"London" calling

5 Comments

• bill says:

  July 7, 2009 at 11:44 am

  This is cur­rently play­ing OnDemand, through August, I believe. I do intend to give it a look, although my exper­i­ence with “The Werckmeister Harmonies” made me think that Tarr and I may not get along too well.

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• Jason M. says:

  July 7, 2009 at 7:52 pm

  That shot you pos­ted is a real stun­ner, Glenn; with the excep­tion of the open­ing sequence, it’s prob­ably my favor­ite shot in the film.
  I love Bela Tarr, but “The Man From London” did­n’t entirely work for me, though it has some very strong moments which have def­in­itely stuck with me. Then again, I’ve only seen it once, so it may grow with a second or third view­ing. I did how­ever, leave with the feel­ing that a rerecor­ded and remixed soundtrack would bene­fit the movie immensely; not because of the dub­bing so much as the fact that the dens­ity (or lack there­of) of the soundtrack did­n’t really com­ple­ment the sparse images par­tic­u­larly well, rely­ing far too much on repe­ti­tion. It worked well in Satantango and Werckmeister, but not here.

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• JF says:

  July 7, 2009 at 11:33 pm

  I saw Satantango last month and I was sur­prised by how rel­at­ively access­ible it is. I mean, it’s not some­thing I could start without first mak­ing peace with the fact that I was going to be sit­ting there for that amount of time, but after I pressed PLAY it com­pletely con­sumed me. The first couple hours went by fast, and while around hour 5 or 6 the length began to feel, if not pun­ish­ing, at least slightly dis­cour­teous, that sense quickly passed. And I can­’t say I was ever bored, since the Faulknerian struc­ture cre­ates enough intrigue to bal­ance out the long stretches of appar­ent inactivity.
  After see­ing Werckmeister Harmonies a few months before Satantango, I wrote a little about the movie and what Tarr’s style does, at least for me: “His shots go through sev­er­al trans­form­a­tions as they’re unfold­ing: at a cer­tain point they stop being about what they’re depict­ing and become about their own dur­a­tion, and then again become about what they’re depict­ing, but in a more gen­er­al­ized, uni­ver­sal way. E.g. ‘this shot is about Janos walk­ing’ becomes ‘this shot is about Janos walk­ing for a long time’ becomes ‘this shot is about the human act of walk­ing.’ ” Maybe that’s just wank, but I think I might be halfway onto something.
  Need to see this one.

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• Glenn Kenny says:

  July 7, 2009 at 11:56 pm

  JF: No wank, I think your obser­va­tions are very astute and catch Tarr’s pro­ject quite nicely. Yes, by all means catch this one!

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• JF says:

  July 16, 2009 at 1:03 am

  So I caught this one. I enjoyed it but def­in­itely get why it’s been divis­ive. It’s half form­al exer­cise, half Satantango cast reunion (note that bit in the bar that reprises Satantango’s tango, only with a dif­fer­ent mem­ber of Satantango’s cast try­ing to keep some­thing bal­anced on his fore­head this time), and since it’s been over 7 years since Werckmeister Harmonies, it’s reas­on­able to expect a little more in the bleak sub­lim­ity depart­ment than what we get here. I think this might be enough for now, though. Especially that opening.

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