werckmeister harmonies/bela tarr

That's a good question about Eastern European filmmakers, too. A lot of it is in their training and their focus on cinematography, so strong that it kind of dictates all the other factors of a film.

Might go after work...

I've seen Werckmeister Harmonies twice and I remember quite a lot of it; the all-encompassing confusion and the sense of everything on the brink of chaos left an impression, even if the underlying emotions remained obscure. Tarr's Satantango, his infamous seven-hour film made prior to WH, is even (much) better in this regard. It's a much more corrosive, more pointed film as well and is awesome in its ability to convey a sense of a certain place and time; I can almost smell the foulness of that decrepit (sp?) little village.

A certain antihumanism is one strain of Eastern European, especially Hungarian, filmmaking. Tarr is a kind of heir to Miklos Jancso, a major figure in Hungarian filmmaking whose international renown mostly came in the late '60s and early '70s. He established a style based on extremely long takes, with the camera constantly tracking, panning, and zooming in intricate patterns around and through the actors who were themselves taking part in an extraordinarily complex choreography. Tarr's long takes are often minimalist by comparison, though not always (I'm thinking of the camera snaking through the crowd heating themselves in the town square by the whale carcass in WH)--he often follows Tarkovsky in watching an event unfold with great patience. Lucky for the audience there's often a lot to look at (thinking of the 10-minute-long drunken dancing in the bar in Satantango. I guess I've accepted that Tarr is working within a tradition here, as I've sketched above (other major figures in such a tradition would be Antonioni and Angelopoulos), and I don't worry so much about what it "means" (nor does Tarr). I don't think his cinema owes us anything more than Hollywood cinema--it's just a different experience. That said there is a certain indulgent miserablism in Tarr's work, and in Jancso since the mid-1970s, that I find a turn-off.

For a great example of what a contemporary "art film" director can do with long takes, I'd recommend Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist or The Suspended Step of the Stork, or Tarkovsky's Stalker, over anything by Tarr. Angelopoulos is probably a little more "readable," ironically perhaps because his films have more traditonal symbolic and political aspects. I think critics' attempt to graft political ideas onto Tarr's films have been mostly laughable, unless they're expressed in the most general terms. Tarr seems right there on the surface, which (rightfully?) alarms people.

An example of a long-take style that's all on the surface, yet explicitly a political satire, is Alexei Guerman's Khroustaliov, My Car!, a Russian film from a few years back, which is like a long-take miserablist piece of slapstick (achoo!). It's totally corrosive, borderline incomprensible much of the time (esp. if you're not Russian), and I've not seen anything like it, ever.

Many of these films have a distinct 19th-century feel. They seem to owe a lot to the Gothic sensibility, or at least one aspect of it. There's something in their linearity, their emphasis on integral experience (hence the long takes), that strikes me as kind of . . . what's the word . . . reactionary maybe.

Of course there are plenty of Western (and Japanese, etc.) filmmakers who use the long take, but the affect is different. Rivette's recent film Secret Defense, for example, is like Lang or Hitchcock on qualuudes (that's a compliment). Kiarostami uses long takes (as well as conventionally brisk shot/reverse shot) but the feeling of his films is much more humane, not at all threatening; likewise Takeshi Kitano.

It's an interesting question.

I think that this is a fair point, and one that I tried arguing in an essay about Scandinavian cinema that iw rote a few years back. One thing I didn't, and should have, takien into account is that these countries do of course have their own traditions of "populist" cinema- Finalnd, for example, has a popular canon of light comedies set around the logging industry (incredibly true!) that are of course never see outisde of the Baltic states. I guess this "miserablist" tradition is more of a strain in Eastern European art in general rather than anything specifically "filmic".

I think you need to take apart your definitions of "religion" and "faith" before you proceed with this line of argument. "Religion" to me means something very specific in the context of late-20th century Greece or Hungary or Italy or the USSR. "Faith" is more nebulous, and to say that all films deal with faith may be a truism of some kind, but is also very banal and doesn't reveal much at all.

One reason I like talking about film style and dislike interpretation is because talk of "meaning" quickly becomes this race to recognize the most all-encompassing theme in a body of work and win the prize.

I also dug the 'indulgent miserabilism' - my only complaint wld be that it wasn't nihilistic/misanthropic/disillusioned enough!

I was clutching at straws a bit, it's true. It's a tendency I should probably tamper somewhat. I've just made a date to go and see Werckmeister Harmonies tomorrow night, so I'll save my comments for then.

I only hesitates to mention this because it sometimes leads to a reductionist reading of Eastern European films, whereby everything is interpreted as a "subversion" of or attack on Stalinism. The worst example of this kind of reductionism is perhaps what's been done to Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible--I'm not saying these films don't have political aspects, but that Eastern European filmmakers should be allowed to address the same universal concerns as anyone else. The complication here is that when Bela Tarr proposes that Satantango has nothing whatever to do with a reproach or satire of Stalinist Hungary, it's still possible to point out that Tarr's general view of the world as derelict and debased may owe a lot to the political circumstances in which he was raised.

Anyway a better example is Jancso, who was--despite his unorthodox style and themes--an officially sanctioned filmmaker with lots of state support, and least until the mid-1970s. His major films of the 1960s and 1970s can be seen not as critiques of Marxism from outside (from a libertarian, capitalist, etc. position a la Milos Forman), but internal critiques--an attempt to reimagine a native Hungarian socialism, to rediscover the roots and purposes of revolt. Granted this kind of critique can pose as much a threat to Stalinism as a "bourgeois" one, but there's a big difference between the two.

Those of you in the USA: one of his best films, The Red and the White, is available on DVD and VHS. A less-known film, Elektra My Love will be available soon. And The Round-Up and Hungarian Rhapsody can be found at Facets and probably Kim's, possibly among other video stores. I can't recommend him highly enough. The earlier films are the places to start; the '70s and '80s films are exceedingly difficult and often obscure.

i was unaware of the Jansco [sp?] tradition he was following in. the film it most reminded me of was Eureka a japanese film by a director whose name i could look up if i wasnt about to go for some lunch.

in both cases i have read articles whereby the director has stated that the long takes are some form of ideological fingers up to the "hollywood"/western trend for faster and faster editing. this seems to me to be pointless if it ruins the pace of the film. and i thought it did. if the point of a scene can be made more quickly than make it more quickly. all that lingering on cried out to me that here was a film that was desperate to be considered serious/portentous/spiritual and that wanted the viewer to invest that for themselves in scenes that did not carry that much weight of their own volition.

not that i am against long takes but like any stylistic tic, without the content in the narrative or subtext it seems a bit empty.

this film is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRl3VQQ0GUA