Béla Tarr has passed away after a long, debilitating illness. It will hardly have surprised the maestro. I spoke to Tarr for a long time in 2016 under the palm trees next to the elegantly tiled swimming pool of the obscenely luxurious La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech. The Moroccan royal family had pleased to appoint Béla Tarr – who, at the age of 60, had been a film retiree for some time – as chairman of the jury. We started drinking and smoking a bit early. Room service, car with driver, colonnade, Tarr grumbled: film is so bourgeois. If you are looking for luxury, you will never create a masterpiece. Was it nice to have dinner with the king’s brother, I asked. “Next question,” he growled.
I spoke to Béla Tarr about his upcoming exhibition at the EYE Film Museum, which would be fantastic in 2017. He himself finished directing after Turin Horse in 2011, a tired, plot-poor film named after the jaded, beaten cart horse that pushed Nietzsche over the edge of madness in Turin. Turin Horse followed a silent farming family and their gifted horse on a post-apocalyptic Hungarian puszta where potatoes, cruelty and a glass of palinka are the only entertainment. So Bélaworld, the black and white Hungarian countryside of dusty pubs, greasy glasses, chilly wind and desperate men.
Béla Tarr was done with that, he said. He did not want to repeat himself and from 2013 onwards he focused on his film.factory, a three-year film school in Sarajevo where admirers such as Jim Jarmusch, Tilda Swinton, Juliette Binoche and Gus van Sant gave guest lectures. In 2016 the money ran out; Tarr appeared shocked in Marrakech by the Syrian civil war – “Dante’s Inferno!” – and the cruel treatment of refugees in Europe, especially by Hungary. That’s why he made a short film for EYE about a Syrian boy who sadly and doggedly tugs at an accordion. In his exhibition you ended up through a gulag-like barbed wire tunnel – the Hungarian border – into the barren and flattened world that Prime Minister Orbán protected against the ‘Islamic hordes’. The bread queue, run-down pub, dancing farmers and an incited crowd. The greasy, churned bed, that lonely tree on the Puszta in front of a wind machine. Belaworld.
‘Goulash communism’
Orbán’s Hungary fit well into Béla Tarr’s nihilistic, pessimistic world that offered nothing to commit to, although aloofness was the greatest sin. Béla Tarr himself grew up under the relatively liberal Hungarian ‘goulash communism’ that followed the 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union. His parents worked at the theater in Budapest: father as a set builder, mother as a prompter. As a teenager, Tarr had some small rolls of film, and there was that well-known director’s story, with a father who gave him an 8mm camera as a gift when he was fourteen.
Two years later, Tarr was co-founder of the film collective Dziga Vertov, which wanted to capture real life in cinéma vérité style. The authorities banned him from studying philosophy after a critical amateur film, but Tarr was now involved with the Béla Balázs Studio, which had been producing no-budget films since 1972: spontaneous, shot from the shoulder, without scripts. In addition to the experimental avant-garde, there was a direction that pursued lifelike drama with non-actors. This included Tarr: his feature film debut Family Nest reminded many critics in 1977 of the then very fashionable actor director John Cassavetes. Tarr had never seen any of that, he said. It was just hanging in the air.
That improvised spontaneity was hard to find in his carefully designed global breakthrough in 1988 Damnationa grimy, lame romance of a drunk and a bar singer. From then on, Béla Tarr was known for that viscous gliding camera. See the unforgettable opening: hypnotic industrial noisethe camera zooming backwards from a mine elevator in the fog, into a room, and ending with a close-up of the back of the head. A normal director would have ended with a normal close-up: the hero attacks his world. This shot emphasized passivity, powerlessness and melancholy.
In his view, people are desperate herd animals, prey to passions and mass hysteria
It was Tarr’s first film adaptation of a book by László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025. He felt at home with his pitch-black pessimism. In his view, people are desperate herd animals, prey to passions and mass hysteria. In fact, morally inferior to animals, they allow themselves to be stirred up to commit atrocities by demagogues. Sensitive souls numb, withdraw, commit suicide. That is often for the best.
Not completely hopeless
Sátántangoa village story based on Krasznahorkai, followed the decline of communism on a moribund collective farm in 1994. Seven hours and 19 minutes long: a masterpiece of ‘slow cinema’, with endless slow shots, atmosphere over plot and a grubby long-winded aesthetic. Susan Sontag – who saw Tarr as the savior of cinema – resolved to watch the film every year, as if it were the St. Matthew Passion.
In Werckmeister Harmoniak (2000) – only 145 minutes long – a circus performer incites a grumbling village to a senseless pogrom at the local hospital. There they demolish furniture and rob patients – until the mob finds a naked, scrawny, fragile patient in the bathroom, so defenseless that they retreat in silence. That unexpected ‘ecce homo’ is an indication that Bélaworld was not completely devoid of hope.
Was Béla Tarr a pessimist? To one he claimed to be misunderstood, he made black comedies. To me: “Okay, you can laugh at my films, but only because life is so absurd.” Enjoying the little things – a drink, a dance, a potato – determines the quality of your life, says Tarr. There was nothing more. A warm potato, right? Tarr: “The fact that I’m making films at all shows enormous optimism. If you think seriously about life, you might as well hang yourself.”
But hanging yourself is more for optimists. One thing made the filmmaker happy: after a quarter of a century he was now certain that he had created real art. Films that they will still watch a century from now, to ponder how we lived then. Because Tarr offers countless small, aesthetic pleasures. The thrill of a magical moment: that poor horse, that old man, that tortured kitten. That unique atmosphere that you will never shake off. But that’s your problem, Béla Tarr is said to have said.
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