An early Bela Tarr film, showing some of what was to come, but overall feeling more like Cassavetes than the Tarr we know today. The film revolves around the lives of a married couple with a young baby and a child. He’s obviously not a perfect husband; he enjoys his beer, his friends, and wants more from his career. She is a caring mother, but perhaps a nagging and extremely needy wife. The Prefab People is certainly a sincere look at the average Hungarian family in the early eighties. Special mention at the Locarno Film Festival in 1982. —hungariant
Born in 1955, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr began making amateur films at the age of 16, later working as caretaker at a national House for Culture and Recreation. His amateur work brought him to the attention of the Bela Balazs Studios (named in honor of the Hungarian cinema theorist), which helped fund Tarr’s 1979 feature debut Family Nest, a work of socialist realism clearly influenced by the work of John Cassavettes. The 1981 piece The Outsider and the following year’s The Prefab People continued in much the same vein, but with a 1982 television adaptation of Macbeth, his work began to change dramatically; comprised of only two shots, the first shot (before the main title) was five minutes long, with the second 67 minutes in length. Not only did Tarr’s visual sensibility move from raw close-ups to more abstract mediums and long shots, but also his philosophical sensibility shifted from grim realism to a more metaphysical outlook similar to that of Andrei Tarkovsky. After 1984’s… read more
Much much better than his previous effort, Tarr's final work in this style of social realism before moving onto his TV adaptation of Macbeth (and therefore marking the beginning of his definitive style) is his most subtle and insightful compared to the other two.
