• RIP Béla Tarr. I came late to Tarr’s films, he’d retired from directing by the time I worked my way through most of his oeuvre in 2019. As I’m always saying: better late than never. What I never expected from reading reviews was the irreducible strangeness at the heart of the later films, as well as their meticulous construction. With regard to the latter, mention should be made of the director’s regular collaborators: Ágnes Hranitzky (wife, editor and co-director), László Krasznahorkai (writer), and Mihály Víg (composer).
More Tarr: “The whole fucking storytelling thing is everywhere the same. That’s why I decided I have to do my movies.” Tarr talking to R. Emmet Sweeney in 2012; and at Criterion, Béla Tarr: Lamentation and Laughter by David Hudson.
• “When [Fela Kuti] first saw Lemi Ghariokwu’s work, he said, ‘Wow!’ Then he plied him with marijuana and asked him to design his album sleeves. The artist recalls their extraordinary partnership – and the day Kuti’s Lagos HQ burned.”
• At Smithsonan Mag: “Hundreds of mysterious Victorian-era shoes are washing up on a beach in Wales. Nobody knows where they came from.”
• At Ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon: The collage art of Wilfried Sätty.
• At the BFI: Leigh Singer selects 10 great Lynchian films.
• At Unquiet Things: The vast luminous art of Andy Kehoe.
• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s another Jan Švankmajer Day.
• New music: Light Self All Others by Tarotplane.
• At I Love Typography: Heart-shaped books.
• At Colossal: Luftwerk.
• Sailin’ Shoes (1972) by Van Dyke Parks | Dead Man’s Shoes (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire | New Shoes (2007) by Angelo Badalamenti.
THE TURIN HORSE is a film that I find myself returning to frequently in the darker months. It is a film that, in conventional standards, traffics in repetition instead of incident, with the latter accelerating towards the end. I also like WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (and the novel it is based on), but THE TURIN HORSE is the one that casts a spell over me. Every shot of the windswept plain exerts a hypnotic fascination over me. I am still to see SATANTANGO, however, even with the book being a favourite.
I still haven’t read any of the novels but Werckmeister Harmonies is the film I always recommend to the Tarr-curious. Sátántangó is marvellous but you really need to devote a day to it rather than watch it in two halves. It’s a film to lose yourself inside.
I think he peaked with this middle three films: Damnation, Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies. There’s an excellent documentary about the making of The Turin Horse on YouTube called Tarr Bela: I Used to Be a Filmmaker.