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- Author or Editor: Jarmo Valkola x
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In the following article, Jarmo Valkola investigates the originality of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s filmmaking practice. Tarr represents European pictorialism that is motivated by the commitment to develop and increase the function and effectiveness of images, sounds and performances that aesthetically formulate, translate and change the effects of contemporary cinema to higher dimensions and qualities of art. Tarr emphasises the selective and manipulative role of the camera in orchestrating his narrative concerns. The significance of the form comes forward, and the photographic dimension of the narrative creates static and momentarily captured intensities. Like Jancsó before him, Tarr also invests the narrative with plan-sequences. Some of them can be very long, involving continuous and intricate camera movements, like simultaneous track-tilt-pans, compounded by the ‘virtual’ movement of the omnipresent camera. Tarr’s filmic iconography sets standards for pictorial filmmaking in the sense of an increasingly personal touch of dramatics defining and distilling a cinematic language that is endless in its search for the almost silent colloquy between the artist’s visions and aspirations. Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies, The Man from London, and The Turin Horse are the films referred in this article.
In the following article, I examine the originality of Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó’s (1921–2014) filmmaking practice. Jancsó appears as a unique representative of European filmmaking tradition who was motivated by a specific commitment to develop and increase the function of cinematic form, the effectiveness of images and sounds and performances of the actors which aesthetically formulate, translate and change the effects of Hungarian cinema to higher qualities and dimensions of art and spectacle. The significance of the filmic form comes forward, and the camera-based organisation of it increases the intensity of narration. Jancsó’s use of folk rituals adds a strong sense of pictoriality to the overall narrative structure, because his emphasis lies in the physicality of different appearances inside the frame. In his own stylistic way, Jancsó processes these various formations executed by the performers in a style in which all the elementary forces—whether physical, pictorial, psychological, or aesthetic—work in conjoint with one another. In this regard, Miklós Jancsó’s cinematic spectacles are symbolical fantasies enriched by phenomenological realism.
