SunJellyFish Film Club: Bela Tarr

SunJellyFish Film Club: Bela Tarr

Nov 24, 2021

Forgot to mention I run a small film club, if you can call it that, and here's the latest on the epic Sátántangó (original post):

Tarred and Feathered #1: Sátántangó - Bela Tarr (1994, 7 hours 31 mins) (link to post to Tarr's The Turin Horse https://www.facebook.com/groups/sunjellyfishfilmclub/permalink/245598046809909/)

Quick thoughts on a long film:

I don’t like the way Tarr uses music a lot of the time (especially in The Turin Horse) but the bells in Satan capture Tarr’s , one which feels somehow indelible, a stain to the world outside of film.

The wind blowing paper, twigs, leaves over Irimias and Petrina’s determined steps. The wind and swirl.

I am really pleased the hype is as justified as it is gushy and adulatory. It is a comfort to know the classics deserve their status, that the canon isn’t deceptive.

Feltámadunk, the title of one of the parts on the first disc; it seemed to stand in for this attitude of enduring oneself to the film. It means “We are resurrected” or “We will rise from the dead”, but for me, being a memorable word, it stands for something else. To me, it is that moment of slow endurance, the act of making entertainment out of the hard stuff, to spend time in a bureaucratic office, to study unchanging expressions. The desire and choice to explore the uncomfortable places, while in a comfortable place. “The sun rises to give birth to the shade.”

It doesn’t, however, extend to the deliberate cruelty brought on an animal.

Feltámadunk, another personal definition: It is not being one of his characters and for no reason: The realisation of the contingency of personhood. It is climbing in the darkness for the doctor, who has fallen down.

I’d like to invite any writing or articles you’ve read about this and Tarr in general.

Irimias says “The two extra spoonfulls of food we can have only make the air thinner in front of us.” Easy to forget that the devil can be generous, can be thought provoking, and ingenious. That evil is good, flipped inside-out.

There isn’t enough in the way of tutorship, following a guide, of (spiritual) apprenticeship these days. I want Tarr to take me somewhere and I want to follow him. He is a ‘master’, he is someone who creates something that is unique to him. This sounds so obvious, but we simply don’t understand ‘mastery’ and discipleship anymore, and we did, and he’s telling me what it was and is now.

With this admission, his pace makes me want to create music in a way that offers a place to interact in, and the interraction is only with oneself, ultimately. I want music to be exquisite wallpaper that offers someone — as an offering — their own canvas. Even the moments of brief sleep were still moments, where ideas merge in ways that are impossible and real.

The impossible, the untrue, is still real, and feels more true than simple waking cognition.

Believe it or not, but I have so much to write, about contept, misogyny, evil, power, betrayal, enterprise, poverty as blood-drainage, ignorance in bureaucracy, Hungarian, alcohol, but I’m off to a concert tonight (there aren’t many in Arles) and perhaps I’ll cover this post in an edit later. I will edit the name of this series as well, although I love the substance of tar as an exquisite noir syrup in the symbolic world.

Props to my local library for stocking this, how lucky to live next to the Mediatheque!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/sunjellyfishfilmclub/permalink/636347144401662/

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