Boundless Damnation: The Films of Béla Tarr

ABOUT THE SERIES:

The American Cinematheque is thrilled to welcome Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr for an in-person retrospective featuring seven films from his legendary body of work. Tarr joins us for special Q&As and introductions, as we celebrate what are commonly cited as some of the most visionary and influential films ever made.

Béla Tarr began his career at sixteen as an amateur filmmaker, shooting largely homemade documentaries, which soon brought him to the esteemed, Balázs Béla Stúdió. There, at the young age of 22, Tarr made his directorial debut with FAMILY NEST (1977), which employed non-professional actors and a documentary-like style to tell the story of a family caught up in a national housing crisis. His next three films, THE OUTSIDER (1981), THE PREFAB PEOPLE (1982), and ALAMANAC OF THE FALL (1984) further demonstrated his unique talent for creating intimate portraits of troubled communities, making up a period of his career that he defines as “social cinema.”

Tarr’s next film, DAMNATION (1988), marked a sharp stylistic change in his cinema that he would pursue until his retirement. A dark story following a doomed affair between a bar regular and a cruel cabaret singer, DAMNATION is a masterpiece of minimalism that features exquisite black-and-white cinematography, mesmerizing long takes and an intensely tactile approach to shooting both interiors and exteriors. These aesthetic principles soon became the defining characteristics of his cinema, pushed to groundbreaking effect in his 7-hour magnum opus, SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994), which is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Tarr’s visionary work of slow cinema follows a small, defunct agricultural collective living in a post-apocalyptic landscape after the fall of communism. Rooted in a depressingly material environment filled with mud and rain, the film simultaneously achieves a transcendental quality, brought on by a menacing sense of doom of near supernatural proportions.

Tarr’s overwhelming sense of pessimism and despair covers every facet of his films, resulting in a sort of purity in his portrayal of the world. His characters are not simply doomed to a tragic fate, but defined by their sense of eternal damnation. The lonely railway worker in THE MAN FROM LONDON (2007), for example, has already accepted his environment’s slow and inevitable deterioration before the film begins. Likewise, the impoverished cab driver and his daughter in Tarr’s final film THE TURIN HORSE (2011), seemingly exist only within their repetitive actions to achieve sustenance and survival. And in WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000), the protagonist implores his townsfolk to accept their realities, perhaps mirroring what Tarr’s cinema asks of us:

“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.”