“I’ve long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There’s no sense or meaning in anything. It’s nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures.”
― Béla Tarr
Rest in peace Bela Tarr. Such an incredible way he work. Dense, brutal and beautiful. He gives weight to everything he points a camera at.
Anarchism – at least these days – is the first point from which all systems of thought can be compared
the way the camera sticks to her – she seems to be freed from gravity
I think it’s the first film he completely breaks up his approach to realism, it’s a dream, men wheeling around the woman at its centre.
I love Mihaly Vig’s soundtracks, melancholy melody mixed in to driving drones. I was asked recently how music influenced my work – I suppose the answer is ‘tone’, and the creation of tone
I looked up the painter Max Neumann (& found this: https://bonelab.wordpress.com/2024/11/05/no-language-but/) after reading ‘Chasing Homer’ by László Krasznahorkai, paintings by Max Neumann and a soundtrack by John Batki, or “László Krasznahorkai (2021) Chasing Homer. New Directions Publishing.” if you like.
The paintings are good, the story is a sort of Beckettian ghost story, the music is eerie, percussive. There’s an ambience.
Krasznahorkai is a part of the group Bela Tarr credits with directing the films Tarr makes. The ambience in those are fascinating too.
Digital drawing, 2024
Space and time and culture are totally at the service of the ambience – events unfold but never really coalesce into story – people fold under the pressure of events. and there is the odd very beautiful moment. All of it has its own grubby stylised beauty. A beauty which holds an elemental almost cosmic weight.
This I think describes ‘Chasing Homer’ and Tarr’s films.
The mundane blended with the cosmic is something worth aspiring to.
How does one create ambience? Convincing the viewer that a thing has weight? It has been my main approach since I first saw a Giacometti drawing. Making the familiar unfamiliar.
o 