Product Description

Shot in a gritty, documentary style, this is a relentlessly realistic portrait of a young working-class couple who suffer the everyday stresses of marriage. The film opens with a huge fight between husband and wife, and then examines what brought the couple to this moment. Tarr captures the minute details of daily life, which add up to an empty, lonely, and frustrating existence. As profound as it is disturbing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115673 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-06-28
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: Hungarian
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 82 minutes

Customer Reviews

Early Tarr Crystalizes a Theme
Shot in glorious black and white, this little gem of a film is definitely on a par with Tarr's later work. Caught in a town filled with smokestacks and a maze of project-like housing, the dysfunctional marriage of a young working class couple becomes a metaphor for the problems of modern (1982) Hungarian society and the consumerist world in general. Weaving the sights and sounds of families, beer halls, beauty shops and routine, The Prefab People reveals an earlier Tarr: simple, short and to the point with Herzog/documentary-type images, including a man who plays his lips as if they were a clarinet.

Superb performances by real-life partners, Judit Pogany and Robert Koltai, trick one into feeling like a voyeur. In public and in private, they deal with the stark reality of their seemingly dead end existence. Fights and disappointments, loneliness and a shallow thinness of life fill the screen in painfully long close-ups. A good amount of (mostly live) music adds to the mix. The closing image, the one you see on the cover with the couple riding in the back of a pickup with their newly purchased Minimat 65 washer, glues the episodes of break-up back together with what money can buy. Tarr uses the film's 75 minutes to construct a single movement that revolves on and on, ending at the beginning, churning up the clothes of life in a futile attempt to once and for all get out the dirt... or have we simply arrived in hell for good?

Spilt Blood Of The Dead
Exhaustive, claustrophobic, circular, discordant, hopeless, weeping, wailing, and a gnashing of teeth, Tarr's camera work and photo direction is powerful (especially during the dance when the wife is sitting, and sitting, and sitting, quietly repressing her pent-up frustrations...), a must-watch short film for Bela Tarr fans.

Though in caves pursued he lie,
Even then he fears attacks.
Coming forth the land to spy,
Even a home he finds he lacks.
Mountain, vale - go where he would,
Grief and sorrow all the same -
Underneath a sea of blood,
While above a sea of flame.

`Neath the fort, a ruin now,
Joy and pleasure erst were found,
Only groans and sighs, I trow,
In its limits now abound.
But no freedom's flowers return
From the spilt blood of the dead,
And the tears of slavery burn,
Which the eyes of orphans shed.

The Prefab people
Kind of film that is very hard to find in modern production. Brillant!