Tarr Béla (Born: July 21, 1955 in Pécs, Hungary)
Bela Tarr entered the film industry as a child actor and shot 8mm amateur films in his teenage years. He developed into a politically charged documentary filmmaker and is alleged to have come under surveillance for engaging in radical left-wing activities. His early works are political tracts and social documents dealing with internal issues, projects that were viewed by some as being critical of both local and centralised Hungarian government.
In 1982, Tarr filmed a version of William Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' inside a castle in Budapest (not sure which castle but the Bela Lugosi bust & statue are at Vajdahunyad Castle which I believe is located nearby the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture). He chiselled a dark, claustrophobic interpretation of the play that contains just two shots in its entire 72-minute duration (a 5-minute pre-credits sequence & a 67-minute live-action shot). From this point on, Tarr always allowed his experimentalism to shine through. He also set about constructing the spine of a crack production unit by bringing together a core group of collaborators he could lean on, including editor Agnes Hranitzky, composer Mihaly Vig (of rock bands Trabant & Balaton), writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai (two of Tarr's films are adaptations of Krasznahorkai novels) and performer Erika Bok. Tarr has since retired from theatrical filmmaking but he retains a strong political voice and remains active in the arts.
“Do you ever feel an itch to make movies again?,” we asked Béla Tarr during a lively conversation earlier this year at Berlinale, where he presented a new restoration of his 1994 opus Sátántangó. His response: “No. I am doing a lot of things. I’m not bored and I’m not retired and I still want to go ahead. I think, after 'The Turin Horse', I cannot say anything. It was about the death of everything. The work is complete. Done.”
Well, it looks like he meant strictly narrative films because the Hungarian director will premiere a new documentary this summer. Commissioned by Vienna’s Wiener Festwochen, where it will screen this June, the festival has announced a new film from Tarr titled 'Missing People'. Made up of only a few shots, the film “presents moving images of society’s outsiders, the impoverished and oppressed, whose lives are contrasted with the opulent surroundings of contemporary Vienna.”
There’s no word yet on the length of the project or if this is more of a museum installation than a film, but those involved describe it as the latter, so hopefully it’ll have a life outside of its premiere location.
Check out this synopsis below :
~ 'Vienna is the city with the highest quality of living in the world – this was confirmed yet again in 2018. But the city’s immaculate façade made of Habsburg splendour, Sacher torte and snow-white Lipizzaner horses is only half the story. Many inhabitants do not fit into this picture and are hidden from sight owing to poverty and social hierarchies. Béla Tarr’s Missing People makes them visible again. Tarr’s magnum opus, Sátántangó, is widely regarded as one of the most important works in film history. And according to his director colleague Gus Van Sant, the Hungarian comes closer to the actual rhythm of life than virtually any other filmmaker. This is also true for his new project, which is his first time directing after a long creative break. Using just a few shots, the film shows these invisible people in the kind of place to which they would normally have no access. This work will be presented exclusively during the Wiener Festwochen – at the filming location itself. While the visitors remain amongst theives, only traces of the film’s protagonists are left behind. A powerful plea for humanity.'
The first images are now available."
- Jordan Raup reporting on April 9th, 2019, The Film Stage
“Bela Tarr is one of the cinema’s most adventurous artists, and his films, like ‘Satantango’ and ‘The Turin Horse,’ are truly experiences that you absorb, and that keep developing in the mind. I understand that he has now devoted himself to film education, with the academy that he started in Sarajevo. He is, I think, an excellent choice to lead this year’s Marrakech jury.”
- Martin Scorsese speaking at the Marrakech Film Festival in 2013
Béla Tarr
'Light And Darkness' - A Tribute To Bela Tarr
'The Prefab People' (1982, Panelkapcsolat - Bela Tarr)
Scenes from a disintegrating marriage. Bela Tarr's engagement with dance can be seen in 'The Prefab People' and most of the films he's made since.
"After watching films like 'Scenes from a Marriage' (1973) and 'Hyderabad Blues 2' (1998), I had come to a kind of conclusion that films about marital life are and even have to be necessarily lengthy in order to depict relationships falling apart bolt by bolt. But Béla Tarr’s masterful venture 'The Prefab People' brutally shatters that perception. The film is so masterfully crafted that I was afraid that Tarr would have to have a pathetic showdown in order to wrap up the film within 80 minutes. But gladly, one couldn’t have asked more after watching what Tarr delivers. He lets the film gradually evolve instead of providing it narrative momentum (but never without a direction). Watching 'The Prefab People', one can see why Sam Mendes’ 'Revolutionary Road' (2008) doesn’t exactly succeed.
'The Prefab People' is Tarr’s fourth feature and one can clearly see Tarr maturing as a filmmaker. He intelligently avoids all the mistakes of his previous outings (which were pretty good themselves) and makes it seem like a grand culmination of a chain of dress rehearsals. He substitutes the extreme verbosity of 'Family Nest' (1979) with self-sufficient images. He sheds the self-indulgent meditation of 'The Outsider' (1981) and makes a film that is universal in its appeal and as personal in its content. He avoids the complex mise-en-scene he employed in his mediocre single-shot adaptation of 'Macbeth' (1982) and in exchange develops a keen sense of shot composition and cutting. One can virtually see where 'Sátántangó' (1994) gets its pitch-perfect atmosphere from. But in spite of the trademark style of the director, 'The Prefab People' is very much a cinema vérité film. It wouldn’t be a coincidence if one was continuously reminded of John Cassavetes while watching this one. The resemblance is most glaring in the scene at the party, which has to be experienced to be believed. These are beautiful characters and so are the actors. To use a worn out cliché, Tarr does not take sides."
- Buster Flashback, The Seventh Art
Judit Pogány & Róbert Koltai
'Almanac Of Fall' (1985, Őszi almanach - Bela Tarr)
The tenants in an apartment start to unravel. Tarr uses the medieval green of Hungary in a variety of guises here, including filtered, pastel and neon.
"Taking place in a single enclosed location, Bela Tarr constructs 'Almanac of Fall' in a schematic that at once opens its contained setting by way of choreographed tracks, pans, and tilts, and simultaneously restricts the visual plane with obstructed compositions and slowly revelatory movements that seem to emerge from some hidden location, peering into a room like a voyeuristic bystander.
The complex mise-en-scene of 'Almanac of Fall' is a triumph of multilayered staging, but if it looks exceptional compared to that which came before it, the film is a thematic extension of its predecessors. Charting a few tumultuous days in the life of its contentious quintet – Hédi (Hédi Temessy), her son, János (János Derzsi), her caregiver, Anna (Erika Bodnár), Anna’s lover, Miklós (Miklós B. Székely), and a poor lodger, the teacher Tibor (Pál Hetényi) – the film exposes rifts in relationships born from domestic tension. And as would be repeated in Tarr’s films to come, these characters are their own worst enemies, burdened by conniving ulterior motives and anxieties intensified by a stifling environment. Tarr diffuses his earlier sense of improvisational interaction and instead begins to incorporate confessional musings, philosophical inquiries regarding love, acceptance, and desire, and in what become almost theatrical tête-à-têtes, the film is laden with an unremitting series of insults that give rise to brutal physical ferocity.
Aside from being the film that ushered in a formally deviating phase in Tarr’s career, 'Almanac of Fall' is also a pivotal work in that it features the first score by Mihály Vig, a composer whose aural contributions to the director’s cinema are undeniably imperative. From this point forward, one of the defining features of a Béla Tarr film would be the music provided by Vig. As a strikingly apropos melodic counterpart to the tonal frequencies Tarr creates through movement and editing, Vig’s music, as the director has stated, “plays an equal role to the actors or the scenes or the story.”
From his illustrious cinematographers (stunning work by Papp, Buda Gulyás, and Sándor Kardos on 'Almanac of Fall'), to the editing by Ágnes Hranitzky, who had been with Tarr since 'The Outsider' and became his most vital collaborator and his wife (she also contributed to Almanac of Fall’s intricate production design of opulent decay), Tarr has been more willing that most auteurs to give credit where credit is due, eventually sharing co-director or “film by” attribution with Hranitzky and others. Rightfully so, as what ultimately characterizes his filmmaking, particularly in the latter section of his career, is largely dependent on the involvement of a number of key collaborators, even if it is never quite clear who does what, as in the case of his working relationship with Hranitzky. According to cinematographer Gabor Medvigy, “Nobody really knows the nature of their work together,”, while Hranitzky states, “I have a say in everything, but it’s always Béla who has the creative initiative”. Tarr himself puts it thusly: “It’s quite simple. I set most things up, in terms of the location and the set. Since the beginning, I prefer that she is there because everything happens once you get to the location, and she has a very sharp eye. She can always see if something is wrong. It’s more helpful to watch a film with four eyes, not only with two.”
- Jeremy Carr, Senses Of Cinema
Hédi Temessy & János Derzsi
'Itt Van Pedig Senki Se Hívta' - Trabant
'Damnation' (1988, Kárhozat - Bela Tarr)
An itinerant barfly takes an interest in a torch singer who performs at the bar Titanik. 'Damnation' is an intimate and immersive crime melodrama built on feelings of desperation.
"Lugubrious pacing makes 'Damnation' (Karhozat, 1988) difficult to sit through. But the attempt really must be made. It's one of those films that almost requires the viewer to be trapped inside a movie house not wanting to waste one's money by walking out. It will nowadays almost always be viewed on dvd.
Without special interest in Hungarian cinema or in director Bela Tarr, a lot of viewers will find it too easy to turn it off, go make a sandwich, & just never watch the rest of it. And that's too damned bad. The black & white cinematography of Tarr's feature film is pure art, & patience will reward any viewer who had the temerity to attempt the viewing in the first place.
An ugly, ugly town beautifully photographed is populated by people with rough, strong features which the cameras adore. It's almost always raining & even if the rain stops now & then, the world is wet, muddy, overcast, & depressing, in accord with the emotions of the local residents."
- Paghat The Ratgirl, Wild Realm
"Béla Tarr films show evil like you've never seen it before. Possibly for this reason Hungary's and, arguably, Central Europe's, greatest filmmaker has been dubbed by the Film Society at Lincoln Center as "the last modernist." Which is funny, when you think of it: it makes European avant-garde filmmakers sound like a dying breed; as if Tarr has outlived his era, and stands alone, on the precipice of the new media age.
It is not uncommon for Tarr's fans to celebrate how long his takes can be, or how little action animates his scenes. However, it takes a film like Damnation, released in 1988 and falling in the middle of Tarr's career, with four features preceding and four following it, to demonstrate just how much can be happening when ostensibly nothing happens."
- Ela Bittencourt, Bright Lights Film Journal
Miklós B. Székely & Vali Kerekes
'Kész Az Egész' - Vali Kerekes & Mihály Vig
'Satantango' (1994, Sátántangó - Bela Tarr)
The arrival of a stranger is cause for concern among a small, sheltered rural community. The 7 & ½ hour deconstruction 'Satantango' is based upon a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
"Sátántangó is a film preceded by reputation. With a runtime that nudges the seven-and-a-half hour mark, it is widely regarded as the retired Hungarian filmmaker’s most imposing artistic statement: an expansive, desolate mood piece that envelopes the viewer and ambles along at a patience-testing snail’s pace. For those who last the distance, however, it remains an indelible, searing cinematic meditation on human desperation.
To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the film has received a 4K restoration courtesy of Arbelos Films. The venerable auteur is supposed to be talking about this fact, but before he does, he settles into his chair and surveys the present. “Films now mostly look like comics. They ignore ‘time’,” he says wearily.
When asked to elaborate, Tarr refers to his signature use of the long take. “Early on, I noticed that when the camera is rolling and the whole scene is moving, everyone starts to breathe in the same rhythm: the actors, the crew members, the cinematographer, everyone. You are all ‘in’. And that is very important. It creates a special tension. It gives a special vibration. Somehow you can feel it on the screen too. You become a part of it.”
Visually speaking, Sátántangó does not veer too far from the blueprint Tarr had already established by 1994 – stylistic traits which previously appeared in 1984’s Almanac of Fall and 1988’s Damnation are merely amplified on a grander scale. The film’s narrative is perhaps its most ambitious aspect, pushing and pulling like the titular tango: six steps forward and six steps back across 12 chapters.
The film chronicles the plight of an isolated rural farming community facing obsolescence when the return of an enigmatic co-worker (played by Mihály Víg, who also provides the loping, carnivalesque score) previously thought to be dead injects fear and hope into the desperate village folk.
“I watched [the film] a month ago and, honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing,” says Tarr. “Twenty-five years is enough time to show you whether something is good or not. So many films disappear. They are like a tissue: used and then thrown out. This is the way that the market works. Time is very cruel and only some films survive.”
Tarr is interrupted by a waiter, who places a drink on the table and is duly thanked for “saving” the filmmaker’s life. He caresses the glass and gathers his thoughts as conversation turns to his professional relationship with László Krasznahorkai, the writer upon whose book Sátántangó was based. “We wanted to make Sátántangó in 1985,” recalls Tarr, “but at that time the Communist Party in Budapest stopped a lot of things. It just wasn’t possible.”
Stifled by an oppressive political climate, the pair decided to pour their collective energy into what would become Damnation. Shortly after its release Tarr, along with his editor and wife, Ágnes Hranitzky, left Hungary for West Berlin. During their time in Germany, significant social changes were developing back home. János Kádár, the communist leader who had fronted the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party since 1956, stepped down, ushering in a more liberal era. This proved a pivotal moment in Tarr’s career, as the director reflects. “At the 1990 Berlinale, some guy came up to me and said, ‘Hungary is changing. You can come back’. So I did, and it was only then that I could start Sátántangó.”
Tarr chose Hortobágy, part of the Great Plains of Hungary, as the backdrop for his film. The region’s sodden dirt tracks, fields and woodlands provided an austere yet striking canvass, suiting the bleak tenor of the material and ultimately emerging as a character in its own right. “One-hundred-and-twenty days of shooting with everybody in the Hungarian lowlands in the sh*t, physically, was really horrible,” admits Tarr. “Mentally, however, it was amazing: the time; the isolation.”
- Greg Wetherall, Little White Lies
"Béla Tarr is a director who divides the field. He makes slow, stark films about lives in which little happens, combining old-fashioned values and innovative methods. He records the basic elements of domestic life with incongruously sweeping, virtuoso cinematography and picks apart the rudiments of human role-play with elaborate subtlety, coordinating gritty detail and a sense of the universal in a way that some see as visionary and others find tedious. 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."
- Rose McLaren, 'The Prosaic Sublime Of Bela Tarr
"About 75 minutes into “Sátántangó,” László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr’s ultimate masterpiece (and arguably the greatest single film of the modern era) — a 450-minute, black and white black comedy set in rural Hungary in which everyone’s a scoundrel, everything is monstrous, and it never stops raining —- the film spends about an hour with a burly doctor, and for most of that time he’s alone. During the first half of this protracted stretch, filmed in very few takes, he’s seated in his shack, drinking himself into a stupor with fruit brandy when he isn’t spying on his neighbors through binoculars, pointlessly recording their precise movements in copious detail in a journal he’s keeping, or snapping at a woman who briefly stops by to deliver his food. We even see him nod off and start snoring at one point, and subsequently stumble to the floor and pass out at another. Otherwise he just keeps drinking, pouring out more and more fruit brandy, and mumbling to himself, and the comic genius of this sequence is in part a demonstration of how much actual labor is actually required to get stinking drunk."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
The Migration
'Sátán Tangója' - Mihály Vig
'Werckmeister Harmonies' (2000, Werckmeister harmóniák - Bela Tarr)
A travelling circus provokes fear among the denizens of an isolated town. The epic drama 'Werckmeister Harmonies' is based on a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
"Bela Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies" (2000) is maddening if you are not in sympathy with it, mesmerizing if you are. If you have not walked out after 20 or 30 minutes, you will thereafter not be able to move from your seat. "Dreamlike," Jim Jarmusch calls it. Nightmarish as well; doom-laded, filled with silence and sadness, with the crawly feeling that evil is penetrating its somber little town. It is filmed elegantly in black and white, the camera movements so stately they almost float through only 39 shots in a film of 145 minutes."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
"The Hungarian director Bela Tarr goes beyond surreal, beyond miserablist, beyond anything I have ever seen with this quite bizarre, dream-like film in monochrome: an apocalyptic vision of - well, what?
In 'Werckmeister Harmonies', a young man in a desolate Hungarian town is devoted to his elderly uncle, a musicologist working on a revisionist theory of the music of the spheres. Some kind of circus arrives, the kind of circus at which no one is expected to have a good time. It consists of a single corrugated-iron pantechnicon containing a dead whale. The presence of this, and someone called the Prince, incites the populace to a strange, somnambulist uprising.
If genius is close to madness, then Tarr's genius - because genius has to be what it is - is closer to autism, a kind of untrained savant touch for compelling imagery. Famously unschooled in European cinema, he has developed his own vernacular language of movie-making. He is a master of the long, long take: mostly compelling but sometimes just outrageously weird. He has a close-up of the young man and his uncle wordlessly walking down a street which goes on for minute after minute. God only knows why.
Who to compare him to? David Lynch? Tod Browning? You've got me. This will be a tough watch for many: an uncompromisingly difficult and severe experience. But I found it unique, mesmeric and sublime."
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
"The mob scene toward the end of “Werckmeister Harmonies.” Its existential profundity is unparalleled in Tarr’s films, indeed in most films period, and it also brings together in 12 minutes several of Tarr’s formal (alternation of sound and silence, such as nearly unpopulated farms with rowdy bar scenes) and thematic concerns (the bleakness and perhaps pointlessness of existence, often with an eventual dose of hope)."
- Howard Feinstein, Screen
Hanna Schygulla & Lars Rudolph
'The Man From London' (2007, A londoni férfi - Bela Tarr & Agnes Hranitzky)
A working man stumbles upon some money after witnessing a crime.
This cold monochrome crime movie is an austere adaptation of a novel by Georges Simenon. As a studied work in formalism, 'The Man From London' evokes the photography of Gyula Halasz. Having risen to fame in Paris, Halasz befriended other Hungarians living there. He was particularly inspired by the the avant-garde collective The Eight whose members (Robert Bereny, Dezso Cziagyn, Bela Czobel, Karoly Kernstok, Odon Marffy, Dezso Orban, Bertalan Por & Lajos Tihanyi) had all studied art in either Paris, Munich, or both.
"Bela Tarr’s long takes and elemental imagery have often led to comparisons with the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky but, unlike Tarkovsky’s, Tarr’s work operates in a post-Christian world, stripped not only of spiritualism and symbolism, but also – Tarr claims – of metaphysics. For Tarr, film is a medium of concrete reality, in which a cigar really is just a cigar.
Tarr’s use of desolate settings, then, is simply a way to highlight and compound humanity’s sense of hopelessness and despair. But, despite the undeniable bleakness of his work, Tarr is not a pessimist. If he was, he once said, he’d have hanged himself rather than made films. This same kind of dry, ironic humour permeates his work and, in this age of hyperkinetic cinema, the length, pace and tone of Tarr’s films imbues their very existence with a sense of absurdity."
- Alex Barrett, The British Film Institute
Miroslav Krobot, Erika Bók & Tilda Swinton
'Levert Vagy' - Trabant
'The Turin Horse' (2011, A torinói ló - Bela Tarr & Agnes Hranitzky)
A farmer fears for the future of his loyal horse in this pure, minimalistic exercise in outbound existentialism.
"The Turin Horse opens with a dry voice-over that tells how the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, on 3 January 1889, witnessed a coachman maltreating his horse in Turin. The story goes that Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse’s neck and then went mad. ‘About the horse,’ the narrator con-tinues, ‘we know nothing.’ You could say that the film follows that horse, all the way to the Hungarian puszta, where an apocalyptic wind lashes the land."
- Dana Linssen, 'This Is No Oeuvre, This Is A Universe'
"The people of this generation know information-cut, information-cut, information-cut. They can follow the logic of it, the logic of the story, but they don't follow the logic of life. Because I see the story as only just a dimension of life, because we have a lot of other things. We have time, we have landscapes, we have meta-communications, all of which are not verbal information. If you watch the news it is just talking, cutting, maybe some action and afterwards talking, action, talking. For us, the film is a bit different.
We have a different kind of narration. For us, the story is the secondary thing. The main thing is always how you can touch the people? How can you go closer to real life? How can you understand something about life, because as we talk a lot of other things are happening. We don't know, for instance, what is happening under the table, but there are interesting, important and serious things happening. It is full of meta-communication. That is the reason why we like to cut: always for the meta-communication. We just follow the real psychological process, not the story, not the verbal information."
- Bela Tarr, Kinoeye
Erika Bók
'Béla Tarr is widely regarded as one of the most influential film authors of the past thirty years. He is a master of the magnificent long take, a master of wonderfully shot, melancholic films that express the human condition. For the exhibition at EYE, Tarr, who after his 2011 film The Turin Horse decided not to make any more films, has picked up the camera one more time to shoot his very last scene. It is his anger at attitudes towards refugees in Europe, and especially in Hungary, that drove him to make a poetic, philosophical and ultimately political statement.
Specially for EYE, Tarr has developed an exhibition that is a cross between a film, a theatre set and an installation. In his films Tarr has always presented the downside of progress, the other side of the coin. It therefore comes as no surprise that he feels called upon to make a statement against the inhuman treatment of thousands of migrants who are trying to give their lives a dignity that – in Europe – is denied them.'
- Introduction to the 2017 art exhibition 'Béla Tarr – Till The End Of The World' at the EYE Film Museum
"I still consider film not as show business, but as the seventh art."
- Bela Tarr