With Sátántangó and Werckmeister’s harmonies, Béla Tarr becomes an unsettling master of spiritual ruin | film

TThe semi-formal genre of “slow cinema” has been around for decades: glacial pacing, continuous, uninterrupted shots, static shooting locations, characters who seem to look – often without words and without a smile – at people or things outside the camera or inside the lens itself, imitating the camera’s calm, uncompromising gaze, and the steady silence that builds up into transcendent simplicity. Robert Bresson, Theo Angelopoulos, Joe Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz, Lisandro Alonso; These are all great practitioners of slow cinema. But surely no director has ever moved the tachometer needle back further to the left than master of tragicomedy Béla Tarr; Its speed was sub-zero, a kind of extreme, uniform slowness, extreme slowness, in movies that move, often almost infinitesimal, like huge, aircraft carrier-sized Gothic ships across dark seas.

Audience reactions were often a sort of delirium or disbelief at how punishing the jarring pacing was, but – with enough investment of interest – you found yourself responding in awe, but also laughing at the macabre black comedy, parables and satire. Béla Tarr’s film has you drunk and hungover at the same time. People were often found desperately drunk in his films.

Tarr was like the Gogol of cinema, often working with co-director and editor Agnes Hranitsky. And yet, despite the bleakness of the vision, for all its misery and misery, Tarr was an intelligent, lively but somewhat deadpan person, funny and wise, deeply engaged with the world, relentless in his criticism of the far-right intellectual mediocrity in his native Hungary and elsewhere. When I interviewed him in 2024 on the occasion of a major retrospective of his work at the BFI Southbank in London, we talked about his new teaching career at a film school in Sarajevo after he stopped making films in 2011; He said he was most energized by his enthusiasm for young filmmakers. He said: “My motto is very simple: No education, just liberation!”

Tarr’s death comes shortly after the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to novelist László Krasznhorkai, the Hungarian author whose bleak, demanding, and uncompromising vision clearly coincided with Tarr’s, and with whom Tarr at some point took a kind of parallel creative path with his semi-legendary 1994 adaptation of Krasznhorkai’s novel Sátántangó, or The Devil’s Dance. It’s a film about a rural village whose residents give up their lives to follow a charismatic cult leader who returns from the dead, and it’s a slow-burning monochrome epic of dreamlike eeriness that runs for seven and a half hours. For years, this charming film was only sporadically available at festivals, and those who saw it had a haunted expression, a kind of cinematic PTSD.

Werckmeister Harmonies from 2000, adapted from Krasnahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance, was another unsettling black-and-white excursion. This was only two and a half hours long, but it was no less punishing nor forgiving. Again, it is a study of spiritual desolation, but also a study of the numbing of groupthink and the internal stupor of fascism. In ways similar to what happened in Satantango, the entire community submits to the will of a sinister outsider, a “prince” who arrives like a peddler or extremist leader with a giant circus whose only attraction is a giant dead whale – and the Melvillian echo is certainly intentional.

Before that, his 1988 film, fiercely and meticulously titled Damnation, was another adaptation of Krasnahorkai, a black-and-white (and mostly grey) vision comparable to that of Beckett and Tarkovsky. His last film, The Turin Horse from 2011 – which he co-wrote with Krasnahorkai – was a variation on Nietzsche, a speculation about what happened to the horse that Nietzsche tearfully embraced in the street in Turin because he was whipped by a bus driver, a moment that caused the great philosopher to have a nervous breakdown. Perhaps it is inevitable that Tarr and Krasnahorkai imagine that the horse does not remain in sunny urban Italy, but is somehow transported to the bleak fields of Central Europe where the cart driver works terribly hard on the farm, enduring the hardship that caused Nietzsche to cry with pity in the first place.

But Tarr also loved thrillers and noirs (most of his conversation with me was due to his admiration for Hitchcock) and directed 2007’s The Man from London, an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel that had actually been conventionally made into a thriller in 1947; Characteristically, he identified the slow-paced spiritual terror beneath the apparent excitement. A fugitive discovers a suitcase full of foreign money, but realizes he cannot spend it without exchanging it, thus fatally drawing attention to himself; He is the Tantalus of longing, and a living symbol of our society, with its desire for money. A normal film would make this the starting point for tension and danger, but for Tarr, this was the moment to stare into that Nietzschean abyss staring right back at you. I felt it bore comparison to contemporary artist Douglas Gordon’s ultra-slow-motion 24-hour installation.

Perhaps uniquely in the canon of ‘slow cinema’, Tarr’s films have always had an element of biting, dark, sulfurous comedy; He himself said that it was similar to the comedy that can be found in Chekhov’s saddest works. His work is something that should be carried alongside Shaw’s quote: “Life ceases to be funny when people die, just as it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” To Tarr, it was laughter in the dark, but the darkness itself had endless texture and complexity.