The Cameraman's Revenge

Apparently this film contains 39 shots in 145 minutes (with or without credits?) for an average shot length approaching 4 minutes. The average shot length of a Hollywood film is probably more like 4 seconds. Yikes. I don’t know why, but even though it’s markedly longer than Damnation and pushes the long take style even further, and though the narrative is rather more abstruse too, I found myself liking Werckmeister a lot more. When I first read about it, it sounded almost like a joke… you know, two and a half hour black and white film in Hungarian about a circus passing through an unnamed town where the only exhibits are an unseen “prince” and a very large and notably dead whale… if the film weren’t actually real, you’d swear someone had made that up to parody European art cinema at its most ponderous and humourless. Which the film is, in a lot of ways, but there’s more to it than the description suggests, cos the presence of the circus draws loads of people from outside of town, there’s paranoia and violence, and lurking in the background is a new movement for the restoration of law and order. It’s hard to actually say just what happens or why it does, but for some reason I found it less remote than Damnation and the amazing scene of the hospital rampage fully justified the long take aesthetic (although the lack of dialogue also contributes to the scene’s power); it would’ve been an entirely different scene had it been shot and edited conventionally. Tarr’s most successful at conjuring up a particular mood, though, that hovers between “normal” realism and magical realism, an atmosphere of impending doom and evil that borders on the Lovecraftian at times (I was reminded of “Nyarlathotep” particularly for some reason). I must say, after initially thinking there was something kind of parodic about the film’s set-up, I can understand why it draws so many “masterpiece” claims: it actually is that impressive.

Good Christ, that’s the longest two hours I’ve spent watching a film since… well, I don’t really know when. I don’t even know if those Satyajit Ray films I’ve watched recently felt quite so extended. I knew I’d probably have to explore Bela Tarr at some point, so I thought I’d try him at comparatively shorter length before subjecting myself to Satantango, to which end I got the Artificial Eye box of three of his other films that don’t last seven hours… Apparently this film marks the point, about a decade into his filmmaking career, where Tarr really blossomed into the god of long takes beloved of cinephiles, and damn me if he doesn’t live up to that reputation with this. Damnation could be some sort of dictionary definition of cinematic minimalism, short on plot and action; indeed you could say that almost the only thing that happens in the film is that the camera moves (which it does, pretty much constantly but also very, very, very, very, VERY slowly). Not much happens in the narrative, which revolves around a man who can only be described as a total loser trying to restart an affair with a woman who sings at a bar. Other qualities conspicuously lacking from the film are humour, lightness of touch, and a good reason for the film to last as long as it does, though I will give it points for the way it conjures up its desolate world, which borders on the post-apocalyptic in its feel, beautifully rendered in black and white. However, while the single-mindedness with which the film goes about its rather dreary business is something I can respect, it’s not something I particularly enjoyed, and too often Damnation gave me the feeling it was being bleak and unpleasant just because it could, not because the grimness and unceasing rain and existentialism actually served much purpose.

After going through one director who was fond of the long take, this evening I decided to follow him with a director who was one of its most famous proponents in the decade after Mizoguchi’s death, i.e. Miklos Jancso… my impression of him hitherto has been of one of the more formidable Euro-arthouse figures of the 60s, and this film (the second one I’ve seen after Private Vices Public Virtues, or whatever that one was called) kind of reinforced that; this is one of the least user-friendly films I’ve come across in a long time. The IMDB plot summary ends with the words “War seems chaotic and arbitrary”, and I really couldn’t have put it better. Commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Jancso decided instead to set his film in 1919 during the civil war between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and to make it a celebration of, frankly, piss all. In this film, winning (or even just surviving) one battle is no guarantee you’ll win (or survive) the next one, and while the White army are fairly clearly set up as villains the Red army is hardly presented as much better. The film has been criticised for being hard to follow cos so much of it happens in long shot (and, of course, long takes) and so few of the characters are named on-screen that there’s no real through-narrative or single figure we can focus on; and yet I suppose that’s the point, people get killed in war, we don’t often know who they were, and it’s questionable whether or not their death served any purpose. Chaotic and arbitrary. No wonder the film was outlawed in the USSR. And the distance from which Jancso observes much of this action makes it, in a way, one of the most brutal war films I’ve ever seen.