Béla Tarr
Nido familiare

The moving endeavor continues of a newly established Italian distribution company (the Eye Division) to import Béla Tarr's filmography into our market, and it continues to go back to the beginning, to Családi tűzfészek, the Hungarian's first feature film where he already shows a keen eye towards the individual, his fragile multifaceted nature in a film that follows the story of a couple in 1970s Hungary forced to live with his parents while waiting for an apartment.

But let's go back. 

A worker, the son of workers, makes a short film that will cost him arrest by the Hungarian political police, as well as the prohibition from attending philosophical studies at the university: this is Béla Tarr at sixteen, six years before debuting with this Családi tűzfészek, a film where his entire poetics is already in germination, the philosophy that tinges a grand work and that will find its dancing star in the last spiritual testament, A torinói ló. And one must keep this in mind because Tarr starts here, or rather from there, from the factory and from the anger towards political coercion and the slumber of the masses, accustomed to an opaque freedom; and he starts from here only then, from a family cell in tatters, to finally foretell the ruin of humanity in that final masterpiece that marks his farewell to the world of cinema. But here is a new Tarr, an angry teenager looking with disenchantment at a family that self-destructs without realizing it, without even in hindsight - understanding the reason. 

Forget the bitter awareness that everything is lost of those awaiting the circus in Werckmeister harmóniák.

Forget those individuals who retreat into themselves and make the world of themselves to escape the misery of the world in Kárhozat.

Forget cinema as such, and the Nietzschean pessimism that tinges it. 

Tarr takes, so to speak, the reverse path of Guédiguian, and it is useless to spend words on how important it is to grasp the nuances of the departure to understand the moment of arrival that realizes everything that preceded it; Tarr looks at the family, the cell that makes up society - a society, that described in his films, that has very little social, very little human. And something already breaks within this family monad, but it is something tiny, something everyday, that doesn't even catch the eye, but which is, indeed, the true catastrophe that will lead nature to the ultimate effort to rid itself of the human race because it is in the family that totalitarianisms are born and either fueled or opposed. Not much is lacking for the long sequences of the Hungarian pustza that will universally reflect the pain each human carries within like a fetus to be aborted, but we are not there yet: here close-ups of a handheld camera prevail, trying to spill out from the four walls of the screen but finding inevitably an object, something inanimate that prevents its eternal flow and forces the camera to return to the family faces to capture the detail and make, of this detail, the tool that clears the way for an eristic of personal suffering, that is never alone despite being alone, indeed it is precisely the presence of the Other that makes one perceive one's solitude... and so the camera, among the embraces and clashes of family members, is surplus, finds itself out of place in the dialectic of the family nest. 

Because the family closes & disperses, and we are already strangers to what we believed familiar.