Macbeth

Bela Tarr made this remarkable color video (1982, 67 min.) for Hungarian television, though it also served as his film-school thesis. Taped in a Budapest cellar and environs, it reduces the Shakespeare play to only two shots (the first, running about four minutes, appears before the main title), and all the witches are men. Most of the action occurs in the foreground, and the elaborate movements of the camera and actors are masterfully staged. Tarr has described this as a kind of documentary of the actors’ performances, and as such it’s a transition between the social realism of his earlier projects (Family Nest, The Outsider, and The Prefab People) and the diabolical formal virtuosity of his later ones (Almanac of Fall, Damnation, Satantango, and Werckmeister Harmonies). In Hungarian with subtitles. (JR)

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