“I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we expand. (Béla Tarr, 2007)”
“Jonathan Rosenbaum, the American film critic, has dubbed Tarr a ‘despiritualised Tarkovsky’. I find him a less lapsed and more conflicted creature: a hopeful cynic or scatological mystic, whose films are as aggressively earthbound as they are inspiring.”
“his early films Family Nest (1979) and The Outsider (1981) are classic examples of the school, but through the eighties he developed away from it as he absorbed the influences of European art house cinema, particularly Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard, and became interested in form, composition, metaphysics and the history of film.”
“In 1984 he began collaborating with the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, with whom he went on to create many of his greatest films, Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) – these last two adaptations of Krasznahorkai’s novels Sátántangó and The Melancholy of Resistance, respectively.”
“The elaborate sentences and unorthodox structures of Krasznahorkai’s novels seem to have informed Tarr’s own formal innovations – the lengthy takes, chapter divisions and sprawling psychological odysseys of which his later films are composed.”
“It is also in Krasznahorkai’s literature that Tarr seems to have identified a vast and surreal perspective through which to envision the lives of ordinary people.”
“Though the range of Tarr’s artistic relationships and interests has shaped a highly distinctive approach, it also has much to do with his cultural position. Working between Soviet-scarred Hungary and the comparatively prosperous and liberated West seems to have afforded him a peculiarly mixed sensibility: aesthetically both spartan and grand and politically as aspirational as it is hopeless.”
“His is an art form of dissolving contrasts in which the everyday lives of individuals are located within the broader frameworks of politics and nature.”
“Minutiae are shown to contain the seeds of power, survival or despair, and the vile or banal is filmed with astonishing sensitivity.”
“This is an essentially disproportionate worldview that pits paradox against conventional logic, taste or taxonomy. It follows the effects of huge historical, even meteorological forces on tiny populations; it proves that beauty can inhere in something as simple as wood grain; and it suggests different ways in which to conceive of, even perhaps accept, cruelty and boredom.”
“In this way the excesses or eccentricities of Tarr’s vision have a function in depicting lives distorted by hardship or isolation. This gloss of the prosaic sublime sheds light on the director by elucidating the ways in which apparently contradictory, inappropriate, fanciful or gratuitously depressing elements in his work also have radical meaning.”
“His films are artefacts of his country’s post-communist existence and the need to communicate this is a major motive for his film-making. He has said of Werckmeister Harmonies, ‘I have a hope, if you watch this film, you understand something about our life, about what is happening in middle Europe, how we are living there, in a kind of edge of the world.’”
“Yet for all their raw brutality, Béla Tarr’s films are also surprisingly full of wonder: from the mystery of the ringing bells in Sátántangó to the glorious enigma of the whale in Werckmeister Harmonies. Otherwise relentlessly harsh narratives are interrupted by marvels, all the more marvellous for their unlikely settings.”
“Though these incidents tend to come from nature or folk mythology, they bring into play forces beyond human comprehension, adding an extraordinary and uplifting dimension to Tarr’s world.”
“Tarr is famous, or infamous, for staggeringly long takes. Sátántangó runs at over 7 hours and is made of only 150 takes. he would have them longer if he could, complaining that his only limit is the length of Kodak film, which stretches to 300m, about 11 minutes. This is extremely unusual by today’s standards – the average take now lasts but a few seconds – making his films challenging to watch and urging some justification for their length.”
“To an extent, the dilatory nature of his films is a way of celebrating (and demanding) endurance.”
“More importantly though, it effects a kind of durational empathy. Watching Damnation or Sátántangó creates a strong impression of what life must be like in such hamlets – like watching paint not dry.”
“There is a crucial difference, though, between an art form that conveys ennui and suffering and an art form that is just painfully boring. Tarr’s prodigious talent as a visual director is perhaps the necessary complement to the time he takes as the awesome beauty of the cinematography in his films renders them (almost) endlessly watchable.”
“On one hand, Tarr appears to insist on rugged honesty and on the other he makes films that are operatic in their artistic complexity and ambition. He snubs the loftiness of Art with a capital A but claims all mainstream cinema is ‘shit’ (and presumably not cosmical).”
“It is impossible to watch his films without observing how strikingly beautiful they are and this is no coincidence – most of them take years to make and the production is painstaking. It isn’t unmotivated – beauty clearly has a function for him. Tarr might not want to spin illusions or sanctify any squalor, and he certainly isn’t courting the cinematic canon, but he does want to dignify his subjects and appears to do so through a profoundly poetic visual language.”
“Denying himself or his work an artistic status seems extremely unconvincing and unnecessary. Why might he maintain such a position?”
“At a strategic level, it looks defensive. His work eludes the zeitgeist, being too down to earth for fashion; too simple for intellectualism; and too earnest for irony. Wooing the contemporary art scene would probably prove a vain pursuit. More fundamentally, though, he appears chary of the critical discourse that is now the lifeblood of contemporary culture (if also vampiric), and there is an extent to which he might downplay the credentials and media coverage of his films to preserve their autonomy, the primacy of what he calls a ‘primitive language’. The prevailing truth of the matter, though, is that he doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks. Which isn’t indifference; it’s a gesture of faith in his work.”
“The real shame of this silence is that it generates misconceptions.”
“Worst among them, Susan Sontag’s recruitment of his films as ‘heroic violations of the norm’ in her moribund-lament-cum-lofty-rant about the decay of film standards and the dying super-species of cinéastes.”
“Though Tarr is anti-establishment, Sontag’s is precisely the sort of counter-conversation he doesn’t want to enter, her ‘Death of Cinephilia’ another wave of crusading hysteria turning him agnostic.”
“Cinema is not dead, and he would rather prove it by making films than talking about them or joining a cause. And if The Turin Horse is to be his final film, I suspect it is also the last we will hear from him, marking an apparent immunity to the reception of his work that is, again, quite unusual.”
“Working outside of any local, mainstream, art house or realist collective makes him something of an anomaly. By choosing not to take part in today’s creative dialogues and eschewing the cultural milieu within which his films have to exist (they need to be screened to be seen), he runs the risk of making films that are less immediately relevant to their audiences, but in the hope that they ultimately have a broader reach. A new set of ideals emerges through this cinema, a prosaic sublime. unmodish and of epic scope, it is Everyman’s art.”