Tarr Bela I used to be a filmmaker

 The Hungarian director, Bela Tarr, is inextricably connected to the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the author of the scripts for Tarr's most famous films.  Krasznahorkai was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and, so, there has been a brief flurry of interest both in books written by the novelist but, also, in the films adapting those novels to the screen, Tarr's Satantango, Damnation, The Werckmeister Harmonies, and other pictures that Krasznahorkai wrote specifically for Tarr:  The Man from London, that adapts a Georges Simenon crime novel and The Turin Horse, the director's last film.  Jean Marc Lemourne's film Tarr Bela I used to be a Filmmaker documents some aspects of the production of the monumentally grim The Turin Horse and tours some of the director's earlier works, most notably Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies.  None of these films are exactly a walk in the park -- Satantango is seven plus hours of unremitting misery, cat torture, mud, drunkenness and suicide; The Werckmeister Harmonies (an adaptation of part of Krasznahorkai's novel, The Melancholy of Resistance) concerns a village in rural Hungary destabilized and thrown into hysteria by a traveling sideshow exhibit featuring an enormous embalmed whale; the townspeople riot and end up destroying their own hospital. The Turin Horse is set on the windswept Hungarian steppes and remorselessly documents the poverty of a man and woman who live in a primitive stone hut in the middle of nowhere.  The wind blows ceaselessly and leaves swirl around in the air, an odd effect since the nearest tree is about two miles away crowning a hill in what looks like central North Dakota.  As a consequence, Tarr Bela is singularly morose, images of a group of elderly people staggering around in the mud as they film the long takes that comprise The Turin Horse.  (The title refers to the legend that Friedrich Nietzsche went mad when he saw a teamster beating an old horse in Turin; sobbing, Nietzsche is supposed to have thrown his arms around the long-suffering beast before proclaiming himself both the Crucified One and Dionysius -- so far as I can see, and I've sat through the movie, the film has nothing to do with this anecdote.)

The main character in The Turin Horse is the relentless gale-force wind.  The documentary shows the film crew using a helicopter to whip the lone tree on the horizon into a flailing frenzy.  Pushing wind machines on wheels, the grips move alongside the tracking camera while another worker throws out handfuls of dry leaves for the wind to whip about.  Tarr complains about shots through the hut window in which the tree is motionless and simulated gale not visible.  The hut itself, which seems like a primeval kind of grotto in the movie, was built from the ground up from field stone with a heavy gabled roof -- it's surprising to me that this set was laboriously constructed, downhill from the lone tree and beneath a bare grasscovered ridge.  (The characters set out for the edge of their world, the grassy ridge, reach the place, and see that there is nothing beyond the ridge but an endless, empty steppe -- so disappointed they come back to the stone hut where they eat roasted potatoes but nothing else.)  If transfer of information is the purpose of a documentary Lemourne's film is, more of less, a failure.  We don't really learn anything about Tarr except that he is a wizened curmudgeon with a three pack a day habit -- he isn't endearing or charismatic.  He boasts about this being his last film and, when he has his crew dig a pit to hold the enormously heavy camera for a low-angle shot, he says that they should delve the pit three meters deep and bury the camera.  The crew is polyglot and, sometimes, Tarr directs in Hungarian; at other times, he uses English.  The crew goes to the collective farm where Satantango was filmed for a special screening of the enormous movie -- the collective farm is in ruins, falling into the weeds on the Hungarian plain.  The water tower advertises in English "Industrial Park for Sale."  The female lead in The Turin Horse (she has about 6 lines) was the strange-looking girl with the cat who kills herself in Satantango.  She's now all grown up, but still pretty odd-looking and miserable.  (She was raised in an orphanage and felt that Tarr and his longstanding female editor, Agi, became her parents during the shoot.)  We see some rehearsals.  Two actors sit in a bar bathed in red light and talk about their work with Tarr.  One of them is named Jani, an actor who has appeared in a half-dozen films directed by the difficult Tarr.  Later, Tarr uses a cell phone to summon Jani to the location on the desolate plain.  He demands that Jani sober-up before coming on the set and that he not drink on location.  There are more scenes with the wind machine, more mud, more vantages through the rock hut's window showing dogs prancing around in the gloom.  Tarr says directing is "not a democracy" -- it's feudal he tells us.  The mob in The Werckmeister Harmonies has advanced through the rural hospital, looting and burning -- in the final room, at the center of the medical complex, they encounter a wrinkled, emaciated old man naked and standing in a bath.  This discomfits the mob and they sullenly leave the scene of the crime.  

At the beginning of the film, Tarr says that he has a repertoire company with whom he always works.  And he tells us that he has worked with Krasznahorkai for 23 years.  (The film was made in 2013).  Yet, mysteriously, Krasznahorkai is absent from the movie and doesn't appear in a single shot.  Nor is he ever mentioned except as aforesaid.