What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. (Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, 1992)
What comes after history? In which way can life continue when history ends?
Béla Tarr was in his mid-thirties when the Berlin Wall fell, when the Soviet Union imploded and when the Cold War ended. He had already made five features: a social-realist trilogy that looked at the disintegration of families (Family Nest, The Outsider, Prefab People); a highly stylised colour film that, to this day, stands apart in his filmography (Almanac of Fall); and the story of a damned man in the rain longing for the (married) woman he loves, which would foreshadow what was to come (Damnation).
Tarr’s career had started when history and the world ended. This sense of an ending, which he had experienced in real life in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was a powerful thread through the director’s filmography, and would become stronger and more powerful long after Tarr retired from filmmaking.
The Cosmos and Eternity
My goal was to talk about a kind of eternity, or a kind of deeper issue.(1)
Werckmeister Harmonies begins with a cosmic scene. János Valuska enters the local bar where the village’s drunkards spend their evening. János does what he often does there – explain immortality to them, as he says. Standing in for Earth, the Sun and the Moon, three drunkards – stumbling and unsure of their movements – revolve around each other, until they stand in line, with the moon blocking the sun.
The scene is simultaneously cosmic and comic – not an unusual set-up for the Hungarian director. Shot in Tarr’s usual grayscale tone, Werckmeister Harmonies is an ominous film. It would become iconic in the director’s canon and highlight more than his previous work the crushing weight of time.
Fatigue and exhaustion. Perhaps even stupefaction, shock and lethargy. There are many reasons for one of the most remarkable features of Tarr’s films. After Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’, Tarr’s films embrace a gruelling slowness, conveyed by a camera that moves independently of character and action, – one that sets out to explore the environment that shapes the characters and that becomes a character in its own right. When film critics and scholars became interested in what they called slow cinema around 2010, Tarr was already planning his exit from the stage.
The European variation of ‘slow cinema’ is the symptom of an end, of an end that has already taken place, which left us without a compass for the future. When the continent lied in ruins in 1945, Italian neorealism tried to find a response to the barbaric apocalypse that descended on the continent of human rights and democracy. Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica, the most known Italian neorealists, portrayed people losing and fighting back. Their films were the opposite of Hollywood’s happy-end stories, but they nevertheless showed hope amidst misery.
Less than fifty years later, the fall of the Iron Curtain ushered in a new Year Zero. For the people in the East, it was the second knock-out punch in a brutal century. And although a dooming sense of the apocalypse-in-the-making dominated, especially the eastern part of Europe, there was also a feeling of hope and relief that dominated the beginning of this new era. That was soon mixed with uncertainty and anxiety across the continent.
Slow cinema can be regarded as the cinematic response to the collapse of a known world – a response to the end of a world, which was felt beyond Europe and the West, and which would continue to be felt for generations to come. Post-1989 slow cinema portrays people who have already lost – punched down, on their knees and resigned to their fate. They no longer have the energy, perhaps not even the will to fight the inevitable. A key element of Tarr’s films: the inevitable.
How do you fight the end if it has already taken place?
By reassembling the leftovers.
Time after History
What comes after history?
Temps mort. Dead time.
‘Liberalism in its several guises in fact advances a conception of fractured time, of time fundamentally disconnected.’(2) What this means, explains Byung-Chul Han is that ‘The disintegration of the time continuum makes existence radically fragile. The soul is constantly exposed to the danger of death, the horror of nothingness, because the event that snatches it from death lacks any duration.’
(…)
This is an excerpt of an essay I wrote on the occasion of ‘Béla Tarr / A Curzon Collection (Limited Edition)‘. It is included in the booklet that accompanies the beautifully crafted box set, which includes ten features, five shorts and more. Paul West’s artwork is the icing on the cake. A must for Béla Tarr films and I’m grateful for having been part of the project (from afar).