“A Cosmic Wirtschaft”: Mood, Materiality and “Metacommunication” in the Cinema of Béla Tarr [Ágnes Hranitzky, Míhaly Víg, and Laszlo Krasznahorkai] (1987-2011).

Abstract

This dissertation is a thematic response to the films of Bela Tarr’s “second-period”, from Damnation to The Turin Horse; and to claims made in the director’s discourse concerning the departure of his cinema from “story” and toward “metacommunication.” By this, Tarr refers to a motion away from the exigency of conventional narrative economy and toward an expressive realisation of the materiality of time, atmosphere and milieu. With reference to the philosophical discourse on Stimmung, or “mood,” I will argue that the disposition toward these paranarrative elements constitutes a medium of experience that conditions an attunement to the affective presence of the world. The appeal of Stimmung - which displaces the difference between “subject” and “object” - will orient our engagement with the “cosmic perspective” of these films and the “poetic experience” it implies. This displacement takes place with regard to a “free-indirect subjectivity,” an autonomous camera-consciousness that draws together subjects and environment into an experiential “state of being”, or “being-with”. Paradoxically, this inclination away from “story” becomes more profound with the entry of the writer Krasznahorkai into the circle of Tarr’s collaborators. The writer’s work represents a pretext and philosophical background to these films, which will be explicated with particular reference to Benjamin and Heidegger. Meanwhile, Tarr’s medium essentialist view rejects interpretation, situating his antipathy to “story” with reference to “metaphysical things” – theory and ideology, symbol and allegory – and suggesting that our “dignity” has been progressively diminished by the being-in-language of historical man. Accordingly, corruption by language is a thematic element of these films, in which the breakdown of meaning and its communicability takes on the apocalyptic dimensions of a cosmic disharmony. This will be read through Agamben’s discourse on gesture, ethics, and “messianic” time.