By MCN Editor editor@moviecitynews.com

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER TO HOST A COMPLETE BÉLA TARR RETROSPECTIVE

Posted Thursday, December 15th, 2011 - Comments Off on THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER TO HOST A COMPLETE BÉLA TARR RETROSPECTIVE
Be Sociable, Share!

PRESS RELEASE

TARR’S FINAL FILM, THE TURIN HORSE, TO OPEN THEATRICALLY AT THE FILM SOCIETY

New York, NY (December 15, 2011) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center will host a complete Béla Tarr retrospective titled The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Béla Tarr from February 3-8, 2012. In advance of the U.S. Theatrical Premiere of The Turin Horse on February 10th, the Film Society will present a rare “complete” retrospective of a living filmmaker, stretching from his early cinema verité portraits of proletariat life in Communist-era Hungary to the hypnotic, career-defining masterworks that cemented Tarr’s international reputation.

“Few filmmakers have made as great an impact on world cinema in the past two decades as Béla Tarr,” said Film Society Associate Program Director Scott Foundas. “And yet, despite the enormous praise given to him by critics and filmmakers as varied as Susan Sontag, Jim Karmusch and Gus Van Sant, his films has remained relatively difficult to see, especially on the big screen. After witnessing the incredibly enthusiastic reception Béla received at this year’s New York Film Festival, it felt like the time was right to re-introduce audiences to this singular and remarkable body of work.”

The Film Society of Lincoln Center will also be home to the theatrical premiere of New York Film Festival favorite, The Turin Horse, opening on February 10th at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and being released by Cinema Guild. Hungary’s official submission for this year’s Academy Awards and awarded the Silver Bear and FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011, Tarr has announced that thiswill be his final film.

On January 3, 1889 in Turin, Italy, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, a cab driver is having trouble with a stubborn horse. The horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. After this, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory lastwords, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. Somewhere in the countryside, the cab driver lives with his daughter and the overworked horse. Outside, a windstorm rages. The horse refuses to move, and the man and his daughter struggle through their daily schedule. Food and water grow scarce. Beggars and gypsies come to their door. The horse stops eating. Slowly, the apocalypse approaches.

Immaculately photographed in Tarr’s renowned long takes, The Turin Horse is the final statement from a master filmmaker. Director, Béla Tarr; Co-Director, Agnes Hranitzky; Screenplay by Béla Tarr and Laszlo Krasznahorkai; Director of Photography, Fred Kelemen; Film Editing, Agnes Hranitzky; Original Music by Mihaly Vig; Producer, Gabor Teni; Executive Producers, Elizabeth Redleaf and Christine K. Walker; Co-producers, Martin Hagemann, Juliette Lepoutre, Marie-Pierre Macia, and Ruth Waldburger

Béla Tarr was born in 1955, and grew up in Budapest, Hungary. He began making amateur documentaries at the age of 16 and shot his 1977 feature debut Family Nest at the age of 22, made with non-professional actors in a stark, realist style. His work made a dramatic shift with his 1982 video adaptation of Macbeth which is comprised of only two shots. In subsequent films, Tarr developed a durational aesthetic revolving around extended shot lengths, most famously in 1994’s Sátántangó, a film heavily influential in both the film and art worlds, and of which Susan Sontag said “I’d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life.” Across the entire body of his work, Tarr has established himself as one of the defining filmmakers and greatest innovators in contemporary cinema.

FILM DESCRIPTIONS

Almanac of Fall, Béla Tarr, 1984, Hungary, 35mm; 119m
Four apartment-dwellers scheme against a rich elderly woman and each other, in a key work that bridges Tarr’s early social realism and later stylistic brio.
FEB 7, 8

Damnation/Kárhozat. Béla Tarr, 1988, Hungary, 35mm; 116m
Tarr and Krasznahorkai’s first collaboration is a ravishing film noir about a man’s efforts to steal his estranged lover from the arms of her debt-addled husband. FEB 3, 6

Family Nest/Családi tüzfészek. Béla Tarr, 1979, Hungary, 35mm; 108m
Tarr’s striking debut (made when he was 22) offers a take-no-prisoners snapshot of a seven-member family sharing a tiny apartment during a housing crisis. FEB 3, 6

Macbeth
Béla Tarr, 1982, Hungary, 35mm; 72m
Shot in two takes, Tarr’s entrancing TV adaptation preserves all the ambient tension of Shakespeare’s play, reinventing the space with his newly mobile camera technique.
FEB 4, 8

The Man From London
 Béla Tarr, 2007, Hungary/France/Germany, 35mm; 135m
The Georges Simenon thriller about a railman and a suitcase of stolen cash becomes an enveloping, chiaroscuro world of melancholy and mystery. With Tilda Swinton. NYFF 2007.
FEB 7, 8

The Outsider/Szabadgyalog. Béla Tarr, 1981, Hungary, 35mm; 122m
An aimless young musician drifts through a series of jobs—and women—before being called up for military service in Tarr’s gritty second feature. FEB 6, 7

The Prefab People
 Béla Tarr, 1982, Hungary, 35mm; 102m
A young married couple in monolithic housing endures the trouble and strife of love’s disintegration, in a searing story that works backward from the climactic break-up.
FEB 3, 6

Satantango/Sátántangó. Béla Tarr, 1994, Hungary/Germany/Switzerland, 35mm; 450m
A landmark of contemporary world cinema, Tarr’s international breakthrough came with this transfixing epic about the arrival of a (false) prophet in a small farming collective. Screened with one 15-minute intermission and one 60-minute dinner break. FEB 4, 5

Werckmeister Harmonies, Béla Tarr, 2000, Hungary, 35mm; 145m
Tarr’s apocalyptic masterpiece unfolds in a Hungarian town teetering at the edge of the abyss with the arrival of a giant stuffed whale. With Hanna Schygulla.
FEB 3, 8

PUBLIC SCREENING SCHEDULE

Friday, February 3
1:00 PM Werckmeister Harmonies (145 min.)
4:00 PM The Prefab People (102 min.)
6:15 PM Damnation (116 min.)
8:45 PM Family Nest (108 min.)

Saturday, February 4
12:00 PM Macbeth (72 min.)
2:00 PM Satantango (450 min. + 30 min. intermission + 60 min. dinner break)

Sunday, February 5
2:00 PM Satantango (450 min. + 30 min. intermission + 60 min. dinner break)

Monday, February 6
1:30 PM Damnation (116 min.)
4:00 PM Family Nest (108 min.)
6:15 PM The Outsider (122 min.)
8:45 PM The Prefab People (102 min.)

Tuesday, February 7
1:00 PM The Man From London (139 min.)
3:45 PM The Outsider (122 min.)
6:15 PM Almanac of Fall (119 min.)

Wednesday, February 8
1:45 PM Macbeth (72 min.)
3:30 PM Almanac of Fall (119 min.)
6:00 PM Werckmeister Harmonies (145 min.)
9:00 PM The Man From London (135 min.)

Film Society of Lincoln Center
 Under the leadership of Rose Kuo, Executive Director, and Richard Peña, Program Director, theFilm Society of Lincoln Center offers the best in international, classic and cutting-edge independent cinema. The Film Society presents two film festivals that attract global attention: the New York Film Festival, currently planning its 50th edition, and New Directors/New Films which, since its founding in 1972, has been produced in collaboration with MoMA. The Film Society also publishes the award-winning Film Comment Magazine, and for over three decades has given an annual award—now named “The Chaplin Award”—to a major figure in world cinema. Past recipients of this award include Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, and Tom Hanks. The Film Society presents a year-round calendar of programming, panels, lectures, educational programs and specialty film releases at its Walter Reade Theater and the new state-of-the-art Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, 42BELOW, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stella Artois, the National Endowment for the Arts, WNET New York Public Media, the National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, visitwww.filmlinc.com.
# # #

Be Sociable, Share!

Posted in Movie City News, Press Releases | Comments Off on THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER TO HOST A COMPLETE BÉLA TARR RETROSPECTIVE

Comments are closed.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon