Since in 2011 Béla Tarr had announced his retirement from the scenes with the last apocalyptic film The Horse of Turin, many filmmakers had welcomed the news with surprise, also because at that time the Hungarian master, class 1955, was only 56 years old and still many things to say. The news of his death catches us equally unprepared because, irrationally, each of us wished a late rethinking, interrupting his incessant teaching commitment as a professor in the film factory in Sarajevo. In fact, Béla Tarr had always underlined the inferiority of film grammar to translate the reality that surrounds us. For him poetry, literature, philosophy were better able to describe the complex universe of human relations and the socio-economic problems of his native country, Hungary.
From the historical-political point of view Béla Tarr has told a “excursus” that goes from the socialist Hungary of the late 1970s (with all its twists: Conservativeism, selfishness, maleism, rejection of the different) until today, through the collapse of the great Soviet bloc, the fall of the wall and the illusion of a possible capitalist well-being. The great hopes for a future of economic prosperity and social equity have faded in the face of the censorship of the Market which has replaced that of State.
The whole Béla Tarr cinema is built on the rubble of an abortion dream, a lucid awareness in front of the greed and aridity of the human race that continues to make the same mistakes, in the vicious circle of courses and historical recourses. The circle ends and the starting point coincides with the arrival point. The majority of critics distinguish two periods in Béla Tarr’s film, ranging from Nido familia (1979) to Almanacco d’autum (1984) characterized by strong social issues (with frequent use of the hand pawning machine and the first floor) and what goes from Perdition (1987) to Il cavallo di Torino (2011) where the sequence plane becomes emblematic of an environment that seems slowly engulf characters in an atmosphere.
In fact, he is the same Hungarian filmmaker to escape any doubt: There is not a season of social films and a season of metaphysical films, there is always the same film, only that the eye of the filmmaker seems to dig deeper and deeper, in a depth of field that paradoxically shows the void inside and outside the individual. This passage from detail to universal, from domestic microenvironment to natural macrocosm is accompanied by the dissolving of each plot or finalistic explanation. For Béla Tarr it is a matter of style or choose between two ways of “seeing”: the relative one, which fulfils the visible at the service of the concatenation of events; and the absolute one, which gives the visible time to produce from itself an effect. And the choice inevitably falls on the second. So the use of rain, fog, alcoholic dance scenes are just pieces of a puzzle in which a series of time images are assembled, in which every moment is an autonomous segment, eternal return, repetition of the instant.
In this flow of dilated images to the infinite, there are still masterful moments that have made the history of Cinema: the scene of the singer at the Titanik Bar in Perdition, the cosmological incipit with humans transformed into planets in Werckmeister’s Harmonies, the long dances desperate in the Satantango masterpiece (I recall my first impact with the work: over seven hours of film but I could not move as I was hypnotized). The important collaborations with the composer Mihály Víg and the writer László Krasznahorkai, a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025 are essential.
Béla Tarr seems to want to communicate a fact: all our little gestures, all our ritual actions, repetitions, words, the importance we attach to the objects, the natural elements (the wind, the water, the light, the leaves), the pages of the books, the prayers, with the approximation of the end emptiness the image. As if the lack of a purpose brought out the gap between reality and the attempt to represent it. It is time to create this process of impairment: everything becomes blurred, foggy, instinctive, dusty, corroded, desolate, irreversible.
Béla Tarr plays a lot on the sound creating a surprising, mysterious and at the same time destabilizing effect: We feel a constant wind through the bodies and deprive them of life. In this melancholic framework his pessimism is typically nietzschian: is directed to the uselessness of the modern world, not to the world or to existence in itself. Béla Tarr still loves his desperate and always shows an empathetic closeness to loneliness and the lack of sense of our lives. To confirm this in the epilogue of The Horse of Turin, the two protagonists still light up and speak as if there was a tomorrow before sinking into the darkness of non-existence. It is a testament image, which closes the Cinema of Béla Tarr with what Lazlo Krasznahorkai would call “Melancholy of Resistance”.
Article Béla Tarr. The unlimited image comes from SentieriSelvaggi.
