I See a Darkness Béla Tarr & György Fehér

July 21 –August 1

The magisterial, eerily apocalyptic films of “slow cinema” godhead Béla Tarr have guaranteed the retired (though not inactive) Hungarian master a pantheonic place beside fellow movie metaphysicians like Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, and Sokurov. Inglorious by comparison are the directorial works of collaborator György Fehér, a producer on Sátántangó and dialogue writer on Werckmeister Harmonies. His virtually forgotten debut feature Twilight, for which Tarr was a consultant, is as haunting as anything found in his countryman’s castiron oeuvre. Indeed, you’d be forgiven for thinking it is a Tarr picture, so kindred is its devotion to a Tarr-like coagulation of time and doomsday vision of humanity edging toward oblivion.

“I See a Darkness” presents Fehér’s tremendous first film, never before released in North America, alongside Tarr’s aforementioned Werckmeister Harmonies, one of the milestones of modern cinema. Both arrive in stunning new restorations.

July 21 (Friday) 6:30 pm

July 24 (Monday) 8:30 pm

July 29 (Saturday) 6:30 pm

Twilight (Szürkület)

Hungary 1990 György Fehér

101 min. DCP

In Hungarian with English subtitles

New Restoration

Inexplicably relegated to obscurity following its Locarno debut (where it scored a cinematography award), the first of just two features by György Fehér, better known as a collaborator of Béla Tarr, is finally getting its due as an unsung masterwork of Hungarian cinema. Based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s crime The Pledge (also the basis for Sean Penn’s eponymous Twilight follows an end-of-career detective in his obsessive pursuit of a child killer, eerily dubbed “the giant” by village children. The crepuscular film, rendered with glacial camera moves in ghostly black-and-white, closely resembles the saturnine works of doom-and-gloom high priest Tarr—little wonder, Miklós Gurbán (Werckmeister Harmonies) shot the film while Tarr serves as consultant. Thick with atmosphere and affectless, almost somnambulistic performances (Herzog’s Heart is also a touchstone, not least because the films share a Popol Vuh soundtrack), Fehér’s chilling policier is less a serial-killer whodunnit than a slow-motion tour of a purgatorial nightmare.

“Those initial cultish whispers about a Hungarian hidden relic can finally become shouts of Hosanna as Fehér’s masterpiece rises from the dead.”

The Film Stage

Werckmeister Harmonies

(Werckmeister harmóniák)

Hungary/Italy/Germany/France 2000

Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky

145 min. DCP

In Hungarian with English subtitles

New Restoration

“Béla Tarr’s films remind us of the strange and beautiful potential of narrative cinema.”

Jim Jarmusch

Werckmeister Harmonies, Béla Tarr’s transfixing follow-up to his seven-hour epic Satantango, is one of the Hungarian auteur’s signature achievements and a benchmark work of contemporary art cinema. Based, like Satantango, on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, the film is set in a dreary, wintry East European village, where the arrival of a strange travelling circus, and a sinister zealot known as The Prince, unleashes destructive forces that plunge the community into madness, murder, and revolution. In distinctive, dreamlike Tarr fashion, the monochrome film is composed of mesmerizing long takes (by a sextet of cinematographers, Twilight ’s Miklós Gurbán among them), and enveloped in mournful, melancholic atmosphere. The title refers to Andreas Werckmeister, a 17th-century German composer whose theories of harmony (and cosmological order) are disputed by one of the characters. Ágnes Hranitzky, Tarr’s longtime editor and wife, would from here on be acknowledged as co-director on their pictures.

July 26 (Wednesday) 7:00 pm

Radiograph of a Family

Iran/Norway/Switzerland 2020

Firouzeh Khosrovani

82 min. DCP

In Farsi and French with English subtitles

Firouzeh Khosrovani's autobiographical documentary offers a glimpse into the life journey of an Iranian family amid significant changes, including immigration to Europe, Iran’s 1979 revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War. It follows Khosrovani, the film’s narrator and the family’s only child, as she observes her parents’ interactions and the impact of the revolution on their relationship. Her mother, a traditional woman, becomes a religious activist after the revolution, while her father, a radiologist educated in Switzerland, finds solace in his favourite chair and the music of Bach, longing for a different future. Through their evolving dynamics, the documentary portrays the profound consequences the revolution had on middle-class Iranians, and skillfully captures the fractures within families, a prevailing occurrence during that tumultuous period.

Best Feature-Length Documentary, Best Creative Use of Archive

IDFA 2020