The Man from London was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7.
The film will also be shown in Canada at the 26th Vancouver International Film Festival (September 27 - October 12) and Montreal's Festival du nouveau cinéma 36th edition (October 10-21). But before these festivals, it will premiere in the United States in mid-September, at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center. On September 14, Tarr will be interviewed by the film writer Howard Feinstein as part of the center's Reigs Dialogue programme.
Writing about Tarr's latest films in an essay posted on the Walker Art Center web site, Feinstein writes:
"Some call these movies bleak, but I think of them as lying somewhere between anthropology and allegory. This is the landscape of a country beaten down by Communism, by false hopes, by the elements themselves. Tarr claims that these works are not at all political, although he acknowledges that he hopes they reveal a "social sensibility." Many critics call them metaphysical, cosmic, cousins to Tarkovsky (whom Tarr finds "soft"). Tarr will have none of that: for him, they are concrete and one should not think too much about such lofty things. (It's ironic that he originally studied philosophy.) No matter: these latter films ooze from their groundedness a strong sense of spirituality."
Feinstein notes, however, that Tarr's films and even the director himself may not be as serious as they first appear.
"What is rarely mentioned is the humor of the films and the director himself, whose attitude toward life does not appear otherworldly. When asked recently whether things were improving in his homeland, the 51-year-old Tarr told Time Out New York, 'We Hungarians were always too lazy-too lazy for Fascism, too lazy for Communism. We are eating too much, drinking too much, making love too much.'"
On September 16-18, Chicago's Facets Cinematheque will host a symposium on Tarr's films. Participating in the symposium will be David Bordwell, film theorist, historian professor and author of Ozu, Poetics of Cinema and The Way Hollywood Tells It; Scott Foundas, film editor of L.A. Weekly, contributor for Variety and member of the selection committee of the New York Film Festival; and Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who authored Essential Cinema, Placing Movies and Discovering Orson Wells. Moderated by Susan Doll, Ph.D., the discussion will cover the central themes and concerns of Tarr's unique body of work from such films as Family Nest, the epic Sátántangó and The Man From London.
The Man from London will show at the New York Film Festival, hosted at Lincoln Center, on September 30 and October 3. It is the first Hungarian film to be invited to the festival in ten years. The previous one was Tarr's seven-hour masterpiece Sátántangó.
The Man From London is a French-German-Hungarian co-production, paid for with support from Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), Eurimages, Arte France Cinéma, ZDF, Canal +, the Hungarian Motion Picture Foundation and the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. The film is based on a novel by French author Georges Simeon and stars the UK's Tilda Swinton, the Czech Miroslav Krobot and Hungarian actors János Derzsi and István Lénárt.
Source: Port.hu
