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Rating: For a month now, an unknown distribution company (EyeDivision) has been releasing various films—never before seen here—by Béla Tarr, a precious rediscovery. Essentially, Béla Tarr's cinema is one that transcends: it transcends space and transcends time, and yet it remains still, true to itself, black and white, like a tango without music, honest. It is a cinema of pain, a pain that trembles, extinguishes, and renews an ancestral emotion that reminds us of who we are.
Who are we?
We are ourselves, but we don’t always find ourselves, and it takes a strength that only pain possesses to finally rediscover us as human. This is where the difficulty lies in capturing Tarr's cinema, which is essentially effort and honesty: effort because we should break down the fear that prevents us from looking beyond the veil of Maya, honesty because one needs to be very, too honest with oneself to stop being afraid and consider the pain that surrounds us, whose ignorance fundamentally characterizes us by nailing our existences to themselves, making us stupid, bigoted, solipsistic, resentful, petty, harmless. Thus, we are led to formulate soteriological doctrines like, for example, Marxism or Christianity, which do nothing but add nails to the coffin of existence. Just read Kierkegaard ("If man did not have an eternal consciousness, if at the bottom of everything there was only a wild and bubbling force that produces everything, the great and the trivial, in the whirlwind of dark passions; if the bottomless void, which nothing can fill, lay hidden beneath things, what would life be, but despair?"), without letting oneself be deceived and taking refuge in the easier path, the one he chose, that is, faith in Christ, but acknowledging the despair that is at the bottom of everything and accepting it for ourselves too. Because, what does man understand about immortality?
And so, there is this village lost in the Hungarian pustza, where, as a solar eclipse approaches, a circus arrives consisting of only two attractions: a prince and a whale. The village is on the brink of collapse, and in the end, the prince's dialectic will prevail over the minds of the villagers, who will raze everything, but this is not what matters, because “every leaf”—as Ginsberg wrote—“has fallen prematurely”, and it is the eclipse that is the reason for it all. Yes, because it is in "this dark and inconceivable sunset" that man pours, tyrannized by his own rationality, or rather in the belief of possessing a rationality that somehow he has given himself: what happens, in the dark? And if the sky were to collapse, and if the earth were to cease to exist, and if suddenly, we all realized that…? We live in a perpetual eclipse, anguished by the future no less than the present, and it will be when the eclipse reveals itself as an eclipse that there will be a new emotion, a new humanity, and finally we will renew existence for what it is. But there are children in the darkness, and "now nothing is sacred": and it is here that the prince's dialectic takes root, which says.
That says: “What they build and what they will build, what they do and what they will do is only deceit and lies. What they think and what they will think is ridiculous. They think because they are afraid. And those who are afraid know nothing.”
It's a misanthropic message, but the dialectic imposes it, this misanthropy, to actualize humanity: which still sleeps, because while I write all this ballyhoo of phrases, words, commas, etc., someone is dying somewhere, someone else is making love, and yet another is discovering an unwanted pregnancy. Why do people say and do sad things? Why this rush of culture, feelings, clothes, memories, glasses? Now more than ever, after Foucault has shown that “the individual is undoubtedly the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society, but it is also a reality fabricated by that specific technology of power called ‘discipline’. We must admit to always describing the effects of power in negative terms: ‘excludes’, ‘represses’, ‘rejects’, ‘abstracts’, ‘masks’, ‘hides’, ‘censors’. In fact, power produces; it produces the real; it produces fields of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge we can assume derive from this production” it is necessary to give birth to the Nietzschean dancing star, and this is what the ending of “Werckmeister Harmonies” wants to tell us.
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