Filming abject Heterotopias: a spatial critique of Béla Tarr’s select later films

Abstract

ABSTRACT Béla Tarr’s later films stand out as paradigms of spatial politics in European film culture. They visualize the experience of abject heterotopia through a series of spatial metaphors. This article is a spatial critique of Tarr’s later films Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse. The critique is based on cultural heterotopology, a reformulation of Foucauldian heterotopology by Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja. The horror of abjection, that seems to pervade the spatiality of these films, calls for alternative (re)ordering of the social space. Tarr presents a social space consistently characterized by desolation and poverty which contemporary Hungary has been reduced to.