), we will trace a series of connections between the various facets of Simondon's thought present in The Mode of Existence of the Technical Object (1958), and Imagination and Invention (1965-66).


Resumo:

Este trabalho propõe uma reflexão sobre o ato cinematográfico em Béla Tarr e sua equipe em diálogo com algumas ideias presentes na obra de Gilbert Simondon. Através do primeiro plano de seu último filme, O Cavalo de Turim (2011), traçaremos uma série de conexões entre as diversas facetas do pensamento de Simondon presentes em O modo de existência do objeto técnico (1958) e Imaginação e invenção (1965-66).

Общим местом является прочтение работ Тарковского
в качестве осмысления религиозного опыта посредством
кино. Однако вопрос: «как подобный опыт связан со статусом
реальности окружающей действительности?» остается на
периферии. «Каким образом кино возвращает нам веру
в мир?» — таков ключевой вопрос для послевоенного
модернистского кинематографа, согласно работе Жиля Делеза
«Образ-время». Решение этой проблемы французский философ
осуществляет на материале крупнейших фигур кино‑модернизма.
Однако выход к теологической проблематике у Делеза опирается
преимущественно на материалистических и(ли) атеистических
режиссеров. В результате чего статус утверждения «вера в мир»
в работе «Кино» сохраняет двусмысленность и открытость для
некритичных прочтений. В статье на материале сравнительного
анализа работ Тарковского и Тарра будет предпринята
попытка прояснения вопроса о статусе реальности кинообраза
и ловушках, связанных с эффектами метафизики, мистики
и религиозного опыта.

László Krasznahorkai wrote two different texts (the second being the script of Béla Tarr’s film) from two different perspectives starting from the well-known scene in Turin, Italy, where Friedrich Nietzsche embraced a horse beaten severely by the carter. Why does the interpretation of the Nietzsche-scene change? What kind of temporal, historical or ethical relationship does the differentiation between the two texts depend on? How can the beauty of the crumbs of life be perceivable? This article argues that in these works – in contrast with the commonly assumed precognitions about apocalyptic art – life and humble living creatures are celebrated.

How to engage with the recent crisis of liberal democracy in a politically productive manner? Using the example of Hungary, the first part of this paper contrasts two empirical strategies. The first takes inspiration from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and explores the conditions of critique within the architecture and infrastructure of liberal democracy. The second empirical strategy turns to a novel by László Krasznahorkai and a film by Béla Tarr, and engages with the problem of critique through búskomorság. This common Hungarian word refers to a sad-sombre sentiment that is both collective and thoroughly political. The second part of the paper focuses on an exhibition created by Béla Tarr that combined these two empirical strategies in a generative way. With the help of the exhibition and recent empirical examples, the paper outlines what could be called búskomor politics – a set of critical practices that take place not so much within the architecture and the infrastructure of liberal democracy as amid its ruins.

This article illustrates the different ways in which the poor are being put to work, in defence of a global neoliberal order by global economic institutions concerned with constructing them as resilient subjects, as well as by opponents of neoliberalism concerned with galvanizing the revolutionary potentials of poor people. In spite of the apparent gulf between neoliberalism and its revolutionary opponents, the poor find themselves subject to remarkably similar strategies of construction by both proponents and opponents of neoliberalism today. This predicament of the poor is particularly vexed in Eastern Europe where strategies of resilience are fast developing, and critical legal theory has so far offered little resistance to this trend. Turning against this tide, this article considers how we might reimagine poverty and conceive its politics beyond and against clichéd images of the poor as resilient subjects. Through an analysis of the work of the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, it argues for the necessity of images capable of conveying the intolerability of the conditions in which the poor continue to live, as well as the contingency of those conditions; images that serve as interventions on narratives which would reduce the poor to a life of mere resilience.

“I would like to make a film about the end of the world, and then quit making films”
(Kovács 2011, 4) declared Béla Tarr in a 2008 interview about his future creative
plans. This idea eventually materialized in his 2011 opus magnum, The Turin Horse,
which some of his critics do indeed consider his last film (c.f. Kovács 2011 and
Pólik). Although this essay is about Prologue, a rather unknown Tarr short-film, this
quotation we consider as a good point of departure, since it summarizes the central
role that ideas of apocalypse play in Tarr’s works. In this paper, we attempt to draw
out the theme of apocalypse in his oeuvre and explain why Tarr’s films generally—
and Prologue particularly—not only demonstrate a certain philosophical character,
but are doing philosophy: film as philosophy (in the sense e.g. Goodenough and Read
(2005) use the concept).

The paper focuses on Satantango (Sátántangó, 1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmóniák, 2000) and The Man From London (A londoni férfi, 2007), particularly on the manner in which the key notion at the core of Tarr’s universe finds a development within those films: the relation between the narrative and its (“entropic,” so to speak) excess. Notably, the Point Of View proves to be the ultimate device through which something like a spatial form structuring the aforementioned relation can be shaped.

Rather than in terms of fiction or reality, Béla Tarr's cinema can be perceived as a creative exploration that is neither realistic nor non-realistic, but the sum-total of our dealings with the world around. The absence of a storyline, non-professional actors, found locations and long shots uninterrupted by editing, carefully thought through and choreographed at the same time, are the effect of this exploration. The director refuses to tell a story, but his aesthetics move beyond that of social realism. In this sense the sombre image of Hungary that defines the mood and style of the films can be thought of not as realistic representation of the world, nor as the metaphysical beyond, but as an event, a situation locked in a wandering movement in which anything or nothing can happen, both real and virtual (Gilles Deleuze). Here the world, the film, the viewer and the outside are intertwined in the process of becoming (Deleuze). Drawing on Deleuze's proposition of time/thinking image, the article explores the imagery of Béla Tarr's later films Damnation (Kárhozat, 1989), Satan's Tango (Sátántangó, 1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000) in terms of the real (rather than realistic) and the creative (rather than fictional). A herd of cattle drifts out of a barn, and wanders off to a muddy, open ground past the houses of an apparently deserted village before disappearing between the buildings. This is accompanied by a ghostly sound of wind and deep tolling bells. The almost ten minute long opening shot of Satan's Tango (Sátántangó, 1994) is the time-image, a pure optical and sound situation where the narrative causality of action/reaction gives way to the architecture of aesthetics, and where the meaning of a story consents to the logic of poetic thought.

Ce séminaire de recherche part de la volonté d’interroger le rapport au temps historique dans le cinéma contemporain et dans le cinéma de la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle. Nous nous proposons de travailler cette question à partir de corpus variés (cinématographies de diverses périodes et régions). Les années 1960 apparaissent comme une périodisation cohérente car c’est une époque de nouvelles vagues dans le monde mais également d’un véritable renouveau aussi bien esthétique, que narratif, thématique et formel. En empruntant la terminologie de François Hartog, nous nous proposons donc d’interroger les régimes d’historicité dans le cinéma et la mutation des formes et des thématiques au cours des décennies, ainsi que la circulation des images et des figures entre des périodes en apparence éloignées, voire antinomiques.
Nous nous intéressons tout particulièrement à des moments de crise de temps qui marquent et interrogent le rapport au temps et à l'Histoire dans de nombreuses filmographies durant des périodes de bouleversements sociopolitiques, ainsi qu’à l’idée de trace du passé dans ses multiples formes (thématiques, esthétiques, narratives, formelles). Une attention particulière sera portée à la question de la présence du passé historique dans les films comme la forme d'une construction ou d'une reconstruction. Enfin, nous interrogerons la manière dont ces régimes d’historicité et l’histoire des représentations qu’ils produisent, permettent de penser une histoire du cinéma travaillée autant par les continuités et les héritages que par les ruptures. Le terme même de la contemporanéité et des « cinémas contemporains » sera repensé et interrogé au prisme de leur ancrage dans la mémoire, la dyschronie et le principe de déphasage temporel comme mode opératoire.

This article is concerned with art's exploration through melancholia of a world in disaster. We will investigate how art as a form of melancholia-akin to Derrida's concept of destinerrance-is not only testifying to its limits, but employing its limits, denouncing and performing its border (as in parages). In relation and in dialogue with Adorno's negative dialectics, we investigate the possibility of non-dialectical art as a non resolving discourse speaking through its melancholia. We will question whether Godard's famous announcement of the end of cinema, Wagner's Tristan chord or Parsifal's much debated ending are a monument to what Adorno would call impossible openness, if they are subjected to closure or, on the contrary, they are rather a melancholic assignable nonplace, both necessary and impossible to find, which enables art to speak of its own impossible closure. How does the end of Wagner's Ring cycle announce and contain the end of the world in Lars von Trier's Melancholia? Does The Turin Horse end the world in a melancholia of waiting in vain? Is the continuous flow of water in Marguerite Duras's film Aurelia Steiner speaking of an impossible arrival? The letter the narrator is reading to us opens up and remains hanging in this liquid and seemingly calm environment. How does filming the waters of the river Seine relate to Bill Viola's statement that true art cannot separate life from death? Why is Auschwitz a border stone for how we understand and make art today? And how is Penderecki putting the pieces together in deconstructing both silence and sound? By raising all these questions this article reprises Badiou's interrogation of the ethical possibility of art in a context of reparations prescribed by Adorno to a post-Auschwitz world, through exploring a fundamental non-violence on the part of identity towards what is different from it in order to cause a difference to begin. Can art be a locus of making reparations? Our thesis is that through exploring discontinuity, dissonance or silence a place is being constructed for an art that is possible after Auschwitz.

Ve Nietzsche Atın Üzerine Kendini Siper Eder: Post-hümanizm Kavramı Üzerine
Bu çalışmada Bela Tarr filmografisinde yer alan 2011 tarihli Torino Atı filmi post-hümanizm mefhumunun merceğinden incelenecektir. 1990'lı yıllardan bu yana akademide sıkça çalışılan bu mefhumu anlamak için öncelikle, irade ve aklı araçsallaştırarak kendinden olmayanı edilgenleştirip kendi yararına kullanmakta hiçbir sakınca görmeyen, kadın, hayvan ve doğa karşısında kendini kutsal ilan eden bir beyaz adam güzellemesi olan "hümanizm" mefhumu yapı söküme uğratılacaktır. Daha sonra batı düşünce tarihinin en önemli filozoflarından olan ve varoluşçuluk, anarşizm ve postmodernizm gibi mefhumların ortaya çıkmasında, Foucault, Derrida ve Baudrillard gibi düşünce adamlarını derinden etkileyen Nietzsche'nin, Torino tatilinde kırbaçlanan bir ata kendini siper etmesi hikayesinin muğlak sonuna açıklık getirmek üzere Bela Tarr tarafından Nietzsche'ye armağan edilen Torino atı, yine Nietzsche'nin üstün insan, ebedi-dönüş ve güç istenci kavramlarının ışığında, bu kavramların post hümanizm mefhumu ile benzerlik ve farklılıkları da irdelenerek analiz edilecek ve başkahramanı atın yemeyi, içmeyi ve hareket etmeyi reddettiği bu sembolik 6 günün insan oğlunu nasıl gittikçe kıyamete yaklaştırdığı ortaya konulacaktır.

Este texto é um ensaio. Como o próprio nome já diz, aqui não será apresentado nenhum dado definitivo, mas algumas implicações que nos levarão a uma conclusão. Nosso objeto de estudo é o tempo cinematográfico. Enquanto espectador de um filme, percebo que o tempo passa enquanto assisto à obra. Enquanto cinéfilo, percebo que diferentes cineastas trabalham de formas diferentes para nos fazer perceber o tempo. Ora ele é alongado, ora ele parece curto. Trata­se de um ensaio escrito, antes de qualquer coisa, por um cinéfilo, e por isso muitos serão os filmes abordados aqui, neste que é um ensaio de introdução a um pensamento. Comecemos, então, com uma história: Em Turim, no dia 3 de janeiro de 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche deixa a residência no número 6 da Via Carlo Alberto, talvez para dar um passeio, talvez para ir até o correio para recolher sua correspondência. Não longe dele, ou realmente bastante longe dele, um cocheiro tem problemas com seu cavalo teimoso. Apesar de sua premência, o cavalo resolve empacar, o que faz com que o cocheiro ­ Giuseppe? Carlo? Ettore? ­ perca a paciência e comece a chicoteá­ lo. Nietzsche avança até a multidão e põe um fim ao brutal espetáculo do cocheiro, que está espumando de raiva. O forte e bigodudo Nietzsche repentinamente pula na carroça e abraça o pescoço do cavalo, soluçando. Seu vizinho o leva para casa, onde ele fica deitado por dois dias, imóvel e silencioso, em um divã até que finalmente murmura suas últimas palavras: "Mutter, ich bin dumm." ("Mãe, eu sou idiota."). Ele vive ainda por 10 anos, meigo e demente, sob os cuidados de sua mãe e irmãs. Do cavalo, nada sabemos.[1] As palavras acima são enunciadas pelo narrador do filme O Cavalo de Turim (A torinói ló) do cineasta húngaro Béla Tarr. Elas soam para o espectador enquanto este mergulha na escuridão da sala de cinema proporcionada pela tela preta que mantém o filme sem qualquer representação espacial daquilo que é retratado pelo narrador. Perante esta falta, o espectador se vê obrigado a O Cinema e o Tempo Criado-esboço de ensaio

It rains a lot in Satantango, both on page and on screen. Not much else happens. Somehow, though, both prose and cinematic narrative manage to keep the reader and the spectator arrested – on condition that they are willing to dance. This paper attempts to draw an intermedial comparison of László Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel Satantango and Béla Tarr’s 1994 eponymous adaptation through the perspective of their treatment of time and narration, by reflecting upon the specificities of their respective media. Challenging the standards of adaptation as a genre, the cinematic version of Satantango’s (7h30’-long) is a bold artistic statement that rekindles discussions on the interplay of narrative time and narrated time in film and literature.
A carefully constructed point-counterpoint monotony and a repertoire of incessant repetitions are central principles of composition in Krasznahorkai’s work that Tarr’s translates into cinematic language. This kind of figural syntax belongs to a specific vein of formal experiments in modern novels, as well as to what Christian Metz called “the nondramatization” tendency in modern cinematography, making the narrative secondary and highly dependent on the subjective perception of objective time. In The Time After, Jacques Rancière borrows Deleuzian vocabulary to describe Satantango as an assemblage of “crystals of time,” in which “each sequence shot has a duty to the time of the world, to the time in which the world is reflected in intensities felt by the bodies.” Through a montage technique close to what Deleuze called a time-image, László Krasznahorkai creates the literary equivalent of this cinematic figure.
Critical and theoretical tools borrowed from Christian Metz, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière will help us compare how Krasznahorkai and Tarr use medium-specific strategies to construct an uncanny temporality which takes on the liquidity of rain, the persistence of someone’s glance through a window, and the eternal return of a drunken dance.

Conference program: https://complitconference2019.wordpress.com/?s=Irimia