Mihály Víg - Film Music for Béla Tarr (2001)

Год/Year: 2001
Стиль/Style: non-Hollywood soundtracks
Страна/Country: Hungary
Формат/Format: MP3
Качество/Quality: CBR 192 kbps
Размер/Size: 120 MB (5% recovery information + artwork included)

Rather melancholy and introspected, this is "beautiful, varied, original, distinctly Eastern European, and yet strangely universal at the same time." — A must have at least for admirers of director Béla Tarr.

Tracklist
01. Title Theme
02. Lukon
03. Ancient Serpent
04. Poland
05. Peyyes
06. Synth
07. Coal Tipper
08. Over and Done
09. Rain I
10. R&R
11. Slow Dance
12. Circle Dance I
13. String Quartet
14. Bell I
15. Rain II
16. Galicia
17. May I have this Tango?
18. Circle Dance II
19. Pityi
20. Bell II
21. Valuska
22. Old

plus
23. Coal Tipper (extended)
24. Prologue

82:55 min

Tracks 1-6:
Oszi almanach (Almanac of Fall)
József Dénes — guitars, bass guitar
Ágnes Kamondy — piano
Gábor Lukin — piano
János Másik — syntheziser
Mihály Víg — piano, guitar

Tracks 7-13:
Kárhozat (Damnation)
Gábor Balogh — drums
Zoltán Csonka — accordion
József Dénes — bass guitar
Ágnes Kamondy — piano
Sándor Koszah — accordion
János Újvári — saxophone
Mihály Víg — piano

Tracks 14-20:
Sátántangó (Satantango)
Ágnes Kamondy — piano
Zoltán Kreschinka — accordion
Mia Santa Maria — syntheziser
János Véto — guitar
Mihály Víg — syntheziser

Tracks 21-22:
Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies)
Ágnes Kamondy — piano
Dora Kováts — violin
Péter Magyar — drums
Gábor Werner — cello

Track 23:
An extended version of track 7 from the opening of "Kárhozat". Taken from DVD.

Track 24:
An extended version of track 4 ("Poland"), used for "Prologue", Béla Tarr's laconic contribution to Lars von Trier's project "Visions of Europe". Taken from DVD.

Some clips @ YouTube:
Prológus/ Epilógus by Balaton w/ Mihály Víg
Prologue by Béla Tarr
(Actually there are several outtakes from Tarr's movies online, in example the Satantango from the film of the same name. Just do a search on "Bela Tarr" over there.)

Mihály Víg
"Film Music from the Films of Béla Tarr"
2001
Periferic Records, BGCD 090
www.perifericrecords.com

Between 1983 and 2001, I composed music for six films of Béla Tarr. Songs from "Last Boat" and "Journey on the Plain" were left out of this collection, since these films weren't full-length feature films.
I'd especially like to thank Lászlo Krasznahorkai*, who gave me the gift of his friendship, and Ági Hranitzky*, without whom this music, and perhaps even these films, could not have been made, and who has trusted, encouraged and helped me as much as Béla Tarr has. [*Lászlo Krasznahorkai — (script) writer; Ágnes Hranitzky — editor and wife of Béla Tarr] — Mihály Víg

Let me say first of all that it isn't necessary to have already seen the films of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr to enjoy this incredibly rich CD. It is enough that it happens to be beautiful, varied, original, distinctly Eastern European, and yet strangely universal at the same time. Much like the films actually, that this music was created to accompany. Béla Tarr is probably one of the most singular filmmakers alive today, and not to sound too terribly pretentious, but if you've ever sat and watched a Tarkovsky movie and bemoaned the fact that people just don't make 'em like they used to, then Béla Tarr may offer some consolation. They're highly stylized, almost always black and white, and shot with looooong takes that consist of slow action and subverted narratives. They're also unremittingly melancholy and impossible to forget. Susan Sontag was a vocal champion of his work, and Gus Van Sant claims he stopped making movies like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester after seeing Tarr's seven-plus-hour magnum opus Sátántango, which will finally be released on DVD later this month [in the meantime released by Artificial Eye with English subtitles, UK — ed.]. He has worked with his composer Mihály Víg since 1983, and the CD at hand is comprised of the scores he wrote for the movies Almanac of Fall, Damnation, Satantango, and Werckmeister Harmonies.
Tarr has stated that he uses music, along with time, as a main character in his films. And while the films aren't ever saturated with music per se, the role it plays is highly prominent and one of the key elements in what makes his movies so highly memorable. Generally, film music is composed after the movie has been completed, but Tarr and Víg do the exact opposite; Víg writes the music first and Tarr finds a way to make it work within his vision. In the films of Béla Tarr, there is often a sense of impending doom, collapse, and disintegration. And yet I've read that Tarr himself actually considers his films to be hopeful, in the same sense that Chekhov is. I hadn't quite understood what he meant until listening to this CD over and over again, when I realized that most of the pieces here, even at their darkest, are almost entirely lacking uneasiness. It is as if they were created in counterpoint to the dread inherent in the human condition. In Damnation, the center of action takes place at a cabaret/nightclub called "The Titanic", that has long since seen its glory days. It's to the soft bellowing of an accordion that Titanic's patrons hang onto the last thread their humanity. The world seems to stand precipitously close to the abyss in his film Werckmeister Harmonies, yet the fifteen minutes of music that Víg wrote for it and which accompany the film's most evocative scenes is almost celestially hopeful. Those fifteen minutes of music alone are reason enough to buy this album; it's one of the most beautiful things you'll hear all year. — MK, othermusic.com

We have lost whatever used to stop people from selling their dignity for a spoonful of gold or a spoonful of free soup – whatever they have in their spoons. — Lászlo Krasznahorkai

If genius is close to madness, then Tarr's genius — because genius has to be what it is — is closer to autism, a kind of untrained savant touch for compelling imagery. Famously unschooled in European cinema, he has developed his own vernacular language of movie-making.
He is a master of the long, long take: mostly compelling but sometimes just outrageously weird. He has a close-up of the young man and his uncle wordlessly walking down a street which goes on for minute after minute. God only knows why.
Who to compare him to? David Lynch? Tod Browning? You've got me. This will be a tough watch for many: an uncompromisingly difficult and severe experience. But I found it unique, mesmeric and sublime. — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, on "Werckmeister Harmonies"

Unless one understands Hungarian, there is almost no information in English on Mihály Víg, the composer of these soundtracks. He's a member of the bands
Balaton and Trabant. And that's it...

So here is at least author Lászlo Krasznahorkai:

Tibor Keresztury & Judit Székely: I heard from filmmaking quarters that while you are isolated in the literary world and keep no contacts, you are a highly co-operative partner in filmmaking. There are legends circulating about your relationship with director Béla Tarr.

Lászlo Krasznahorkai: It is rather hard to imagine two people co-operating in writing a novel, but then literature works very differently from film. The majority of intellectuals of the normal Hungarian cast have done their utmost to turn us against each in the context of "Werckmeister Harmonies" (Béla Tarr's film based on Krasznahorkai's novel, "The Melancholy of Resistance"). I think Tarr is one of the last great Hungarian film directors. People are always asking me whether I don't find it insulting that while I wrote the whole thing, he goes and collects the laurels for it. What on earth could I say to that? Partly, it is not true that I invented the whole thing. I delivered the novels and helped with whatever I could. But the film was made by Béla Tarr alone, even if he did have people to help him – excellent, brilliant, sensitive characters. Rather unfairly, I shall now just mention one of them, Mihály Vig. So, I am just one in the line next to Tarr – even if my role is rather important, to be sure.

[László Krasznahorkai is not a fashionable writer. He is marching directly against what the age is about: that literature should become part of the entertainment industry.]

And this is Béla Tarr himself:

"Probably, I make films in order to tempt fate, to simultaneously be the most humiliated and, if only for a few moments, the freest person in the world. Because I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being — all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine — time itself: the years, days hours, minutes and seconds. And film time has also ceased to exist, since the film itself has ceased to exist. Luckily there is no authentic form or current fashion. Some kind of massive introversion, a searching of our own souls can help ease the situation.

Or kill us.

We could die of not being able to make films, or we could die from making films.

But there's no escape.

Because films are our only means of authenticating our lives. Eventually nothing remains of us except our films — strips of celluloid on which our shadows wander in search of truth and humanity until the end of time.

I really don't know why I make films.

Perhaps to survive, because I'd still like to live, at least just a little longer..."

B. Tarr, during pre-production for "Damnation", 1987