Cinemarxisme (1979)

Director: Béla Tarr

Canon Fodder

Bathing is refreshing. Fabulon is beautifying.

Not surprisingly, a student film from Hungarian director Béla Tarr will not reach the scale of Satantango (1994), his near eight hour epic adaptation of a László Krasznahorkai novel, or his other theatrical films. It is however a fascinating piece of his world to see. A couple is in a bathroom, the film beginning with the wife being berated by her husband for selling her body in her work. A hybrid between meta film, a fictional interview and a sociological critique, the best way to describe Cinemarxisme is a document on hardship and the struggle of life, something the Hungarian director will become accustomed to. The wife is a model who advertises the likes of Fabulon shampoo, the film cutting repeatedly to her, in the same bathtub she is soaking in throughout the whole film, promoting the product to us the viewer. Her husband, in the shower throughout the film, is more in general labour work, talking of having Fabulon in a barrel and pouring the contents into small plastic bottles. They stay bathing/showering throughout, the film discrete without any explicit nudity, a lot of water likely used in the short film as a result too.

I can see the interest in people the director developed. Tarr may be a bleak director, but he studied people in his career. Long way off his legendary long takes, instead what we have here are long takes of these two figures talking to the camera, listening to them as they list the many concerns they have. Reference to a tuberculosis sanatorium. That for the husband, there is no love, instead the belief that thicker the envelope of pay, the larger the love quotient is. The banal life of marriage with children, which is said to have no life especially for the wife. It becomes as much a non-fiction essay critique, starting with a Karl Marx quotation, ending with another from Jean-Luc Godard which even questions the point of filmmaking.

You can argue it is as bleak as Tarr usually is, not someone with an apparently optimistic view of humanity. To his credit, his work does have its moments of human individuality, their interests or quirks to bask in, colouring his (usually) monochrome worlds as here, also filmed in black-and-white and showing within this. Mainly the husband in this case, recounting his enjoyment of frequent cinema visits, watching a film like the Russian picture The Claws of the Black Crab¹, or the positives of a sexual experience with a forty year old woman, without an opinion of whether he is a good person or not, merely a snapshot of a man's life.

This makes up most of this thirty or so minute short. The last piece breaks the fourth wall by showing the crew tidy up their equipment out of the bathroom. Then the female cleaner, an old woman, appears who complains about the mess. Then she is interviewed, and her segment adds a huge moment of humanity to Tarr's career. Her life has been miserable - an unhappy marriage, having to be on sedatives and drudgery - but there is also joy in recounting giving birth to twins, her hobby of reading and talking about herself. She even adds a bit more cineaste content when she talks of watching Ben-Hur (1959) and Gone with the Wind (1939) in West Germany, even remembering seeing the silent Ben-Hur (1925) in the 1930s. This in itself becomes something to treasure in the director's career, a levity to how (for many) miserable his career can be in terms of the depiction of humanity. A combination of different pieces, some of this he would jettison entirely when not long after he would start making theatrical films, but it still feels of importance to include for this emotional surprise to his work. That this student film was considered lost, only to be found again, adds contextually a delight to this film even existing.

 

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1) Possibly In the Claws of the Black Crab (1975), by Aleksandrs Leimanis, a medieval film set in Latvia, in which brave peasants fight against German lords in a combination of romance, adventure, comedy and possibly even a musical.