Interview. Béla Tarr.

Michael Guillén just comes right out and asks: "What is it about the long take that you love so much? You're famous for this and your long takes are sinuously eloquent. Why do long takes serve your vision?" And Béla Tarr's direct reply may not be immediately satisfying, but over the course of the interview, he does get an answer across.

The New York Film Festival will screen The Man from London tomorrow (Sunday) and Wednesday.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and Toronto and Jay Kuehner's talk with Tarr about Werckmeister Harmonies.

Update, 9/30: "[I]f the core of the film seems hollow, thin, and strangely vacuous - sporadically populated and hazily set in an anonymous port, this film will not be burdened with the interpretations of national allegory Tarr's last two features were burdened with - one of the benefits is seeing the director handling uninspired material with his personality intact," writes Daniel Kasman. "The Man From London may not be Béla Tarr's best but it certainly is Béla Tarr's, which makes it a wonder in and of itself."

Update, 10/1: For Vadim Rizov, writing at the Reeler, the film "seems like a transitional work - a weird thing to say, seeing as Tarr has made exactly three features in the last 15 years. Nevertheless, In his own way, Tarr is as much of a maximalist as, say, James Cameron: every frame of Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies is calculated to stagger the eye, an orgy of complicated lighting, tracking shots and staging marvels. The Man from London, if not a clean break, is the most determinedly minimal feature Tarr's made since 1988's Damnation."

Updates, 10/4: Jürgen Fauth: "Some may argue that the complex movements and spatial relations, along with the extreme shadows and rough-hewn textures they reveal, shed light on the characters' emotional realities, but I found the pleasures of this drowsy film noir limited to externalities: dreamlike vistas of wet brick walls and the ghostly shine of street lamps through the fog."

"If we are to deal with Tarr that's merely 'good,' it should be acknowledged that even on this level he remains better than almost anyone else," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot. "No, The Man from London isn't Werckmeister Harmonies or Sátántangó, but it doesn't need, nor want to be. It's a Béla Tarr film, and that's more than enough."

Update, 10/16: "The Man From London finds Tarr's camera (literally) drifting closer to the realm of the subjective," writes Dave McDougall at chained to the cinémathèque. "While still autonomous, it resembles the viewpoints of his characters with a greater fidelity and frequency. There's also a greater commitment on Tarr's part to representing the mechanisms of observation, which also brings us closer to the subjective realm in that we approach information from the perspectives of the film's characters."

Posted by dwhudson at September 29, 2007 11:20 AM