A Piece of Monologue: Literature, Philosophy and the Arts: Andrei Tarkovsky

17.7.13

The Soundscapes of Béla Tarr

A short essay by Michael Keane

A still from Béla Tarr's 1988 film Kárhozat (Damnation)

Since his 1988 breakthrough film Damnation, Béla Tarr has gained a cult status in the art-house film industry. Whilst his uncompromising brand of black and white films, characterised by the long take and apocalyptic undertones, have been likened to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, the sonic side of his work is equally impressive in portraying a brutal and unforgiving setting. Sound aids the definitive sense of place that Tarr so convincingly produces. Like the work of Bergman and Bresson, Tarr’s use of diegetic sound produces a sense of authenticity, making the bleak landscapes of Eastern Europe seem miserably real. Both sound and image work together in a series of lengthy shots that provide a temporal and spatial sense of verisimilitude. Neither sound nor image works in turn, but united in the representation of an atmospheric experience.

In the opening of Damnation, the image of the desolate landscape is coupled with the distant sound of clanking and the low hum of mechanical movement, as hanging buckets of coal move across the sky. Whilst the slow zoom out, akin to that shot from Citizen Kane, provides spatial depth, the mechanical clanking of the coal buckets gives us the first real signpost of location: the protagonist, Karrer’s, house. Like the opening of Sátántangó, the diegetic sound allows the audience to gauge a sense of space and distance. Even whilst Karrer shaves in the following shot, the monotonous sound of the coal bucket’s movement can be heard, a fitting soundtrack to his life given the misery that plagues him throughout the film. Whilst the sounds of the coal buckets and then later the incessant rain provide a sonic representation of Karrer’s plight and create an atmosphere of resounding gloom, they also act as audible signs for the few locations that the key characters visit. Places of residence, such as Karrer’s and the singer’s dingy habitats, are backed by the constant mechanical hum and the clank of the moving coal buckets. Even in moments when Karrer’s fortune appears to be changing, such as when he has sex with the singer, he cannot escape the unending, irksome sounds that surround him.

The same technique is used for the Titanik Bar. Appropriately sodden in water, the neon sign gleams through the sheets of rain whilst the din of the downpour supplies a feeling of relief when the camera finally moves inside to the music: a far more comforting and varied sonic space compared to the one-toned drone of the falling rain. The contrast between the comfort of music and the sonic monotony of Tarr’s outside world serves to emphasise the character of this particular space. Like with the sound made by the coal buckets, the sound of rain signposts the Titanik club as a significant location, a place where Karrer’s object of desire is found and his attempts to win her back take place. With recognisable sounds, these locations take on a more definitive character than they would through a purely visual representation.

Foggy images depicting a land of lifelessness and disappointment are made achingly tangible by monotonous clanks and heavy footsteps. Given the audible space by the scarcity of dialogue and music, diegetic sound is given the opportunity to create rhythms and atmospheres without the interruption of a cut. The nature of the sound and the audience’s mode of listening can be forced to change, not suddenly, but in a fluid transition allowed to occur because of the slowness of the film.

Tarr himself encapsulates the way in which his films should be approached and viewed, as he says: “I’m always telling this to my audience, don’t think too much, just listen”. A fitting piece of advice from a director whose films are as sonically rich as the monochromatic images he presents.

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22.9.12

Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka

Alex Shepard interviews the author of Spurious and Dogma

Lars Iyer

From a 2011 interview by Full Stop:

[In Spurious,] Lars and W. worship Kafka and wonder if they more resemble Kafka or Max Brod, his executor. Is Kafka one of your heroes? Do you, like Lars and W., think of yourself as more of a Max Brod than a Kafka?

I do not even see myself as a Brod! Max Brod was the most energetic of men – he wrote a great deal, he was active in various intellectual circles – and he placed himself most genuinely in the service of others. A remarkable combination. W. and Lars seem to form the entirety of each other’s intellectual circle, and the question whether they actually help anybody is an open one.

Am I a Brod? But I wrote a novel. And one writes novels, I think, in the hope that one might be more than a Brod. Brod, no doubt, wanted to be more than a Brod. At what stage did he realise that he was no Kafka? My argument: he never realised it. Perhaps to write a novel is to be a Brod who wants to be Kafka. And perhaps that’s why Kafka couldn’t finish his own novels. He, too, in his own way, was a Brod.

But we live in a different time from Kafka’s, when the hope of being a Kafka will result in something altogether different than becoming Kafka. Kafka’s displaced relations to Jewish traditions have their counterparts today, perhaps, in our displaced relations with the novel, and with figures like Kafka. [Read More]

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1.8.12

Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse

Slant Magazine on the DVD/Blu-Ray release of Tarr's final film

Promotional poster for The Turin Horse (dir. Béla Tarr, 2011)

A review by Budd Wilkins (Slant Magazine): 'The final film from acclaimed Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse is an almost perfect encapsulation of the stylistic hallmarks and thematic preoccupations that have marked the director's work, at least since the beginning of his collaboration with novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai. The film opens in poetic-philosophical mode with a literal tabula rasa: Darkness fills the screen. A disembodied voice relates an incident, perhaps little more than an apocryphal legend, a footnote from the history of philosophy concerning the collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche after compassionately embracing a beaten horse in the streets of Turin. "Quiet and demented," so we are told, Nietzsche lived out the last 10 years of his existence. The anecdote concludes somewhat inconclusively: "Of the horse, we know nothing." This quizzical narration contains all the simplicity and ambiguity of one of Kafka's fables, opening up vistas of ethical and ultimately metaphysical speculation. Likewise, the atmosphere of existential enervation that accumulates over the course of The Turin Horse suggests the bleak and barren topography of a late Samuel Beckett play as filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Ultimately, precisely what relation the film's subsequent events bear to Nietzsche and his philosophy remains resolutely open to viewer interpretation.' [Read More]

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3.1.12

Andrei Tarkovsky on Art

Video interview with the Russian director

Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky is interviewed about his work, and his attitudes and opinions toward art (link via Mark Thwaite's excellent Ready Steady Book).

31.12.11

Geoff Dyer, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

New book explores the themes raised by Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

Geoff Dyer has written a book exploring the themes of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction film Stalker. The publisher, Canongate Books, reveals that the film has 'obsessed' Dyer all of his adult life, and that it acts as 'a point of departure for a wonderfully digressive exploration of cinema, of how we understand our obsessions and of how we try to realise - no, discover - our deepest wishes.' Aside from the slightly cloying blurb, I wonder whether Dyer's new volume might be worth a look. The book will be called Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, and will be published in February 2012. [Read More]