I suppose you can call Béla Tarr “indulgent,” and many do, but in an age when coma-inducing
mediocrity and predictability are the general rule, I don’t mind a little
indulgence at all. For today’s
audiences, a film being “slow” is a worse crime than being stupid and unoriginal,
it seems, which makes Tarr’s confident defiance of prevailing trends all the
more admirable. He proves that films
don’t need to be exciting to be involving.
I find his leisurely (and lengthy) traveling shots quite hypnotic and
suspenseful. His aim is not ‘realism,’
as some claim, in the sense that real-life-is-also-boring,
but ‘realism’ in the sense of Bazin, where the actual spatial relationships
between objects is proven by use of the camera, through both movement and
composition. This is exemplified by The Man from London in a fascinating
scene in a pub in which the camera moves towards and around two men having a
conversation and eventually reveals the man about whom they are speaking, who
has been eavesdropping. This deliberate
quality of the mise-en-scene, combined with Tarr’s standard black-and-white
photography, are decidedly non-realistic, more what Rudolf Arnheim referred to
as “de-limitations;” elements that increase the power of a film by removing it
several steps from reality.
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