A new article by Marco Grosoli is out now! His article "Through a Glass, Slowly. On a Certain Continuity between the Two Halves of Tarr’s Career / À travers une vitre, lentement. Sur une certaine continuité entre les deux moitiés du parcours de Tarr" is part of the special issue Écrans 2024 – 2, n° 22 - Revoir Béla Tarr. Généalogies, influences, résonances, directed by Mathieu Lericq and Damien Marguet.
In this paper he offers an original interpretation of the second half of Béla Tarr’s film career (roughly after 1986) as revolving around a traversée du fantasme (as per Jacques Lacan’s phrasing: simultaneously an endorsement and a subversion) of the ideology of the “end of history”, particularly popular in the 1990s in the wake of Francis Fukuyama’s famous theses. Moreover, Marco Grosoli analyses the first three films by Tarr as having crucially laid the foundations for the later, more celebrated post-1986 phase, by having pursued and found suitably cinematic forms to the gap between things and their narrativization (also a cornerstone of the Budapest School Tarr’s early works are sometimes said to be in dialogue with).
More about the special isue here.
📸 Prefab People [1982], by Béla Tarr
