The Turin Horse (2011)

A torinói ló, Hungary / France / Switzerland / Germany / USA, 155 minutes
Directors: Bela Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky
Writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Bela Tarr
Photography: Fred Kelemen
Music: Mihaly Vig
Editor: Agnes Hranitzky
Cast: Erika Bok, Janos Derzsi, Mihaly Kormos, Mihaly Raday

Together for 30 years of moviemaking, Hungarian director Bela Tarr with his life partner Agnes Hranitzky (credited on some films as editor and on others, as here, also as co-director) produced a uniquely recognizable body of work. Their movies have resemblances to and affinities with the work of other directors (Bresson, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, etc.), not to mention a host of students in their trail (Lav Diaz, Jim Jarmusch, etc.), but nothing else is much like them. They are arguably stunt movies, slow, overlong, ponderous, willfully opaque in passages. The Turin Horse, for example—which is more or less their official sign-off—comes in at a relatively trim two and a half hours and contains only 30 takes (an average of more than five minutes between cuts). I'm actually much more OK with technical cinematic tricks like that than with some of the narrative conceits they indulge, e.g., "Satan's Tango," the name and seeming motivating idea of their seven-hour-plus masterpiece. I had similar problems with the touchpoint core of The Turin Horse, which true confession I never picked up on until I read up more on the picture in recent days.

The Turin Horse opens with an incidental anecdote, related by the voiceover narrator (Mihaly Raday), about the German philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche. Or at least I thought it was incidental. It's the story of the day Nietzsche snapped in Turin, Italy, when by the unsubstantiated legend he saw a horse being viciously flogged. Come to understand, the unfortunate conceit of The Turin Horse is that the horse in it—a figure in this movie reminiscent of the figure of the donkey in Au hasard Balthazar—is the very horse that Nietzsche saw in Turin. Well, OK, but it plays hell with the setting, a dry outland of eternally blowing wind and dust, out of which a random third character wanders in at one point with a largely incoherent rant but clues that we are in some kind of science fiction post-apocalyptic world like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. So it's no later than 1920 (how long do horses live anyway?) yet it is post-apocalyptic. OK, whatever! Maybe it's an alternative World War I. It's just, did it really have to be the very horse that sent MC Zarathustra around the bend?

Satantango (1994)

(Requested by reader Phil.)

Satan's Tango, Hungary / Germany / Switzerland, 420 minutes
Director: Bela Tarr
Writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Mihaly Vig, Peter Dobai, Barna Mihok, Bela Tarr
Photography: Gabor Medvigy
Music: Mihaly Vig
Editor: Agnes Hranitzky
Cast: Peter Berling, Janos Derzsi, Miklos Szekely B., Erzsebet Gaal, Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath, Laszlo feLugossy, Eva Almassy Albert, Erika Bok

Fair warning and common sense alert: It takes some mental preparation and internal letting go to get inside and all the way through this picture—Satantango is not a movie to see on a whim. For one thing, it just doesn't behave much like many other films, except perhaps parts of the rest of Hungarian director and co-writer Bela Tarr's catalog, which is infrequent yet can be equally prolific, lean, and densely massive. The pamphlet that comes with the Facets DVD box bears the important message, "A Cinema of Patience." Take note. Coming in 1994 out of a former Soviet satellite state, that sentiment bears the weight of multiple connotations about this film, and a dreadful burden.

At seven hours, the running time likely remains the most salient feature of Satantango, certainly the primary factor one must negotiate. The movie comes with its own sense of time. It's not just slow, with its long meditative takes, but it also forces accommodation of time in new and strange ways. The narrative—not easy to make out (partly exactly because it is so long and slow), and which is perhaps best taken as extended post-Soviet phantasmagoria—tends to stop, retreat, and loop back on itself, creating knots. Meanwhile, long lines and vectors of themes and plot points cross each other at angles acute and obtuse. An eerie synthesizer keyboard soundtrack sounds like the organ in Sunset Blvd. The tone is deadening somber, but it is also an absurdist black comedy, and often very funny. Satantango is playful as only a bludgeoning seven-hour tour de force of long slow takes can be. It is equally often harrowing and desolate, and always deliciously paranoid. It contains depictions of human cruelty you may never forget. It is fantastical and naturalistic at once.

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

Werckmeister harmóniák, Hungary/Italy/Germany/France, 145 minutes
Directors: Bela Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky
Writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Bela Tarr, Peter Dobai, Gyuri Dosa Kiss, Gyorgy Feher
Photography: Patrick de Ranter, Miklos Gurban, Erwin Lanzensberger, Gabor Medvigy, Emil Novak, Rob Tregenza
Music: Mihaly Vig
Editor: Agnes Hranitzky
Cast: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla, Janos Derzsi, Djoko Rosic, Peter Dobai

Werckmeister Harmonies is the usual study in contradictions for a long and difficult art film, or at least for one that grows better with familiarity—bewildering but mesmerizing, confusing but lucid, slow and ponderous yet frequently nimble-witted. It opens on a strange and elaborately staged barroom demonstration of an eclipse, with drunkards standing in as the heavenly bodies. It finds its narrative focus (around which it stalks sideways fashion) in the arrival of a traveling circus, so called, to a small city. The circus features a whale exhibit and "The Prince," some sort of charismatic cult figure. The town, seen mostly through the eyes of its overnight newspaper delivery person and would-be litterateur Janos (Lars Rudolph and his haunting, fearful face), is in fragile condition, wracked by unknown forces politically, emotionally, existentially.

These elements are as carefully chosen as everything else in this movie, which is nearly as deliberate as it is possible to be. Whales carry portent that stretches back to the bible, revived again in the advent of the New World. "The Prince"—who is likely the strangest and most mysterious character in a movie stuffed with them—grounds it deeply in European experience, bearing the colossal burden of everything from Machiavelli and Saint-Exupery to the feudal estate itself. In many ways the opening scene works as prologue, because the narrative arc, such as it is, most closely resembles an eclipse, the single most cinematic natural event that occurs (aside from perhaps only tornadoes), ending at that moment Janos himself describes in his barroom exposition: "Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open under us? We don't know. We don't know, for a total eclipse has come upon us... But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the moon swims away...."