The Great Movies III

Janos is well liked in the town. "How's our Janos?" he's asked. He receives a visit from his Auntie Tunde (Hanna Schygulla), who insists he visit her estranged husband, Uncle Gyorgy (Peter Fitz), and enlist him in leading the townspeople against unnamed but imminent threats. She gives him a suitcase to take along, a case that is never opened or explained. Uncle Gyorgy is a musicologist who believes the world went wrong when Andreas Werckmeister (1645-17o6) popularized a system of harmonics that clashed with the music of the celestial spheres. Janos and Gyorgy walk to the town square, both held in frame in a very long shot, until they arrive at clumps of people hunched in the cold around the truck containing the whale. Later, when Janos buys his ticket and goes inside, he regards the whale's enormous, lifeless, staring eye.

Bela Tarr (born 1955) is a Hungarian director more talked about than viewed, in part because few audiences have an appetite for, and few theaters the time to play, his films like Sdtdntango (1994), which is 415 minutes long. For all of my time on the festival circuit, I had never seen one of his films until this one, which I obtained on DVD through Facets Multimedia of Chicago. When you're at a festival and seeing one film means missing four others, you tend to take the path of least resistance. But Tarr's name kept swimming reproachfully into my view, even in that book rool Movies You Must See Before You Die, where I proudly checked off movie after movie until I came to ... Bela Tarr.

And now I find that Tarr does, in fact, make films both unique and original, and in a style I find beautiful. I prefer the purity of black and white to color, I like very long takes if they serve a purpose and are not simply stunts, I am drawn into an air of mystery, I find it compelling when a film establishes an immediate, tangible time and place. For all of its phantasmal themes, Werckmeister Harmonies is resolutely realistic. Every person, every room, every street, every action, every line of dialogue feels as much like cinema verite as the works of Frederick Wiseman.

There is a state of film reverie that longer films can create (and at 145 minutes, Werckmeister is, after all, shorter than, say, Zodiac). You are lured away from the clock ticking in your mind and drift in a nontemporal state. Tarr's camera drifts as well; it is rock steady (even though handheld at times), and glides smoothly through unbroken takes that become long shots, tracking shots, closeups, framing shots, all without haste or indecision, all without a cut. (Average shot length, if you're one of David Bordwell's ASL collectors: 3.7 minutes, as compared to, say, The Bourne Supremacy at 1.9 seconds.)

So do you just sit there, friends ask, and look at the shots? Well, yes, that's what everybody does when they watch a film. But they don't always see the shots as shots. Bela Tarr's style seems to be an attempt to regard his characters with great intensity and respect, to observe them without jostling them, to follow unobtrusively as they move through their worlds, which look so ordinary and are so awesome, like ours.

he staircase should be billed along with the stars in Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). On a claustrophobic set, it dominates many shots, separating the upstairs captivity of the paraplegic Blanche from the downstairs lair of her deranged sister, Jane. Although the two sisters live in a "mansion" that allegedly once belonged to Valentino, it is jammed between nosy neighbors and seems to consist only of a living room, a kitchen, a hallway, and a bedroom for each sister. In this hothouse a lifelong rivalry turns vicious, in one of Hollywood's best gothic grotesqueries.

The story involves sisters who were once movie stars, played by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The casting is one of the crucial successes of the film, although it is hard to imagine how Aldrich convinced the two divas to appear together. Rivals since the 193os, competitive, vain, and touchy, they by all accounts hated each other in real life. Indeed, a book was written about their mutual disdain, Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud (1989). It is claimed on IMDb.com that in the scene where Jane kicks the helpless Blanche, Davis kicked Crawford so hard a cut required stitches. This is surely an urban legend, since the actual contact takes place below frame and Crawford would not have been present for the shot.