ALMANAC OF FALL

  1. Problems

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Last year, I was bowled over by my first encounter with Bela Tarr when I saw Damnation (1987), his fifth feature. And now that I’ve seen Almanac of Fall (1984), his fourth (showing this week at Facets Multimedia Center), I want to see his earlier features–Family Nest (1977), The Outsider (1980), and The Prefab People (1982). The fact that I lack a comprehensive Hungarian context in which to situate these films doesn’t create any serious obstacles to the great deal of pleasure Tarr’s movies provide. But this lack of expertise does usher in a whole set of potential problems when it comes to writing about Tarr’s work, and if I’m breaking with conventional critical etiquette in admitting to this anxiety here, it’s only because I think a related form of anxiety dissuades a good many viewers from seeing films as exciting as Damnation and Almanac of Fall. I believe that these problems are less serious than we tend to make them out to be; rather than pretend that they don’t exist, it seems more honest and useful to acknowledge them–in the process of showing how and why they don’t matter much.

Three problems should be broached right away: (1) I have no idea what the title Almanac of Fall means, or how it relates to the film; (2) I no longer remember the film’s opening quote from Alexander Pushkin, the relevance of which was also unclear; and (3) I’m not sure I understood all the dialogue, because some of the subtitles here (and in Damnation) are grammatically and/or typographically slipshod. All three problems have to do with linguistic uncertainty. The fact that I’ve searched the indexes of Cahiers du Cinema and Sight and Sound in vain for any references to Tarr’s work creates an additional layer of uncertainty, although one that is surely connected to the linguistic and cultural uncertainties of French and English film critics confronting the same work, many of whom would rather not see or write about films over which they feel no mastery.

The main issue for all five characters is money, which Hedi has and the other four characters want. The relations between them are often edgy and quarrelsome and at times even violent, although at the outset, Anna gets along quite well with Hedi, serving as a friend as well as a nurse. The action proceeds mainly through a series of dialogues between two characters at a time, in or between various rooms, during which they either form temporary alliances or engage in conflicts: Anna speaks to Miklos in their bedroom, Hedi and Janos quarrel about money in the living room, Anna in the kitchen addresses Hedi in the bathroom, and so on.

Some of the unorthodox camera angles, like those of Raul Ruiz, provide disturbingly uncanny and nonhuman vantage points on the action: in some scenes in the bathroom, the camera peers down at the characters from a point somewhere near the ceiling, and in one startling and violent scene in the kitchen, the wide-angle camera peers up at them through a transparent floor. (Because the camera is some distance below the floor, the characters seem to be floating eerily in midair, like astronauts frozen in free-fall.) More often, the camera frames the actors at eye level from a certain distance while moving slowly past or around them–glimpsing them from outside the apartment through a succession of windows, or gliding between them so that their relationships to each other and to the frame are in continual flux. Reflections in mirrors and in other kinds of glass are often ingeniously incorporated; a dialogue between Janos and Miklos is framed in such a way that, thanks to double reflections, they appear to be simultaneously facing and looking away from each other, so that we get the equivalent of both an angle and its reverse angle within the same shot.