Oppressive wind torments the lonely inhabitants of a desolate landscape. It sweeps across the lifeless, chalky soil with brutal relentlessness, tearing down the landscape one layer at a time. If there is a deity minding the shop it seems to have either lost interest in the plight of humanity or is actively working at its destruction, but in either case the …
The Prefab People (1982), his first feature to star professional actors, again presents Bela Tarr examining marriage in socialist Hungary. Closing in on the struggling relationship of husband and wife, the film draws from social realism to shore up a background to their not so unique circumstances. A commentary both on marriage …
Rarely have words the heft of László Krasznahorkai’s: the Hungarian author, whose dystopian tomes manifest in technique and tone the terrifying banality with which we crawl toward death, doesn’t so much tell stories as intone them, the incessant trudge of his behemoth sentences rendering the …
Bela Tarr’s realist drama, Family Nest (1979), shifts modalities to realize an authentic layering of different forms of being. What begins as a social drama is soon transformed first into a family drama and second into an individual/humanist one. By commencing on the crowd and completing on the creature, Tarr’s commentary …
Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) is a switchman at the local train depot, but on this night, he’s more interested in a ship in the adjacent harbor than the train that has come in to his station. What at first looks like an attempt to sneak a briefcase into the country turns into a scuffle and then a murder, and Maloin fishes the case, filled with …
The seeds of greatness require proper nurturing before they can flourish to their fullest potential. A specimen will do everything it can to thrive with the available resources it is given, but if certain parameters are not met the specimen will most likely wither away and die, creating growth opportunities for less remarkable specimens …
This December Next Projection is please to present our first film series, ‘Apocalyptic Poetry: The Films of Bela Tarr’.