Thousands of Different Betrayals

Béla Tarr’s Atrophy of Causation

The doctor heaves and huffs his way through every painful movement. He fills one small glass with fruit brandy, another with a measure of water; he mixes the two in a single larger glass; each pour is laborious to the point of nausea. The sounds of his movements seem to come from a thousand miles off. Rain is total. The camera returns to the windowpane and the screen of driving rain provides a kind of relief. A minute later we are back with the doctor, whose every movement suggests he is rotting from the inside. It seems impossible that he could have survived until now. The sheer bodily weight of his every movement makes the extent of his record-keeping a chilling sight. In a notebook for each of the village’s inhabitants, he makes notes and small drawings, watching the goings-on from his rain-washed window. The notebooks seem to fill whole bookcases of the room, even as the doctor’s every pencil stroke sounds exhausting. His is the voice of the film, but it hardly seems to matter; his state is only the upper limit of Sátántangó’s somatic atmosphere: a howling discomfort muffled to just below the pitch of the unsustainable.

Tarr’s films are so heavy with matter – the texture of faces, the ravaged land, the peeling walls – that it almost obscures anything else. His notorious slowness seems to fix the matter of things in place, the camera lingering as if it might stop altogether with any given shot, as if it might congeal in place. The textural weight of the films is curious given that many of them are based on László Krasznahorkai’s novels or screenplays. Prose is not able to linger in quite the same way, and the novels themselves feel nimbler, less weary, than Tarr’s films. Sátántangó, based on Krasznahorkai’s book of the same name, depicts a desolate Hungarian village – the dilapidated remnants of a collective farm – and its inhabitants. Across its more than seven-hour span, the film details the return to the village of Irimiás, a local criminal and trickster; the suicide of a young girl, Estike, who swallows rat poison after having been betrayed by her brother, dismissed by the villagers, and having witnessed their bawdy, drunken dancing as they await the return of Irimiás. The film’s third act details a second, grander betrayal. Seizing on Estike’s death, Irimiás convinces the villagers to hand over their money and abandon the village to establish a new collective farm some miles away; the farm never materializes; the villagers are given cryptic instructions and scattered around the country to await some future redemption.

This narrative structure – which begins in the poverty and desolation of rural late- and post-Communist Hungary, proceeds through some hope of escape or salvation, and collapses through some betrayal – is more or less common to all Tarr’s films. The setting and the timing compel various possible allegorical readings. Tarr is taken to be a chronicler of the hypocrisy of Communism in Hungary, the brutality of its fall, the hopelessness of life in and after the disappearance of the Eastern Bloc. The films themselves, however, remain at arm’s length. That they are paralyzingly beautiful is known. Tarr’s films are composed of long, careful shots in black and white, constantly attentive to the textures of buildings, mud, craggy skin. The earlier films, less celebrated than the darker works from Damnation (1988) onwards, have more to say about politics and about Hungary. The later films, meanwhile, have a quality that resists thematic summary. 

 
To say that Sátántangó is about despair, hope or decay, or conversely about the fall of Communism or rural decline seems in any case to miss the point. At the same time, Jacques Rancière’s Béla Tarr, le temps d’après (2011) reminds us that Tarr does not believe himself to have changed his approach to filmmaking:

“And yet, Béla Tarr tells us time and again: there is not, in his oeuvre, a period of social films and a period of metaphysical and formalist works. It is always the same film that he makes, the same reality of which he speaks; he simply delves a little deeper into it each time. From the first film to the last, it is always the story of a broken promise, of a voyage that returns to its point of departure.”  

The return to the point of departure, in Tarr’s work, is more structurally fundamental than the betrayal itself. For all their pessimism, Tarr’s films are not Hobbesian tales of universal human untrustworthiness. Pessimism, in Sátántangó or Damnation, does not concern human failures but rather the gravity of what is: its tendency to arrest change, to brutally overpower what could be. Much of Tarr’s nihilism resides precisely in his portrayal of the atrophy of causation. Repetition is omnipresent in Sátántangó and Damnation: words, scenes, personal tragedies, the doctor filling his glass. The very end of Sátántangó forms a loop with its beginning: one of the village’s inhabitants, Futaki, waking in the arms of Mrs Schmidt – with whom he is having an affair – tells us that he hears church bells in the early hours of the morning. Everything remains in place.

The absolute inertia of matter is essential to Tarr’s camerawork. Shots linger for so long that they seem to exist more in texture than in time. When the film reaches its end and the doctor’s narration forms a loop with the very beginning, there is no sense of a neat trick or device. It makes a fatal sort of sense. “It’s all eternal,” Tarr said in an interview last year when asked about the absence of markers of specific time or period in his films, but it extends just as aptly to the sense that Sátántangó is ongoing, crystallized somewhere in space more than situated historically. The question Tarr is responding to is about the (non-)particularity of time and place in his films, but he says nothing at all about place. Tarr’s entire answer concerns his films’ quality of timelessness, their lack of relevance to some particular historical-political moment. Tarr says: “A table is a table. But, of course, we know thousands of different tables.”

A table is not just a table, however, and certainly not in Tarr’s films, nor is a betrayal ever just a betrayal. Nonetheless, this brute materiality functions as a kind of threat: brute materiality is a kind of structuring limit in Tarr’s films. The absence of cause and effect, the difficulty of movement, whether narrative or physical, is the condition that haunts Sátántangó. Despair is the disappearance of telos, the sense that what is at stake in Tarr’s films is precisely the possibility that we might be left with merely thousands of different tables. Though Tarr’s films never quite lapse into the presentation of despondent, isolated matter – they are after all moving images, they do threaten and allegorise that condition. The camera moves, some loose causality persists, but the possibility of total arrest lingers, and an implacable gravity promises to overwhelm change and motion.

Tarr’s films, including the later ones, are not quite as free of historical identifiers as he suggests – they are not quite outside of time – but their slowness constantly underscores Tarr’s focus on the eternal, even if he has to be resigned to the historicity of the language in which the eternal is articulated. There are urban streets, Damnation’s Titanik bar, the occasional car, a restaurant, the architecture of a moment and a nation. All these things bleed into Tarr’s work; it is not false to say that Sátántangó is about Hungary or about Communism, but nor is it particularly illuminating. The streets fill with inexplicable horses, the restaurant is deserted, the people in a bar stop still as if frozen in place. These surreal intrusions are not relief from the characteristic slowness and bleakness of Tarr’s filmmaking, they are themselves peaks of despair: one thing does not follow from another. Narrative, political and moral order are constantly at risk of succumbing to the immobility of mud and matter, and thereby to nihilism proper. When, in Sátántangó, the villagers leave to start a new farm at a large house nearby, the farm is soon forgotten and narrative structure dissolves; the house is just a house, no riper with potentiality than what they have left behind. When they are made to leave the house, the explanation offered is nonsensical and unimportant. Material undermines causation and meaning alike.

The tendency of things to return to their original state, of events to repeat, and of films to loop back to their beginnings is also expressed in Tarr’s general attitude to the relation between temporality and materiality. Time is subordinated to weather; the film’s temporal condition is rain. This is true both literally (characters remark repeatedly that the arrival of the rains marks the turn of the season) and structurally (Tarr punctuates the film with shots of rain, now streaking down a window, now hammering the soil). We can situate the first six chapters in time according to their relation to the rain. Wind, too, is constant. Some of Sátántangó’s most striking flashes of beauty are to be found in the relief of the wind – in the sense that the film has been lifted momentarily by the wind and is being carried lightly above the surface of the mud, above the unmistakable labour of traversing waterlogged fields and near-impassable roads.

Filmed in several locations across rural Hungary, the landscape is continuously bleak. Occasionally, as when we see an empty urban street flooded with horses, Sátántangó is apocalyptic, but for most of its hundreds of minutes it is just unfathomably barren. The composite of the village lacks any spatial logic, each new shot seemingly irreconcilable with the roads and buildings of the last. The road that the village people walk along to find a new place to settle, tricked by the wily, sophistic Irimiás, is of indeterminate length, beaten by driving, almost unendurable rain. The rain is nonetheless endured, Tarr’s camera tracks the villagers’ implacable tread towards the site of Irimiás’s proposed farm as if to make clear that they could go on forever, that this landscape and this way of life are only ever almost unendurable. Somehow, here, Tarr reverses the causality of survival: the brutality of the landscape is endurable only because it is endured, and not the other way around. The violence of the horizontal rain and of unremitting poverty are hollowed out into mere facts by their persistence, their eternity in the place of the film. Delusion and deceit, when they come, are not tragedies – they, too, are qualities of the place, facts from which we begin.

Betrayals are layered atop betrayals in Sátántangó, mirroring one another, as if mocking the very possibility of growth or alteration. The strange young girl, Estike, is tricked by her older brother into burying the few coins she has managed to save, on the promise that they will grow into a money tree, only for him to steal them shortly after. It is easy enough to read this as an allegory for the exploitation and scams of newly capitalist Hungary: the money tree is easily the too-promising investment opportunity, and Estike the naïve rural Hungarian, only recently delivered from Communism into the market. Little enough is gained by such a reading; there is nothing more real about dubious investment schemes than about the trickery of sisters by brothers. One might just as well insist that the story of Estike and her cruel brother is the substratum of meaning that underlies the story of the fall of Communism in Hungary. It is telling that Tarr wanted to make Sátántangó before the fall of Communism, and then nonetheless made it after. Its stories are no less applicable to the fall itself than to the prior regime – Tarr attempts to trace some more fundamental pattern of betrayal, even as he recalls some particular history – voluntarily or otherwise. We are shown that Hungarian Communism and post-Communism are not so different in terms of hope, but the comment feels general as well as specific. If cinema ordinarily moves from the concrete to the abstract, Tarr strains and collapses that opposition, appearing to move in both directions at once: from the concrete to the abstract, and from the abstract to the concrete. He exposes the limits of allegory at the same time as he seems to speak universally, insists on the particular even as he forces us to grapple with extreme abstraction. As he says, we know thousands of different tables.

Tarr’s films are so much about the individual material thing that to read them as really being about something else feels not like overreaching but underreaching: failing to reckon with the particular and sufficient tragedy of each instance of blank despair. This mud, this new sheet of rain, this table smashed to pieces in the hope that it will never again be needed. To return to Tarr’s cryptic tables: a betrayal is just a betrayal. But, of course, we know thousands of different betrayals. This is not to say that either Sátántangó or Damnation is merely a catalogue of tables, craggy faces, or puddles; both films propose a new understanding of the horror of betrayal. The tragedy of the betrayal—Estike’s scheming brother, Irimiás’ illusory collective farm, Karrer’s plot to get rid of his beloved’s husband—is that it is always a return to what is, the collapse of some illusory vector, of some new cause and the potentiality that springs from it. Betrayal is essential to despair because it reveals the stubborn, inert conditions that were always there beneath the veneer of hope. Mud has more than a merely formal connection to the hopelessness of Tarr’s protagonists; it is what betrayal returns to.

There is something awful in recognising the weight of that accumulation without treating that accumulation as a symptom of some historically contingent cause. Tarr insists that we stay with the matter of things. That is perhaps the point of his slowness—how else but by lingering would we come to see that this dance matters? To reckon with the particular, to tarry with this table, this dance, this streak of rain, is to entertain what Tarr presents as the nadir of hopelessness: the possibility that there is no organising concept, no allegory, no movement at all. If Tarr’s films have a politics, it is grounded in this Schopenhauerian possibility: the substitution of static matter for narrative causality implies the abolition of hope. Shots stretch on until we almost believe there is no moment after this. Tarr relents, movement returns, but under the uneasy shadow of brute matter.

Much as in his representation of history, Tarr’s attentiveness to the material constantly hovers between concreteness and abstraction. His camera traces an interest in the labour of standing, walking, dragging, dancing, washing, simply withstanding which is simultaneously acute and muted. The plodding repetition of each movement (the doctor refills his glass, the crippled Futaki tries to stand repeatedly and is shoved back down, the drunken coach-driver repeats “plodding and plodding” countless times to a dwindling audience) and of scenes (for the first half of the film, the tango’s six steps forward, we see the same few hours from several perspectives, retreading the same anchoring events) conjure a despair that is abstract but not merely conceptual. Despair, Tarr seems to worry – or to threaten – is a quality of matter itself, of its resistance to change, its imperviousness to cause and effect. In Sátántangó, the land is not inert, it has a kind of agency of its own, and like the agency of Irimiás or Estike’s brother it is always eventually treacherous. There is always a broken promise, always a return to how things were.

In Sátántangó’s most controversial scene – in which Estike tortures and poisons her cat, whose limp body she then carries with her until her suicide – the nauseating horror Tarr generates is not the product of graphic visual detail, of any single instant of unwatchable violence. It is the product of an accumulating, inexorable brutality, of the repetition of Estike smashing the cat against the wooden planks of the barn’s floor. After the scene, she carries the cat as if it is a mere thing, trudging the long road to the chapel where she dies with its body motionless in her arms. It is as if Tarr is proving how close living beings in his films always are to being inanimate, how continuous they are with the crumbling walls of the village.

Perhaps the most similar film in Tarr’s filmography to Sátántangó is 1988’s Damnation (Kárhozat), a film that tracks the hopeless plodding of Karrer, alleviated only occasionally by his affair with a married singer from a local bar. Like Sátántangó, and unlike the later and busier Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Damnation is a study in exhaustion and repetition. Here, too, is the perpetual rain, the near-impassable mud that labours every step. The crags of faces are studied by Tarr’s camera with much the same care as the crags of walls with their plaster peeling, and again as the sorry grey heaps of food that his characters pick at. Wet strands of hair hang as limp as the meat hooks next to them. Karrer’s beloved has a face so remarkably smooth for a character in one of Tarr’s films, when we first see her, huddled close to the microphone in the Titanik bar, that it seems to cordon her off from the world at large. Her ability to make music, too, seems a kind of otherworldly relief. The linearity of her song seems to promise some escape from the paralysis of Karrer’s desolate, weather-beaten town. Though bound for failure and betrayal, it is the most conventional of all Tarr’s depictions of romance – Karrer sees in the singer some line of flight, something approaching an ideal.

Even so, Karrer’s singer is beholden to the great flattening force of the land. “I like to watch the water run down the window,” she says, “I don’t think about anything.” When she tells her husband that “One must return to beauty,” it is hard to imagine that she is really describing a return, that she has dwelt in beauty any more than the dogs that scrounge for scraps of food in the rain outside have. When we watch her affair with Karrer unfold, any line of flight seems impossible. As in all Tarr’s cinematic love affairs, physicality is overwhelming and subdued. Here is no corporeality that might be spoken of as raw or animal, no desire that relishes its bodily instantiation, only something heavy and decrepit: something that approaches the condition of the walls themselves. Tarr’s slow pans may appear to glide, but their lingering has something in it of the doctor’s gaze; his laboured breathing and scratchy pencil weigh upon their seeming ease.

Sex does not evade Tarr’s pessimism of causality, for all its veneer of escapism. Mrs Schmidt in Sátántangó is the erotic locus of the long tango scene in the film’s sixth chapter, “The Job of the Spider II (The Devil’s Tit, Satan’s Tango)”, cycling between enthusiasm, abandon, and panicked discomfort. Mrs Schmidt’s moods loop as if in time with the tango’s insistent refrain, and as the nervous scene of the bar grows drunker, a sad, sickly lust begins to surface. Characteristically, there is no telling whether the scene of the bar or some perceived failure of Mrs Schmidt’s sexual morality is really a cause of Estike’s suicide. To draw such connections is for Irimiás alone, it is the prerogative of the con artist, not a fact of the world.

For Tarr, despair consists of the recognition not so much of suffering and privation as of the absence of cause and effect. Hope is, correspondingly, the belief in some kind of determination. When Irimiás tricks the villagers out of their money it is by way of repeated appeals to “fate” and to “consequences”, to his careful observation of necessity. Irimiás is a relief to see on screen because his movement appears so comparatively unencumbered, because he seems to be vested with the powers of plot, whether it be narrative or scheme. Tarr is clear enough: causation is no more than a trick. A love affair does not come out of desperation, nor does it come from an environment conducive to desire; it merely occurs. It is equally without product or consequence; the villagers are no more fertile than the soil of the failing farm. Lust does not survive its numbed repetition in Tarr’s films, it is born of it. The first throes are just as weary and dispassionate as they ever will be. Here again there is a quality of almostness, of the body – like Estike’s poor cat – beaten back almost to the status of the inanimate. Freud’s Eros and Thanatos find their vanishing point in these moments. Tarr’s characters collapse time and time again into a state between pleasure and death each time causation is thwarted, each time a promise is broken.

Bereft of causality, the acute physicality of Tarr’s long takes is muted. Immobilized within the circularity of the film’s structure, the pleasures and horrors of bodies are heavy but inconsequential. In Damnation, as the camera tracks slowly from the grime of the rain-dashed windows and crosses a mirror in which we see the tangled bodies of Karrer and the bar singer he loves, their movements cannot help but recall the film’s opening shot: the slow passage of cable cars above the flat grey fields.

Nonetheless, Sátántangó offers occasional glimpses of relief from despair. In Damnation, Karrer’s only source of hope is illusory – his beloved proves no escape from the bleak monotony that crowds in around him, but in Sátántangó we have flashes of some real escape. At the very start of the film, we see cows circling and mounting one another in a muddy yard. The cows are there even before Futaki awakes to the sound of bells, before the beginning that matches the film’s end. The cows are also prior to repetition, to the sense of gravity and matter that sits as heavy on Tarr’s films as the sheeting rain. Perhaps they are as close as Tarr gets to hope: not an escape from the brute fact and decrepitude of matter but an escape through it. The cows run through the mud, they appear to mate with one another. Perhaps for them, as for Estike on her grassy deathbed, some kind of happy determinism remains a possibility. As Estike lies dying, she sees or imagines some fugitive causation weaving events together like a spider: “She thought over the events of the day and smiled as she understood how they all connected up: she felt it was neither chance, nor accident, but an unutterably beautiful logic that was holding them together.”

It is a tragic sort of hope, perhaps no less illusory than Irimiás’s promises, but certainly less susceptible to betrayal. At the end of Sátántangó, the doctor boards up the window from which he used to watch and record the events of the village, but some sliver of light remains between the boards. Perhaps too, Tarr allows, there is small hope that the logic of causation is not purgatorial but “unutterably beautiful”