“I still consider myself an anarchist. But there’s an old saying, that goes, “If you’re not a communist by 30, you have no heart. But if you’re a communist after 30, you have no brain.” This is quite an old maxim, with which I don’t always agree with, because I think that social sensitivity is a really important aspect. You can’t be cynical, you can’t be cold-hearted. You can’t do anything without empathy. And it’s obvious that one has to side with the poor, the disgraced and the tormented. This is a moral duty, and not a question of profession, nor a question of your social status. This is simply a question of honour.”
Béla Tarr, “Kozmikus a szar” | életútinterjú Tarr Bélával [interview with English subtitles with Béla Tarr], Partizán, 24 March 2023, (via YouTube).
“My slogan is very, very simple: no education – just liberation!”
If Béla Tarr’s “slogan” is first a reference to his hope for young filmmakers, that they break away from the weight of cinematographic traditions and find their own forms of expression, it may be taken more broadly as a call to break away from something more profound: from stories with a “perceptive centre”, for “the filmmaker is not there to make himself the center that arranges the visible and its sense.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After, 2011)
“The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought”, Jacques Rancière tells us. This is not to contend that all reality is fiction, but that the line separating the logic of facts and the logic of fiction is blurred, as evidenced in the work of historians and sociologists/social theorists. In telling stories, these latter assume “a certain idea of history as common destiny, with an idea of those who make history’, and that this inter penetration of the logic of facts and the logic of stories is specific to an age when anyone and everyone is considered to be participating in the task of ‘making’ history. Thus, it is not a matter of claiming that ‘History’ is only made up of stories that we tell ourselves, but simply that the ‘logic of stories’ and the ability to act as historical agents go together. Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions’, that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done. (Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution o f the Sensible, 2004 [2000])
Our “political fictions” however lie in tatters, and for Tarr, this is as true for soviet-style communism, as it is for liberal capitalism. And his films sought to move us beyond “linear stories” of social and political amelioration – illusions and snares – to a level that he called “cosmic”.
“But this cosmic is not the world of pure contemplation. It is an absolutely realistic world, absolutely material, stripped of all that dulls pure sensation, as only cinema can offer it. … For Béla Tarr’s problem is not that of sending a message about the end of illusions and, eventually, about the end of the world. No more than that of making “beautiful images.” The beauty of images is never an end. It is only the reward for a fidelity to the reality that one wants to express and to the means that one employs in doing so. … Cinema is the art of the time of images and sounds, an art developing the movements that set bodies in relation to one another in a space. It is not an art without words. But it is not the art of the word that recounts and describes. It is an art that shows bodies, bodies expressing themselves among other bodies through the act of speaking, and through the way in which the word has an effect upon them.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After) And sometimes without words, as only potential speakers.
[Béla Tarr’s Prologue (2004), made on request to mark Hungary’s admission to the European Union, is more than a vision of poverty, as some have stressed; it is equally and more deeply a visual reflection on what EU “prosperity” is.]
To stories, Tarr opposes realism.
“The essence of realism – contrary to the program of edification known by the name of socialist realism – is the distance taken with regard to stories, to their temporal schemes and their sequences of causes and effects. Realism opposes situations that endure to stories that link together and pass from one to the next. … Stories demand that we retain, from each situation, the elements capable of being inserted into a schema of causes and effects. But realism, for its part, requires us to go ever deeper into the interior of the situation itself, to expand, ever farther back, the chain of sensations, perceptions, and emotions which make human animals into beings to whom stories happen, beings who make promises, believe in promises, or cease to believe in them. As such, it is no longer with the official deployment of time that situations are confronted, but with their own immanent limit: there, where lived time is connected with pure repetition, there, where human speech and gestures tend toward those of animals.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After)
It is at Tarr’s “cosmic” level – a level at which the story gives way to unchartered possibility – that other forms of companionship/comradery reveal themselves. This is not the basis of a transcendent hope – Tarr’s atheism is unforgiving -, but the ground for ways of being together freed of the stories that blind.
The epigraph to the film Family Nest (1979), ‘This is a true story. It didn’t happen to the people in the film, but it could have.”, points to a situation – the focus of Tarr’s realism – a situation possibly framed by a story, but frameable differently, potentially and always.
“The filmmaker is interested in bodies, in the way they hold still or move in a space. He is interested in situations and movements, rather than stories and the ends they use to explain the movements, at risk of distorting their force. A situation only. releases its power through the gap it opens with the simple logic of a story … . The films that Bela Tarr directs on the basis of Krasznahorkais novels [Satantango (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)] are fashioned from the tension between the circular stories of illusory ends the latter offers him, and the possibility he finds in them of constructing a visual scenario which extracts the power of situations that endure from the narrative that binds them together, but which also breaks the circularity of the narrative by giving all the force of these situations to straight lines, to positive lines of flight, forward in the pursuit of a shadow – to the straight lines around which the circular narrative closes its nihilistic logic.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After)
“Stories of expectations that are shown to be lies. We await he who will never come, but in whose place all sorts of false messiahs will come. And he who will arrive among his own will not be recognized by them. Irimias and Janos suffice to summarize the alternative. Stories are stories of liars and of dupes, because the stories are themselves lies. They lead us to believe that something of what we have waited for has come to pass. The communist promise was only a variation of this much older lie. This is why it is pointless to believe that the world will become reasonable if we keep harping on the crimes of the last liars, but also grotesque to insist that from now on we are living in a world without illusion. The time after is neither that of reason recovered, nor that of the expected disaster. It is the time after all stories, the time when one takes direct interest in the sensible stuff in which these stories cleaved their shortcuts between projected and accomplished ends. It is not the time in which we craft beautiful phrases or shots to make up for the emptiness of all waiting. It is the time in which we take an interest in the wait itself.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After)
“The time after [stories] is not the morose, uniform time of those who no longer believe in anything. It is the time of pure, material events, against which belief will be measured for as long as life will sustain it.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After)
“If you are really pessimistic, you go up to the roof and hang yourself, not wake up at four in the morning and go into the countryside to film! I only ask this – how did you feel when you came out of the movie theatre after watching my film? Did you feel stronger or weaker? That’s the main question. I want you to be stronger.” (Béla Tarr, The Guardian, 19/07/2024)
“You are the sun. The sun doesn’t move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun. And now, we’ll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine, in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here, we only experience general motion, and at first, we don’t notice the events that we are witnessing. The brilliant light of the sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand here in its brilliance. This is the moon. The moon revolves around the Earth. What is happening? We suddenly see that the disc of the moon, the disc of the moon, on the Sun’s flaming sphere, makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger… and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly only a narrow crescent of the sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment, the next moment – say that it’s around one in the afternoon – a most dramatic turn of event occurs. At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens, then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds… the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then… Complete Silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don’t know. We don’t know, for a total eclipse has come upon us… But… but no need to fear. It’s not over. For across the sun’s glowing sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away. And the sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness” (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000)
For Béla Tarr (1955-2026)
“I still consider myself an anarchist. But there’s an old saying, that goes, “If you’re not a communist by 30, you have no heart. But if you’re a communist after 30, you have no brain.” This is quite an old maxim, with which I don’t always agree with, because I think that social sensitivity is a really important aspect. You can’t be cynical, you can’t be cold-hearted. You can’t do anything without empathy. And it’s obvious that one has to side with the poor, the disgraced and the tormented. This is a moral duty, and not a question of profession, nor a question of your social status. This is simply a question of honour.”
Béla Tarr, “Kozmikus a szar” | életútinterjú Tarr Bélával [interview with English subtitles with Béla Tarr], Partizán, 24 March 2023, (via YouTube).
“My slogan is very, very simple: no education – just liberation!”
Béla Tarr, The Guardian, 19/07/2024
If Béla Tarr’s “slogan” is first a reference to his hope for young filmmakers, that they break away from the weight of cinematographic traditions and find their own forms of expression, it may be taken more broadly as a call to break away from something more profound: from stories with a “perceptive centre”, for “the filmmaker is not there to make himself the center that arranges the visible and its sense.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After, 2011)
“The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought”, Jacques Rancière tells us. This is not to contend that all reality is fiction, but that the line separating the logic of facts and the logic of fiction is blurred, as evidenced in the work of historians and sociologists/social theorists. In telling stories, these latter assume “a certain idea of history as common destiny, with an idea of those who make history’, and that this inter penetration of the logic of facts and the logic of stories is specific to an age when anyone and everyone is considered to be participating in the task of ‘making’ history. Thus, it is not a matter of claiming that ‘History’ is only made up of stories that we tell ourselves, but simply that the ‘logic of stories’ and the ability to act as historical agents go together. Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions’, that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done. (Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution o f the Sensible, 2004 [2000])
Our “political fictions” however lie in tatters, and for Tarr, this is as true for soviet-style communism, as it is for liberal capitalism. And his films sought to move us beyond “linear stories” of social and political amelioration – illusions and snares – to a level that he called “cosmic”.
“But this cosmic is not the world of pure contemplation. It is an absolutely realistic world, absolutely material, stripped of all that dulls pure sensation, as only cinema can offer it. … For Béla Tarr’s problem is not that of sending a message about the end of illusions and, eventually, about the end of the world. No more than that of making “beautiful images.” The beauty of images is never an end. It is only the reward for a fidelity to the reality that one wants to express and to the means that one employs in doing so. … Cinema is the art of the time of images and sounds, an art developing the movements that set bodies in relation to one another in a space. It is not an art without words. But it is not the art of the word that recounts and describes. It is an art that shows bodies, bodies expressing themselves among other bodies through the act of speaking, and through the way in which the word has an effect upon them.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After) And sometimes without words, as only potential speakers.
[Béla Tarr’s Prologue (2004), made on request to mark Hungary’s admission to the European Union, is more than a vision of poverty, as some have stressed; it is equally and more deeply a visual reflection on what EU “prosperity” is.]
To stories, Tarr opposes realism.
“The essence of realism – contrary to the program of edification known by the name of socialist realism – is the distance taken with regard to stories, to their temporal schemes and their sequences of causes and effects. Realism opposes situations that endure to stories that link together and pass from one to the next. … Stories demand that we retain, from each situation, the elements capable of being inserted into a schema of causes and effects. But realism, for its part, requires us to go ever deeper into the interior of the situation itself, to expand, ever farther back, the chain of sensations, perceptions, and emotions which make human animals into beings to whom stories happen, beings who make promises, believe in promises, or cease to believe in them. As such, it is no longer with the official deployment of time that situations are confronted, but with their own immanent limit: there, where lived time is connected with pure repetition, there, where human speech and gestures tend toward those of animals.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After)
It is at Tarr’s “cosmic” level – a level at which the story gives way to unchartered possibility – that other forms of companionship/comradery reveal themselves. This is not the basis of a transcendent hope – Tarr’s atheism is unforgiving -, but the ground for ways of being together freed of the stories that blind.
The epigraph to the film Family Nest (1979), ‘This is a true story. It didn’t happen to the people in the film, but it could have.”, points to a situation – the focus of Tarr’s realism – a situation possibly framed by a story, but frameable differently, potentially and always.
“The filmmaker is interested in bodies, in the way they hold still or move in a space. He is interested in situations and movements, rather than stories and the ends they use to explain the movements, at risk of distorting their force. A situation only. releases its power through the gap it opens with the simple logic of a story … . The films that Bela Tarr directs on the basis of Krasznahorkais novels [Satantango (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)] are fashioned from the tension between the circular stories of illusory ends the latter offers him, and the possibility he finds in them of constructing a visual scenario which extracts the power of situations that endure from the narrative that binds them together, but which also breaks the circularity of the narrative by giving all the force of these situations to straight lines, to positive lines of flight, forward in the pursuit of a shadow – to the straight lines around which the circular narrative closes its nihilistic logic.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After)
“Stories of expectations that are shown to be lies. We await he who will never come, but in whose place all sorts of false messiahs will come. And he who will arrive among his own will not be recognized by them. Irimias and Janos suffice to summarize the alternative. Stories are stories of liars and of dupes, because the stories are themselves lies. They lead us to believe that something of what we have waited for has come to pass. The communist promise was only a variation of this much older lie. This is why it is pointless to believe that the world will become reasonable if we keep harping on the crimes of the last liars, but also grotesque to insist that from now on we are living in a world without illusion. The time after is neither that of reason recovered, nor that of the expected disaster. It is the time after all stories, the time when one takes direct interest in the sensible stuff in which these stories cleaved their shortcuts between projected and accomplished ends. It is not the time in which we craft beautiful phrases or shots to make up for the emptiness of all waiting. It is the time in which we take an interest in the wait itself.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After)
“The time after [stories] is not the morose, uniform time of those who no longer believe in anything. It is the time of pure, material events, against which belief will be measured for as long as life will sustain it.” (Jacques Rancière, The Time After)
“If you are really pessimistic, you go up to the roof and hang yourself, not wake up at four in the morning and go into the countryside to film! I only ask this – how did you feel when you came out of the movie theatre after watching my film? Did you feel stronger or weaker? That’s the main question. I want you to be stronger.” (Béla Tarr, The Guardian, 19/07/2024)
“You are the sun. The sun doesn’t move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun. And now, we’ll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine, in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here, we only experience general motion, and at first, we don’t notice the events that we are witnessing. The brilliant light of the sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand here in its brilliance. This is the moon. The moon revolves around the Earth. What is happening? We suddenly see that the disc of the moon, the disc of the moon, on the Sun’s flaming sphere, makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger… and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly only a narrow crescent of the sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment, the next moment – say that it’s around one in the afternoon – a most dramatic turn of event occurs. At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens, then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds… the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then… Complete Silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don’t know. We don’t know, for a total eclipse has come upon us… But… but no need to fear. It’s not over. For across the sun’s glowing sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away. And the sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness” (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000)
Béla Tarr obituary (The Guardian, 06/01/2026)
Bleart Thaçi, “Béla Tarr (1955-2026)”, Freedom News, (07/01/2025)