{"id":23422,"date":"2023-08-14T16:31:22","date_gmt":"2023-08-14T15:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=23422"},"modified":"2023-08-14T16:31:22","modified_gmt":"2023-08-14T15:31:22","slug":"twilight-a-film-by-gyorgy-feher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2023\/08\/14\/twilight-a-film-by-gyorgy-feher\/","title":{"rendered":"Twilight, a film by Gy\u00f6rgy Feh\u00e9r"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"twilight1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s a Thomas Ligotti story\u2014you’ll have to forgive my not recalling the title\u2014in which the world is suffused in an inexplicable and persistent twilight, a condition that you see manifested for real in this remarkable film by Gy\u00f6rgy Feh\u00e9r. Twilight<\/em> was released in 1990 but for a long time hasn’t been easy to see. Second Run<\/a> announced their region-free blu-ray edition a couple of months ago, another film which, like Son of the White Mare<\/em><\/a>, is a restoration presented by the National Film Institute of Hungary. The new disc arrives with filmed appreciations by the Quay Brothers, Peter Strickland and others. Mention in the publicity of the Quays, Strickland and B\u00e9la Tarr, who the film credits as a consultant, was enough to make me order this without knowing anything further.<\/p>\n

\"twilight2.jpg\"<\/p>\n

A seasoned detective investigates a series of child murders, succumbing to an all-consuming and tragic obsession with the case, finding empty solace in his quest for vengeance. What emerges is not a crime story, but a harrowing venture through the darkness of the human soul.<\/p>\n

Twilight<\/em> unfolds with breathtaking cinematography and haunting sound design, allowing the mystery to emerge in tantalisingly atmospheric and meditative fashion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A police procedural, then, but not one like any you’ve seen before. The narrative is reduced to a skeletal trace, subsumed, like Ligotti’s world, by the twilight atmosphere. Tarr’s films are an obvious reference here; Feh\u00e9r’s investigation takes place in the same misty, rain-sodden rural nowhere as S\u00e1t\u00e1ntang\u00f3<\/em> (which Feh\u00e9r helped produce), and shares with Tarr’s epic a similar approach to shot duration and camera movement. Feh\u00e9r was a cinematographer before he became a director, so the shots may be long but they’re also mesmerising and perfectly choreographed. The film is placeless and also rather timeless, in that it’s evidently set in the past but the antique quality might equally be the product of an isolated backwater. All the cars and phones and typewriters look old, while the men wear big coats and big hats; the atmosphere isn’t so much film noir<\/em> as film gris<\/em>. (Feh\u00e9r followed Twilight<\/em> with an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice<\/em> which I now have to see.)<\/p>\n

\"twilight3.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s a lot more I could say about this but I hadn’t really intended to write a review. I ought to note, however, the three musical cues which sustain the sombre visuals, and which repeat throughout: the opening chords from B\u00e9la Bart\u00f3k’s Bluebeard’s Castle<\/em>; the opening chords of Br\u00fcder Des Shattens\u2014Sohne Des Lichts<\/em><\/a> by Popol Vu, which are slowed and muted to create a Thomas K\u00f6ner-like drone; and (very surprisingly) the last minute or so of Hello Earth<\/em> by Kate Bush, which seems to have been used mainly for the song’s borrowing of Tsintskaro<\/em><\/a>, a Georgian folk song which most people know either from The Hounds Of Love<\/em> or from its earlier appearance in the plague scenes in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu<\/em>. I recognised the Bush track immediately, and was a little disconcerted at first, but the music is as muted as the other pieces, and subtly looped to create a refrain which contrasts with Bart\u00f3k’s ominous overture, something we may take as a leitmotif for the murdered girls.<\/p>\n

As I was saying only a couple of weeks ago, “it\u2019s a big cinematic world out there, and ‘world cinema’ is more than just a few shelves in an entertainment store”. It is indeed. Consider this Exhibit A.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The Cremator by Juraj Herz<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a Thomas Ligotti story\u2014you’ll have to forgive my not recalling the title\u2014in which the world is suffused in an inexplicable and persistent twilight, a condition that you see manifested for real in this remarkable film by Gy\u00f6rgy Feh\u00e9r. Twilight was released in 1990 but for a long time hasn’t been easy to see. Second … Continue reading “Twilight, a film by Gy\u00f6rgy Feh\u00e9r”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[2074,10281,13025,2719,4957,13027,13026,611],"class_list":["post-23422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","tag-bela-bartok","tag-bela-tarr","tag-gyorgy-feher","tag-kate-bush","tag-peter-strickland","tag-popol-vu","tag-quay-brothers","tag-werner-herzog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-65M","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}