My task was to find the reality that led Kraznahorkai to write [The Werckmeister Harmonies]. So I myself spent six months in the great Hungarian plain and visited every house and I visited every pub. That's when I started to understand what it means: mud, rain, infinity. And that's when I sensed the form into which I could place this story, about these people.
Bela Tarr, interviewed
– Where do you situate Nostalghia in the context of your body of work?
– Nostalghia is an extremely important film for me. It is a film in which I have managed to express myself fully. I must say that it has confirmed for me that cinema is a truly great art form, capable of representing faithfully even the most imperceptable movements of the human soul.
– What struck you most upon seeing, even if only once, your completed film?
– Its almost unbearable sadness, which, however, reflects very well my need to immerse myself in spirituality. In any case, I can't stand mirth. Cheerful people seem guilty to me, because they can't comprehend the mournful value of existence. I accept happiness only in children and the elderly, with all others I am intolerant.
Tarkovsky, interviewed
– Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?
– The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.
J.G. Ballard, interviewed
The most disquieting section of the Joy Division documentary is the cassette recording of Curtis being hypnotised. It's disturbing, in part because you suspect that it is many ways the key to Curtis's art of performance: his capacity to evacuate his self, to "travel far and wide through many different times". You don't have to believe that he has been regressed into a past life in order to recognise that he is not there, that he has gone somewhere else: you can hear the absence in Curtis's comatoned voice, stripped of familiar emotional textures. He has gone to some ur-zone where Law is written, the Land Of The Dead. Hence another take on the old 'death of the author' riff: the real author is the one who can break the connection with his lifeworld self, become a shell and a conduit which other voices, outside forces, can temporarily occupy.
Mark E Smith once understood this very well; perhaps still understands it, even now, sitting at the bar at the end of the universe, his psychic antenna dulled by booze. In a very different way to Curtis, Smith at his most incendiary was a depersonalised host for stray, strange signal. Where Curtis's dispossession was concentrated into a single and singular voice that sounded as if it was already dead, Smith became a cacophony, an 'ESP medium of discord', a damaged transmitter that was like Baudrillard's schizophrenic: a switching centre for all the networks of influence. That is partly why the Smith 'auto' 'biography' is so disappointing. Biography is an end of history form, deflationary and reductive in its rush to reassure us that it was always about people. The point that artists come to believe it it is all about them – and not about their ability to channel externalities which erased them – is usually the point at which they lose it.
… the Mark E Smith persona has solidified, become a ‘national treasure’. Mark E Smith, the sort of no-nonsense bloke everyone would like to have a drink with. A fancied wit, still sharp, sarcastic – he’d keep you on your toes – but at the end of the day, he’s as pubbish and blokish as his one-time mentor John Peel, only with added prole cred. Mark E Smith, who gives his own life story to a culture in which biography has passively aggressively defanged fiction. See, we can explain it all now. True life tales. Nothing odd to see here.
This Mark E Smith is a doppelganger who has gradually all but replaced Mark E Smith the psychic and the schizophrenic, the ‘righteous maelstrom’, the dissonant vorticist transmitter who heard voices and spoke in tongues, the medium and media-channeler. The Mark E Smith who could make himself a riot of voices. People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads.
Mark K-Punk
It would be a mistake to read The Unmamable's 'I'll go on' redemptively, as the triumph of some indomitable spirit, human or otherwise. Beckett makes contact instead with an intensive negativity, a purgatorial continuum in which things can always get worse, without ever reaching the relief of the worst. Total negativity would yield quiescence, yet for Beckett, as for Ligotti, silence and stasis are unattainable, they lie outside texts which might be for nothing but which are not, cannot be, nothing. Those afflicted with being might yearn for nothingness, yet even their dreams belong to being.
The ontological haemorrhage to which Beckett's 'characters' in the Trilogy are subject – the collapsing of Molloy's world into the worlds of Malone, Macmann and the Unnnamable – is echoed in Ligotti by the repeated 'moment of consummate disaster, when the puppet turns to face the puppet master'. Just as 'the Unnamable not only imagines characters, he also tries to imagine himself as the character of someone else' (McHale) …
You do not make it very easy for the audience. Compared to Simenon’s novel where the story is very easy to follow, you omit a lot of things, you do not show only indicate many details.
Not the story that matters. First of all, I respect my viewers as much as myself. If I do not like primitive, stupid, simple stories, then I won’t humiliate my audience with a story of this kind. Because I suppose the viewer is as smart and sensitive as me, so I have to make a great effort to present the best I can. I always have to do my best and have to speak supposing that the viewer is as clever or more clever than me.
The other thing is storytelling. We talked about this last time: every story is the same. It is not worth caring much for telling a story. We shall not tell a story. There are things which are already known. We can omit them, because that is not the point. The point is whether fate is there in the characters’ eyes on the screen. There are big stories, but they can be authentic only if there are real human destinies presented in them. The point is how deep you can present or approach human fate. If you suceed in it, then you could do it.
Bela Tarr, interviewed
– In one of the editions of Crash, you write, “The fiction is already there. It is up to us to invent the reality”.
– I think that is pretty true on one level. We live in a world of entertainment culture that’s informed by relentless television, hundreds of channels, by advertising, by politics conducted as a branch of advertising, by consumerism as a whole. It’s seen as a reality because people are quite serious about it, but it’s completely devoid of real elements.
My father as a young man, or my grandfather as a young man, or my grandmother, would have recognised reality. They had a clear understanding that reality was work. That isn’t true any more. The whole thing is a huge fiction. This is why we’ve sort of lost our direction as a nation. We assume that everyday reality is as real as in our grandparents’ time. I think even our present Prime Minister is to some extent a prisoner of his own fantasy world, who doesn’t realise it and has started to believe his own fictions.
I don’t think it can be reversed — the other world, the reality, has become so fictionalised. Any points of reality we have are in our own heads. Our obsessions. Nodes of anger, greed, hope, the need to remythologise our lives — these are the only realities we have. To my father’s and grandfather’s generation all that was just nonsense. ‘You’re dreaming boy. Go to work. Wake up’. There’s been a sort of switch of polarities.
J G Ballard, interviewed in 2006.
Boredom … To think without anything in us thinking, but with the exhaustion from thought; to feel without anything in us feeling, but with its anxiety; not to desire, without anything in us refusing to desire, but with the nausea of non-desire – all that is part and parcel of boredom without being it, and is nothing more than paraphrase or metaphor. It is, as far as our feelings are concerned, as if, over the moat encircling the castle of our soul, the drawbridge was suddenly raised and there remained nothing between the castle and the adjoining land but the possibility of looking at both of them without being able to cross from one to the other.
Boredom … To suffer without pain, to love without desire, to think bereft of reason …
Pessoa's Soares, The Book of Disquiet
There's a lot of clever people around who write songs', Dylan says. 'My songs, what makes them different is that there's a foundation to them. That's why they're still around, that's why my songs are still being performed. It's not because they're such great songs. They don't fall into the commerical category. They're not written to be performed by other people. But they're standing on a strong foundation, and subliminally that's what people are hearing.
'Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book', he adds. 'All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from 'Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain' to 'Keep on the Sunny Side'. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing 'I Saw the Light'. I've seen the light, too'. Dylan now says he subscribes to no organised religion.
From Dylan on Dylan
So, there’s a sense of apocalypse. Rather, a sense of foreboding because maybe the apocalypse isn’t coming?
Apocalypse? What is this? Sure, I’ve read something in the Bible. Maybe we are in it, who knows?
Lars Rudolph, who acted the part of Valuska in The Werckmeister Harmonies, from an interview (or is it Bela Tarr himself speaking? I can’t tell.)
Everything in me can be summed up as an urge to be immediately something else; an impatience of the soul with itself, like an importunate child; a disquiet which is always on the increase and always identitical. Everything interests me and nothing retains my attention. I apply myself to everything by continually dreaming; I pin down the slightest details of the facial expressions of the person I am talking to. I register the intonations down to the last millimetre of what he expresses; but, even listening, I do not hear him, since I am in the process of thinking about something else, and what I remember least about our conversation is precisely what is said – by one or the other.
So, very often, I repeat to people what I have already told them, I ask over again a question to which they have already replied; but I can describe, in four photographic words, the facile expression which they employed to say what I no longer remember, or this tendency to listen only with the eyes to the story which I do not remember having told them. I am two – and both of them keep their distance, Siamese twins linked by nothing.
I have lived so much without ever living! I have thought so much without ever thinking. Worlds of static violence, motionless adventures heavily oppress me. I am sated with what I never had nor will never have, annoyed by non-existent gods. I wear the scars of all the battles I avoided fighting. My muscular body is exhausted from the effort I have not thought of making.
Dulled, silent, nothing … The sky high up there is a dead, unfinished summer sky. I look at it, as if it were not there. I sleep what I think, I am prostrate when walking, I suffer without feeling anything. That immense nostalgia I have is nothing, it is nothing, like the high heavens which I do not see and which I stare at impersonally.
… irony has two stages: the one exemplified by Socrates when he says, ‘I only know that I know nothing’, and the other exemplified by Sanchez when he says, ‘I do not even know that I know nothing’. The first stage reaches the point where we doubt ourselves dogmatically, and every superior man attains that level. The second arrives at the point when we doubt both ourselves and our doubt, and very few have attained that during the brief, but already too long, span of time which we, humanity, have seen alternating the day and the night on the variegated surface of the earth.
The whole of life is an attempt to make life real. As everybody knows, even if we act in ignorance, life is totally unreal in its direct reality; fields, cities, ideas are totally fictive things, born of our complex realisation of ourselves.
[…] To speak! To know how to speak! To know how to exist using the written voice and the intellectual image! Life is worth nothing more; the rest are men and women, imagined loves and false vanities, digestive subterfuges and those of oblivion, people who race around like insects when a stone is lifted, under the vast abstract rock of the unfeeling blue sky.
There is something sublime in wasting a life which might have mad utility, in never completing a work which would necessarily have been sublime, by abandoning halfway the assured path to success!
[…] And I who talk like this – why do I write such a book? Because I know it to be imperfect. Total silence would be perfection; once written, it unperfections itself; for that reason, I write it.
And above all, because I defend what is useless, absurd – I write this book to lie to myself, to betray my own theory.
I am today an ascetic in my own religion. A cup of coffee, a cigarette, and my dreams can easily replace the sky and its stars, work, love and even the beauty of glory. I have, so to speak, no need of stimulants. My opium I find in my soul.
Since we are unable to extract beauty from life, we attempt at least to extract it from our incapacity to extract beauty from life. We turn our rout into a victory, something achieved and positive, with columns, pomp and spiritual contentment.
Bernardo Soares, via Pessoa
So Tarr, the subject of a current NFT retrospective, arrived in this country cloaked in mystique. But he dismisses any scent of enigma around his work. “When we are making a movie,” he says, “we only talk about concrete situations – where the camera is, what will be the first and the last shot. We never talk about art or God.”
Bela Tarr, interviewed
I must ask what your next film is about.
You may ask it, but I won’t talk about it.
You never talk about it.
Yes, because it is impossible. At the end of Werckmeister Harmonies the old man goes up to the whale and look into its eyes. Is it possible to tell what he is feeling then? That is why it is good to make films.
Bela Tarr, interviewed
I’m fed up with this whole narrative thing because the movie – you know what? – without the narrative, the movie has a chance; you can show something. It’s not necessary to tell. Do you remember the end take of the Werckmeister Harmonies? When the old man goes to the eye of the whale?
Yes
Nobody can ever tell you by words what is happening in this old man and in this sad eye of the whale. But I can show you and that’s enough. I trust your eyes and I trust your heart and I trust your emotions. I really trust the audience.
Bela Tarr, interviewed
[Tarr speaks on many occasions of loving and trusting his audience. He speaks of them as friends, as Godard has done recently.]
– But there are cosmic themes in your films, and you’ve been quoted as saying that you’re “trying to look at things from a cosmic dimension.”
– You know how it happens, when we started we had a big social responsibility which I think still exists now. And back then I thought “Okay, we have some social problems in this political system – maybe we’ll just deal with the social question.” And afterwards when we made a second movie and a third we knew better that there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos. And there’s the reason. You know how we open out step by step, film by film. It’s very difficult to speak about the metaphysical and that. No. It’s just always listening to life. And we are thinking about what is happening around us.
– What do you think this shit is that’s coming from the cosmos?
– I just think about the quality of human life and when I say ‘shit’ I think I’m very close to it.
Bela Tarr, interviewed
Probably, I make films in order to tempt fate, to simultaneously be the most humiliated and, if only for a few moments, the freest person in the world. Because I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being – all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine – time itself: the years, days hours, minutes and seconds. And film time has also ceased to exist, since the film itself has ceased to exist. Luckily there is no authentic form or current fashion. Some kind of massive introversion, a searching of our own souls can help ease the situation.
Or kill us.
We could die of not being able to make films, or we could die from making films.
But there’s no escape.
Because films are our only means of authenticating our lives. Eventually nothing remains of us except our films – strips of celluloid on which our shadows wander in search of truth and humanity until the end of time.
I really don’t know why I make films.
Perhaps to survive, because I’d still like to live, at least just a little longer….
Bela Tarr on why he makes films
Where are the good old days, when Rabelais wrote as a child might pee against a tree, to relieve himself? The old days when literature took a deep breath and created itself freely, among people, for people!
Drawing is for Giacometti another breathing. In order to model or paint one must have earth, canvas, colours. Drawing is possible anywhere, at any time, and Giacometti draws anywhere, at any time. He draws to see and can see nothing without drawing, mentally at any rate: each thing seen is drawn within him. The drawing eye of Giacometti knows no rest, no faigue. Nor does our eye, as it contemplates his drawings, have the right to rest. it is forbidden to linger over a detail, a form, an empty space. A strange, perpetual motion, without which it would lose sight of the subject, draws it on.
This optical phenoneomon results from the very nature of Giacometti’s drawing, from its mobility which is the product of the repetition and discontinuity of the line. The form is never immobilised by an outline or held within isolated and sure strokes. It is not detached from the background or separated by a ressuring boundary from the space which surrounds it. It issues from a multitude of overlapping lines which correct and weigh down each oter, and abolish one another as liness they increase. Thus the line is never continuous but broken, interrupted, open at every moment on the void but revoking it at once by its renewals, its unforeseen returns.
This results in an imprecision of detail and an intentional indefiniteness which repel the eye at each impact, as though by a minature electric shock, sending it from one detail to the next, and from each to the totality which they produce as they disappear. These goings and comings, this dancing race of our eye, gives us the subject to see at a distance, as Giacometti sees it, in its impassable space, across the ambient void which disturbs and infects its image.
[…] In its rapid whorls the drawing carves our depth, or rather breathes it in, opens itself to it and renders its active between the strokes. It is as though a force issuing from within beings or things gushes out like a fluid through the interstices of the drawing and the porousness of the forms. And the lines must reveal this force, that is, both contain it and provoke its escape. This is the reason for their discontinuity. The interruptions and accumlations of line are never felt as superflous repetitions and incongruous stops since they are the equivalent of the eye’s mobility. On the contrary they contribute to give the objects this trembling, this feeling of truth and life.
[…] When Matisse draws a leaf with his lively and supple line, he also fixes it in a single one of its appearance and thus immobilises it tyrannically for eternity. Giacometti cannot or dose not care to gather such an image and immolate it according to his whims. As he multiplies its possibilities of seeming, he leaves the object its uncertain development, its anxious mobility. He does not draw up a single course but opens a multitude of paths among which the object can choose, or at least seem to hesitate continually, drawing from its indecision its quivering autonomy and the trembling of a separate life.
Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays
In the centre of the tiny, culttered studio, lit by a skylight, Diego poses, sitting immobile aand resigned on a stool: he is used to it. But Alberto, in spite of having examined his brother’s face for almost fifty years, is not yet used to it. He is just as astonished as he was on the very first day before this unknown, immeasurable head, which defies and refuses him, which offers only its refusal. If he approaches his brother, the latter’s head grows out of all proportion, becomes gigantic and threatening, ready to topple on him like a mountain or the angry face of a god. But if he backs away a few paces Diego recedes into infinity: his tiny, dense head seems a planet suspended in the immense void of the studio. In any case, and whatever the distance, it forbids him to approach. It looms abruptly, a separate, irreducible entity.
[…] We know what a head is’, exclaimed André Breton one day, disappointed and irritated that Giacometti preferred reality to the imaginarg. We do indeed know what a head is. But the knowledge, precisely, is what Giacometti is struggling against.
Face to face with his sculpture, we are scarcely freer than Giacometti in front of his model. For it carries itsdistance within it and keeps us at a respectful distance. And our relationship recreates the strictly evaluated space so that its totality, and that alone, may appear. This figure does not allow us to rest our eyes on one or another of its parts; each detail refers us back at once to the whole. It does not develop a rhythm which would gradually conduct us owards an encounter. it does ot reveal itself as a series of plasic events leading to a harmony, a chord. It bursts forth in its immediate presence: it is an advent.
The figures keep us at a distance; they carry their remoteness inside them and reveal their profound being. Naked, unmasked, it is now their unknown doubles who come to light. Their hieratic attitude reveals an imperious insensitivity. They elude our understanding, reject our impulsive gestures. They do not disain us; they ignore us and dominate us. One would think them fastened on their pedestals for eternity, rooted to their rock. The gravity of their bearing, the asceticism of their demeanor and their gaze which traverses time and traverses us too withou flinching, without suspecting our opacity and our stupefaction, gives them the appearance of divinities. They seem to await a primitive cult.
Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays
By copying what he sees, as his father taught him when he was a boy, he hopes to give consistency to the reality which eludes him, to see it, hold on to it, and hence to affirm himself in its presence. And as he copies it he advances toward the most exact portrayal of what he sees, but also toward awareness of the absolute impossibility of this attempt, The affective ordeal becomes identified with his experience of the perception which objectifies the inner drama. His procedure turns into a stubborn, furious pursuit of a prey which escapes him or of a shadow which he rejects. The closer he comes to the truth of the object, the more he deepens the gulf which separates him from it, the more he feels and communicates the acute feelings of his difference and his separation.
[…] Through a series of trials, failures, leaps ahead which are but the varied moments of a single experience, Giacometti approaches the inaccessible goal he assigned himself, and at the same time expresses the lyric investigation of a consciousness tortured by the impossibility of communicaion.
Giacometti […] strives to copy what he sees, simply, ‘stupidly’, desperately.
[…] With any other artist it would be theoretically possible to determine exactly what a single touch of colour or a stroke of the chisel brings to the work in progress, for each gesture adds itself to the preceding one, modifying the part and the whole, causing the work to advance toward its end (the end proposed or supposed from the beginning). Giacometti’s gesture is of another sort. His repeating, his re-examining contradict the deforming brutality of each particular intervention. To make and unmake incessantly is to diminish, to deaden each gesture, to drown it gently in sequence and number, as the sea absorbs its weaves.
Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays
Each of my books was created at a different place. Vienna, Brussels, somewhere in Yugoslavia, in Poland. I never had a desk in mind. When writing was going well it didn’t matter where I did it. I also wrote with the greatest noise around me. I’m not disturbed by a crane or a noisy crowd or a screaming tram, or a laundry or a butcher’s. I always liked to work in a country where I didn’t understand the language. That was stimulating. A strangeness where you are one hundred percent at home.
Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to expresss themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.
Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
Plaintive voices are very important, not just poetically but historically and socially, because they express a movement of subjectification (‘poor me …’): there’s a whole order of elegiac subjectivity.
Maybe I should explain my image of Godard. As someone who works a great deal, he must be a very solitary figure. But it’s not just any solitude, it’s an extraordinarily animated solitude. Full, not of dreams, fantasies and projects, but of acts, things, people even. A multiple, creative solitude.
A lovely sentence from Brody’s book on Godard,
Duras herself recognised that ‘the film was made at the same time as it was filmed; the film was written in step with its unspooling’, and criticised directors who did not understand ‘that the making of the film is already the film’.
And now a passage which makes me think of Tarkovsky’s Mirror:
For Godard, Duras represented a model of integrating his own private experience with the work of art without sacrificing any of its political or vatic power. He had criticised Sartre, in the wake of 1968, for having distinguished his writing of the time (his biography of Flaubert, The Idiot of the Family) from his political activism – for having two separate ‘drawers’: a ‘Flaubert drawer’ and a ‘class struggle’ drawer. Duras made no such distinction: Le Camion, a story of a woman who hitches a ride with a pair of truck dirvers, is dominated by the political delusions of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, without yielding to dogma or diluting the film’s artistic immediacy – and Duras told that story herself, on-screen. Adapting Duras’s strategies, Godard, beginning with Sauve qui peut, would approach politics by other means, creating feature films that reflected his first-person implication in their subjects, however great or abstract.
Lars Iyer's Blog 