“Jacques Rancière’s latest work, Béla Tarr, The Time After, is that awkward thing: an essay-book. It appears primarily to serve as a manifesto of Rancière’s theory of cinema, via a ponderous and dogmatic guide to the Hungarian filmmaker, Béla Tarr.”
“Rancière, like Adorno and Žižek, has come to be feted as a philosopher of the arts, and this fluid translation by Erik Beranek is essentially a book of academic film criticism, in the tradition of Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag.”
“It is a worthy tradition and undoubtedly important that academics engage with contemporary culture. But the distance between the abstractions of philosophy and the immediately physical nature of the art discussed can be problematic where either that distance is not successfully bridged or, worse, it accommodates a distortive reading that attempts to fit individual works of art into the broader intellectual arguments that philosophy might privilege.”
“Both problems apply here. For, though powerfully written and often illuminating, Rancière’s analysis is at times overbearing and frequently skewed by his own dogma. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the book reads best where he strays from his theorizing, distracted in a study of the films for their own sakes.”
“Rancière’s ambition seems to be more grandiose than particular, and in this way it can feel as though Tarr is just a means for the philosopher to reach his bold conclusions.”
“For Béla Tarr’s films are both ecstatically liberating and emphatically binding: an essentially visceral form of spiritual quest, which I have elsewhere called a kind of Prosaic Sublime.”
“What is rare and exciting about films like Damnation, Sátántangó, The Werckmeister Harmonies, and his last film, The Turin Horse, is that they do not locate their meanings in any mythical elsewhere, but find significance in the physical conditions and human relationships that circumscribe the arduous lives of the characters he follows.”
“Appropriate to Tarr’s peripatetic films and a refreshing break from the linear march of many retrospective appraisals, Rancière prefaces his argument with the counsel echoed in the final line of the book: “the last film is still just another film. The closed circle is always open.””
“His assertions, masquerading as explanations, epitomize a style that risks being pointlessly blunt.”
“Moreover, his sweeping statements on the general nature of cinema strike me as perverse since, surely, what motivated him to write the book in the first place was his interest in the films of this particular director, rather than a desire to legislate the absolutes of Art.”
“if cinema is essentially physical and sensible, then the medium of film is the durational time in which this sensory matter is experienced and recorded. Which is so far an excellent analysis of the particular way in which Tarr configures time.”
“Chapter IV, “Crooks, Idiots and Madmen,” comes to life with a discussion of various character types in Sátántangó, their roots in folk and fairy tale and the way in which they are empowered by Tarr’s recasting of them in more minimal roles that communicate through a visual language of film, rather than verbal myth.”
“Rancière also quotes Tarr’s insistence that characters are “personalities” which his actors have to “be” rather than “play,” informing the reader about the ideology behind the directing.”
“Rancière also has a talent for identifying those specific moments in the film where meaning condenses or an underlying idea finds its symbol.”
“The risk is giving up all together and dignity lies in resistance or survival. This is important to understand as it is Tarr’s only form of faith, without which the films become a sea of despair in which the viewer can’t see the point of any of it.”
“Tarr’s god is dignity, human dignity and he has explicitly stated its centrality to his filmmaking in numerous interviews. In bringing it to light, Rancière establishes that Tarr is not the pessimist that the stark nature of his films might suggest but, conversely, a director with a waywardly uplifting aspect.”
“Either way, the title of his book looks beyond these, hoping for a future of cinema that transcends false stories, a post-disillusioned utopia and identifying it in the “sensible stuff” of Tarr’s films.”
“But, of course, the sensible is only the half of it. With his head in the clouds, did Rancière forget to mention that Tarr is also a metaphysical man?”