Szabadgyalog

The begins with a handsome young man immersed in playing a violin solo in a hospital ward for mental patients, who find the music calming. The film ends with a small group of classical musicians playing Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody, at the request of a classical music enthusiast, who thinks and lives in the world of composers. The situations, where both these musical sequences are played, are allegorical views of Hungary's social and political reality in the early Eighties. I had visited Hungary at that time. Tarr's movie has the philosophical line "Music can't be bought, it is not like a painting." There are sequences where the audience can easily miss the satirical undercurrents--a joke about a chicken thief who insists his bag contains crows, and when discovered, says he doesn't want them.

"The Outsider" is an unusual Tarr film because it is in shot in colour; usually his films on equally bleak, reflective subjects are best captured in black-and-white. It is also unusual because all actors are non-professional (according to the IMdB trivia). But the lead actor Andras Szabo playing the role of Andras is a delight to watch as a happy-go-lucky man, refusing responsibility of having fathered a child, getting fired from jobs, and eventually getting married (the actual marriage is never shown, except for a post-marriage dance and merry-making and a bus trip with wedding attire.) Andras is "The Outsider"-- an affable, talented violinist who is rejected from orchestras as he has not graduated from music schools and has a history of being fired from many jobs. He is an outsider also because he rejects social responsibilities that most others would accept.

Tarr's wife Agnes is also the film's editor. Not a major Tarr film but the non-professionals are by and large agreeable on screen.

Not that I loved it or anything. It's still rooted in the clichés of socialist realism and it has long, repetitive scenes of people chattering on. But I connected with this one pretty well. The main character, András, is a talented but unambitious musician. He plays the violin exceptionally well, but doesn't think he could make a living at it because he's not classically trained. Instead, he wastes his life away at a factory in a small town; he only works there because he has to support his illegitimate son. The film's best scenes all involve music, which is also true of the other two Facets releases, The Prefab People and Family Nest (though those two used music much more sparingly than The Outsider). Music seems to hold a special place in Tarr's work, or at least these early works. I wouldn't especially recommend any of these three films. You might want to wait until Satantango or The Werckmeister Harmonies – both of which sound much more interesting – eventually make their way to DVD. If you have seen those films and are looking into the development of this artist, these films are worthwhile enough.

Watching Béla Tarr's "The Outsider" was a similar experience for me to watching Bresson's "A Gentle Woman", in that both films saw me witnessing the use of color from a director that I had previously thought constitutionally incapable of anything but black-and-white. Tarr's vision of life, of course, is best suited to the black-and-white medium, as was Bresson's, but like "A Gentle Woman", the uncharacteristic use of color did nothing to sully my appreciation for this impressive film.

Tarr would become best known for his more formal, highly metaphysical works, such as "Damnation" and "Werckmeister Harmonies", but here, early in his career, we see him at the completely opposite end of the cinematic spectrum. In his early features, instead of sheer, unmitigated formalism, Tarr opted for absolute realism. These films are more political, where his later work tends to be more philosophical (nihilistic, specifically). Instead of Tarkovsky-esque camera-work infused with a certain Bressonian drabness, which is the style that dominates Tarr's later films, what we get here is something closer to Cassavetes than to Tarkovsky or Bresson.

Whether Tarr hadn't fully formed his vision of life and of cinema yet, or whether he simply didn't have the means to make films any other way at this point, I can't say for sure. But what's certain is that these early Tarr films are a completely different experience. An inferior one, ultimately, but they're still impressive films in their own right.

Tarr's debut feature, "Family Nest", from 1979, was a black-and-white exercise in kitchen sink realism, which is as dissimilar to the style of his later work as one can possibly imagine. Nevertheless, "Family Nest" bears some similarities to those later films in terms of content. All Tarr's films seem to incorporate characters who are trapped and paralyzed by either social or existential conditions. In "Family Nest", an indictment of the Hungarian society and government of the time, the prison was a social one, not a metaphysical one. As a result, there was actually an implication that, if freed from the oppressive weight of this flawed society, these characters might actually be able to find some degree of happiness. Characters in future Tarr films would not be so fortunate. In those films, it was the oppressive weight of human existence that imprisoned them, and that, unlike society, is entirely inescapable.

"The Outsider", released in 1981, continued predominately in the realist mode of "Family Nest". Tarr decided to go with color here, which was effective despite being inconsistent with his other films, but otherwise the style here is very similar to his first film. In both cases we have a low budget production with hand-held camera-work, nonprofessional actors (I believe), and an overall realist aesthetic. However, unlike "Family Nest", there are moments in "The Outsider" that really do move toward formalism. So you can tell that Tarr did at least have that vision inside of him when he made this film, even if he was just beginning to express it, and to nourish it as it evolved bit by bit into what would eventually become his preferred style of filmmaking.

Other than the superficial change to color, the place where "The Outsider" can be most contrasted with "Family Nest" is the source of the conflict, which was external in "Family Nest", and is internal in "The Outsider". On a content level, "The Outsider" is a bit of a cross between a traditional exercise in social realism and an existential meditation on the human spirit (i.e. Ingmar Bergman). In "Family Nest", the problems that were responsible for the misery of the central characters were largely external, originating outwardly in their flawed environment and social milieu. In "The Outsider", the fundamental barrier that stands between our protagonist and happiness is an inner one.

This chicken-egg conundrum was eventually resolved by Tarr, by the time he reached "Damnation", maybe before. In "Family Nest", the despairing human spirit is an echo of a broken social climate. The misery begins on the outside, and is carried inward by victims of a flawed system. In "The Outsider", however, this model of human suffering is reversed. Society is the fractured form spawned from existential discontent, an inherent burden of the human condition. Misery originates in the interior world of the human soul, and ripples outward into society, thus moving in a direction opposite to the one it took in "Family Nest".

Finally, in "Damnation" and Tarr's subsequent works, the question of from where human misery originates is resolved. Or, rather, I should say, it is ignored all together. It has been asked, and no answer having been found, it is set aside as inconsequential. In "Damnation", neither the tormented interior world of the soul nor the desolate exterior landscapes hold the source of human despair. Anguish is simply a reality of human life, and so we find it in both worlds: the internal and the external. The forsaken, barren landscapes of the physical world are simply a reflection of the anguish in our souls, and conversely, the suffering that is inherent to the human soul is merely a reflection of the cold and harsh universe that envelops us. The inner and the outer worlds of human existence are mirror images, and in that image we find despair, anguish, and misery. There is no origin.

Ultimately, "The Outsider" is a formative work for Tarr, and by no means one of his best films, but by any other standards than the extremely high ones that Tarr has set for himself with his more recent films, it's a legitimately impressive film. Expect something closer to Michael Fengler's "Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?" and not "Werckmeister Harmonies", for instance, and this will hopefully be as satisfying for you as it was for me. I much prefer formalism to realism, but in the latter category, it doesn't get too much better than this.

RATING: 8.00 out of 10 stars

I guess i was plain unlucky..this is my first Bela Tarr film and I found it virtually unmatchable .But I am not deterred and look fwd to watching his other later work.This film was an exercise in dullness at least for a non hungarian non European like me.The film has not aged well at all and his methods of shooting only extreme closeups was pretty headache inducing.Think Tarr was both lucky and talented to have found backers after this.The story of Angreas who is a musician and his dysfunctional life of playing the violin, working as a nurse and marrying a girl to get dumped by her in a difficult social environment could have been quite interesting but Tarr chooses to make it difficult for us. I was prepared for lack of story but not for a lack of interesting visuals.