Still from The Man From London, 2007, 2 hours 12 minutes. Courtesy of Béla Tarr and T. T. Filmmûhely.

When Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr says that filmmaking “is not like shooting a movie, it is a part of life,” the conviction in his voice is palpable. And yet to approach Tarr’s melancholy vision of reality there is truly only the work to guide us. From his films of the late 1970s and early ’80s (including Family Nest [1977] and The Outsider [1981]), with their vérité style of employing non-professional actors, improvised dialogue, and hand-held cameras, through to the magisterial distances of Satan’s Tango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Tarr’s films follow simple stories in order to convey an experience of a situation, or an atmosphere; to create what he calls the “objective reality of the story.” And while much has been made by a few critics of the endurance factor of watching a later Tarr film—long, elaborate shots, immense depth of focus, and claustrophobic repetition are signature to his style—first exposure to his work punctures all conventional expectations of cinematic time and space.

My first viewing of a Tarr film, Werckmeister Harmonies, was a revelation. After a delay at the Canadian border en route to the Vancouver Film Festival, and a harried drive to arrive on time and take our seats, the camera’s eye opened upon the shambling interior of a bar in some remote outpost where three drunk patrons were enacting a solar eclipse—one the sun, another the moon, and the earth circling between—all under the wide-eyed direction of János Valuska, the village postman. That 10-minute take cast an immersive, otherworldly spell that mirrors the rhythm of Tarr’s work as a whole—distinctive, ongoing, and resonant.

The opportunity to assess Tarr’s work has increased profoundly in the past two years: His early films—The Outsider, Prefab People (1982), and Family Nest—were released on DVD in 2005, followed last year by Almanac of Fall (1984), Damnation (1988), and Werckmeister Harmonies, and finally, this year, Tarr’s seven-hour masterwork, Satan’s Tango. This happy development is the result of Facets Multi-Media. Based in Chicago, Facets has played a crucial role in the meteoric rise of the DVD market for European “arthouse” films and increased the audiences for early films from Alexander Sokurov, Werner Herzog, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and many others. For Tarr, this has resulted in a much wider audience and a growing number of critics familiar with his body of work, as his reputation begins to morph from rebel outsider to venerable auteur—a reputation that was cemented by the Cannes premiere this spring of his first film in seven years, The Man From London.

The Man from London continues an aesthetic that Tarr insists is unbroken back to his first film. And despite the “Old Testament” plot—a term he wryly uses to describe his own films—and the usual grim circumstances looming in stark black and white, this latest venture seems to offer new directions for the 52-year-old filmmaker. For the first time the film’s central character is played by someone well known in Hollywood—British actress Tilda Swinton—and the script is a more or less faithful adaptation of a populist crime novel by Belgian author George Simenon. All indications—including Tarr’s own—are that the film more directly engages film noir conceits only flirted with in the past (most notably in Damnation). In short, The Man from London appears to inch Tarr toward an increased accessibility.

I spoke with Tarr on the telephone in December 2006, as he was preparing to return to Bastia, Corsica, for final shooting.

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Issue 100 Summer 2007