Bela Tarr's TURIN HORSE

I just saw Tarr's latest (and probably last) movie at The Lincoln Film Center. The movie is much better than his "Man From London" and after "Satantango" it is his most daring work, and in many way it is the closest to the latter.
Out of all the movies he made, this one carries the simplest narrative (and one can argue maybe too simple): description of 6 days in the life of a poor farmer and his daughter. Stormy winds hit their old house and the stable where a horse is kept.
The film opens with a nice long tracking fluid shot where the camera sometimes comes too close to the horse from a low angle and at times it tracks the horse and the farmer from a distance. Day one starts, and the daily "rituals" are shown: getting water from the well, help the half-paralyzed man dress and undress, eating boiled potatoes...etc. Those acts are repeated daily, each day from a different camera perspective but with almost no variation in content. To describe the hard life they live, Tarr succeeds in creating horror from those mundane activities, there are few shots each morning when the father wakes up with a horrifying facial expression; it surpasses in effect any possible dialogue that the character can say. And add to this example many others that also work brilliantly: pealing the boiled potatoes and eating them every day with bare hands; even eating is torture for the characters. Very little words are spoken, but no dialogue is needed with Tarr strong images and actually almost all of what is said doesn't add to the narrative, including the voice-over narration (a la Satantango).
This movie has some of Tarr most haunting images: the mummified facial expression of the farmer that is shown every morning, eating potatoes (reminded me of Van Gogh's potato eaters), the final scene of the movie is a scene that lingers even after the light is out. None of those images are as strong as or as catalytic as the whale scene in W.Harmonies but the abundance/repetition of images in Turin Horse has a cumulative effect.
In Satantango Tarr manipulated time and memory by pushing the limit of cinema storytelling in a seven-hour-long movie, here he tried to achieve this "engraving" and "time condensing" effect with the persistence and repetition of his images. It works -to a lesser degree than Satantango- now I'm 6 hours after the screening and still left with clear visual memories of those six days the characters lived. It is very interesting how this movie does not need to any dialogue, one can watch this movie with no subtitles and still get the same experience.






Turin Horse is like Bergman's Passion and Shame, ominous things occur with no explanation but we know they're adding their weight on the character. In Turin Horse, we don't know why the horse stopped eating, why the well got dry...etc but we feel this ominous feel of entrapment and death. One very strong -and horrifying- image in Turin Horse is when the light went off, not only the gas light, but the actual day light in the middle of the day, that was done brilliantly with no visual or sound effects.

One of the negative things in the movie was the introduction, why did Tarr link this story to a time (1889), a place (Turin), and a historical figure (Nietzsche) ?? Actually one can argue that though this is mentioned in the first scene, there is nothing that states clearly that this the actual "turin horse"; what is said is "nobody knows" (see the first scene below). This relation to the Nietzsche incident can't be taken seriously unless Tarr is explaining why the latter went mad (him realizing the fate of the horse and its owners), this would be a long, and weak stretch. The other explanation is that being an absurd -and not that funny- joke. Had Tarr kept the time and place unrevealed (like in W. Harmonies) this would have added more depth to the narrative and the apocalyptic events (especially towards the end, when fire and light stop to exist) could have been attributed to the present or the future of mankind, as seen by Tarr.



Tarr uses his regulars, it's nice to see Estike, the troubled little girl from Satantango now as a grown up woman. Vig's simple 4-bar soundtrack also works beautifully as usual. Overall I wish I could say that this movie is as good as all the movie I mentioned (except the Man From London) but W. Harmonies, Bergman's Shame and Passion, and even Satantango had all more accomplished narratives.
However if this is really tarr's final work, it is far better than Bergman's Saraband and Tarkovsky's Sacrifice.

Malick's TREE OF LIFE

I didn't expect to wait in line for 20 minutes to be able to get two tickets to see a Malick's film on a Friday noon show. In the US usually lines are seen on weekend night for "Avatar"ish blockbusters, but that is one thing I like in NYC, lines of serious cinema viewers do exist. Interestingly the crowd was mostly elderly and middle-aged, maybe this is due just to the location being in the upper west side (as opposed to a younger audience in Chelsea or the Village).

Tree of Life is an excellent movie, it is Malick's most daring work to date:
1. It is his most NON-linear narrative.
2. It attempts to find (to show) answers to impossible existential philosophical questions.
3. It is his most visually-driven work (some frames are pure abstracts)
4. It has dinosaurs (as -almost- everybody, I knew that before seeing the film).

Sooner or later everybody will be comparing this movie to Kubrick's 2001, especially when it will hit the theaters in wide release in July. This is not a surprise, I read somewhere that Malick even dragged the same visual effects pioneer who worked on Kubrick's 2001 (Douglas Trumbull) out of his retirement to work on Tree of Life. Both 2001 and ToL have those near-abstract frames in long sequences, but overall Malick is no where near Kubrick as a visionary filmmaker: Kubrick's work is really enigmatic (e.g. the monolith) compared to Malick's detailed and more grounded and more scientific-based frames (e.g. cells, sperms, ovocytes, planets....etc).
With some limitations, one can say that ToL is to Malick's oeuvre what The Mirror was to Tarkovski's: Both movies represented the directors pushing their cinema to extremes of experimentation whether technically or in narration and also both movies are their most personal (I wouldn't use the word autobiographical for ToL despite what I read about family members in Malick's own life -almost- having identical historical traits and events to the movie's characters). One major limitation to such comparison is that The Mirror is Tarkovski's best work. And by the way, The Mirror has -by far- a much better narrative than ToL and for that alone it is a much better work. Another reason why The Mirror is a better work is that it lacks any major weakness or flaw, whether ToL -despite being an excellent work- has few downs, and almost all of them are present in Malick's attempt to explain (or show) the unknown. I can mention one of the very last sequences that is visually striking but gives a relatively "naive" image to the afterlife. What should be mentioned though -and that most of the critics seem to miss- is that this whole "vision" of the universe should be seen as a subjective vision via the mind of the main protagonist and NOT a scientific explanation. Taking this into consideration helps me digest this better, just like how one should not be attempting to explain Tarkovski's dream sequences.

Tree of Life is not an easy work to apprehend from a single view, I am not sure where it ranks in Malick's work but it is definitely something different than everything else he made and for this alone I have to give credit to the director to step out of his comfort zone of storytelling. I will be visiting very soon this movie again (and again). One can say that Malick just made one of the best and most sincere movies about childhood but to limit ToL that theme is unfair.

Visually it's Malick at his best especially with a cinematographer like E. Lubezki (the terrific visuals of Children of Men, and The New World), the soundtrack is outstanding with original work by A. Desplat blended with classics by Mahler, Brahms....etc.

The Mirror- Review

The review is up.

Tarkovsky Documentary (Part 2)

Tarkovsky Documentary (Part 1)

Tarkovsky On Cinema

Tarkovsky on Art (Part 2)

Tarkovsky on Art

The Mirror- Dream

The Mirror- Fire

Tarkovsky's The Mirror

The Sacrifice

One of Ingmar Bergman's main men, Erland Josephson, in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice:

Solaris Trailer

Tarkovsky's Mirror

Got a gift this Xmas- an Amazon gift certificate. Bought a few books and DVDs I'm awaiting.

One of them is Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror. Of the few films of his I've seen I can say the artist is intriguing, even when not in top form: Stalker, The Sacrifice, and Solaris, are all very interesting films, no matter whether one agrees with their philosophic posits or not.

Some scenes:

M. Kalatozov's I AM CUBA (1964)

This is a stunning work, simply great. I had this DVD for a few years now and I just managed to watch it. I remember I was reading about Tarkovsky back then, who cited -more than once- a Russian cinematographer (Sergey Urusevsky) as a big influence on his visual style. In fact Tarkovsky made the first scene of his first major movie (the opening dream sequence in Ivan's Childhood) with Urusevsky in mind. This is the sequence



I Am Cuba was done in 1964 and was sponsored by both the Cuban and the Russian regimes, hence the fact it's a pro-Castro shouldn't be a surprise. The director M.Kalatozov and the cinematographer Urusevsky both did a successful work in 1957 (The Cranes Are Flying, I'm planning to watch next) and were chosen by the soviet regime to evoke moments similar to Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible. I Am Cuba was hated by both Cubans and Russians for years, only to be restored some 30 years after by Scorsese and Coppola who loved it after seeing some scenes of it and decided to join effort to restore it.

The movie's narrative is simple: four simple independent stories from Cuba in the period of revolution, all stories connected by a narrative by a young female voice, Cuba. What puts this work on a separate level from any other Russian (or European) movie I've seen from the mid-60's is its stunning visuals. The cinematography is incredibly challenging: an uninterrupted scene starts from the top roof of a building and tracks random people (camera going through ground floors) only to end tracking a random young lady into a pool (under the water). According to the press notes, the filmmakers "had to make a watertight box out of sheets of Dupont plastic with three handles so the camera could be passed between Urusevsky and Calzatti [cameramen] at crucial moments. On the first take, the camera box refused to dive beneath the water surface, and Calzatti had to adapt the box with a hollow steel tube running through it so the air could escape the box, but no water would enter the camera."

The movie features another unforgettable scene (shot in extreme infra-red!!!) that features a burning field of sugar canes under a cloudy sky, the infra-red turned the flames into a "black" cloud that was contrasted with a gray/moody sky. Most of the camera work is hand-held yet has a great stability. A lot of tracking shots ascend many feet in the sky and descend abruptly in seconds (like Tarkovsky's shot).





another shot (NOT the actual sound track)



The best "story" is -in my opinion- the farmer's story, it had few dialogue and almost the whole story is told through superb visual sequences (reminded me of Malick's but replace the colors with dominant black shadows and gray light). The strength of the movie is that it is told visually.

Dan I highly recommend this experience, try to get it. It's the best movie I've seen since ages... reminded me (at least form-wise) of great visual moments of great directors (Tarr, Tarkovsky, Jancso, Angelopoulos, Malick).

Wassim

Tarkovsky's Stalker

This is great. This is a terrific film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and free online.

Here is my review of Stalker.

The film: