And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
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.
To know where we stand as the film begins, we should start with these words by the director, Tarr:
“I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another … All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine — time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.”
It is the dead of winter, almost closing time in a shabby pub. An eclipse of the sun is due, and Janos (Lars Rudolph), the local paper carrier, takes it upon himself to explain what will happen in the heavens. He pushes the furniture to the walls, and enlists a drunk to stand in the center of the floor and flutter his hands, like the sun’s rays. Then he gets another pal to be the earth, and walk in circles around the sun. And then a third is the moon, walking in his own circles around the earth. All of these circles stagger around, the drunks rotating, and then the moon comes between the sun and the earth, and there is an eclipse: “The sky darkens, then goes all dark,” Janos says. “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?”
Janos is well-liked in the town. “How’s our Janos?” he’s asked. He receives a visit from his Auntie Tunde (Hanna Schygulla), who insists he visit her estranged husband, Uncle Gyorgy (Peter Fitz) and enlist him in leading the townspeople against unnamed but imminent threats. She gives him a suitcase to take along, a case that is never opened or explained. Uncle Gyorgy is a musicologist who believes the world went wrong when Andreas Werckmeister (1645-1706) popularized a system of harmonics that clashed with the music of the celestial spheres. Janos and Gyorgy walk to the town square, both held in frame in a very long shot, until they arrive at clumps of people hunched in the cold around the truck containing the whale. Later, when Janos buys his ticket and goes inside, he regards the whale’s enormous, lifeless, staring eye.
Bela Tarr (born 1955), is a Hungarian director more talked about than viewed, in part because few audiences have an appetite for, and few theaters the time to play, his films like “Satantango” (1994), which is 415 minutes long.
I find that Tarr does, in fact, make films both unique and original, and in a style I find beautiful. I prefer the purity of black and white to color, I like very long takes if they serve a purpose and are not simply stunts, I am drawn into an air of mystery, I find it compelling when a film establishes an immediate, tangible, time and place. For all of its phantasmal themes, “Werckmeister Harmonies” is resolutely realistic. Every person, every room, every street, every action, every line of dialogue, feels as much like cinema verite as the works of Frederick Wiseman.
So do you just sit there, friends ask, and look at the shots? Well, yes, that’s what everybody does when they watch a film. But they don’t always see the shots as shots. Bela Tarr’s style seems to be an attempt to regard his characters with great intensity and respect, to observe them without jostling them, to follow unobtrusively as they move through their worlds, which look so ordinary and are so awesome, like ours.
Béla Tarr rejected traditional plotting. For him, film was not about "action" but about the texture of reality. His work captures the weight of atmosphere—the rain, the wind, the mud, and the slow, inexorable decay of time.
The dead whale functions as a "Leviathan" – a symbol of an alien, monumental nature cast into a world of corruption. To János, it is proof of God’s creative power; to the incited mob, it is a catalyst for their pent-up rage and nihilism. It serves as a "silent witness" to human decay.
Andreas Werckmeister & Music
The film's title refers to "well-tempered tuning." György Eszter believes that this mathematical compromise in music planted the seed for the decay of truth in the world. If the foundations of harmony are "false," the society built upon them cannot be harmonious either.
Order vs. Chaos
The film examines the paradox of order:
Cosmic Order: The movement of the planets (shown in the famous opening scene in the bar).
Artificial Order: Werckmeister’s music theory.
Political Order: The transition from anarchy to totalitarian control.
Interpretation
Werckmeister Harmonies is often read as a political allegory for post-Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, but it works equally well as a universal fable. It demonstrates how easily a society can slide into barbarism when hope dies and demagogues (like the Prince) fill the vacuum. The scene in the hospital, where the rioters stop before a gaunt, naked old man, marks the only moment where human cruelty hits a limit – the absolute, pitiable frailty of life itself.
The infamous hospital scene serves as the film’s moral climax. As the mob ruthlessly beats the sick and helpless, their momentum is suddenly halted by the sight of a gaunt, naked old man standing in a bathtub. This figure—the "absolute victim"—is so fragile that even the rioters are forced to recognize their own reflection in his vulnerability. It is the only moment where human cruelty hits a limit, suggesting that even in total darkness, the "pitiable frailty of life" remains a sacred, terrifying barrier.
Ultimately, the film posits that when the masses destroy the "fake" harmony of civilization, they do not find freedom; they merely pave the way for a more rigid, military-style authoritarianism, as seen in the film's final takeover by Tünde.
Long Takes: With only 39 cuts in over two hours, the film forces the viewer to experience every movement and every second of decay.
Cinematography: The camera (by Gábor Medvigy and others) literally floats through the streets, often in slow, choreographed tracking shots behind the characters.
Mihály Vig’s Score: The melancholic piano theme is one of the most recognizable motifs in film history, heightening the sense of an unavoidable tragedy.
The Opening: The Cosmic Dance
The film begins with a tour-de-force sequence in a local pub. János uses the drunken patrons to perform a "ballet" representing a solar eclipse.
Significance: This scene establishes János's character as a bridge between the mundane (the pub) and the sublime (the cosmos). It is the only moment of warmth and "harmony" in the film, showing that even the lowliest figures can participate in the celestial order.
Cinematography: A single, circular take that mimics the orbits of the planets.
The Hospital Rampage
Perhaps the most harrowing scene in cinema, the mob enters a hospital to beat patients. The camera follows them in a relentless, slow-moving tracking shot.
The Limit of Evil: The violence only stops when the mob encounters an old, frail, naked man in a bathtub. This "Ecce Homo" moment forces the attackers to confront the ultimate fragility of human existence, leading to a sudden, silent retreat.
Sátántangó (1994)
What can you do in eight hours? Work a full day’s work or log a solid night’s sleep. Run 60 eight-minute miles—that’s over two marathons—or microwave 240 Hot Pockets. Or watch Sátántangó.
I recently set aside a whole Sunday to watch the film critics consider to be Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s masterpiece. Filmed between 1990 and 1994—delayed in part because political antipathy toward his previous effort, Almanac of Fall, had put Tarr in “really deep shit”—Sátántangó actually runs 435 black and white minutes, closer to seven and a half than eight hours.
I decided to read Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó before watching Tarr’s. Though the novel, the author’s first, was originally published in Hungary in 1985, it became available to English readers only last year via New Directions’ handsomely bound hardcover edition of George Szirtes’s translation. I finished the novel the night before my chosen viewing date; for what it’s worth, the film proved to be fairly loyal to the book, both in terms of mood—grim and darkly funny—and narrative shape. The “story,” an aspect of filmmaking secondary in Tarr’s estimation to image, sound, and emotion (“I don’t care about stories. I never did. Every story is the same…. The stories are just covering something.”), involves the return or “resurrection” of two men thought dead to a derelict farm estate. After the body of a local young girl (Erika Bók) turns up, the messiah-figure Irimiás (Mihály Vig) offers a frank but seemingly empathetic appraisal of the estate’s depleted and dejected community; then, with the help of his sidekick Petrina (Putyi Horváth), he convinces the hangers-on that if they give him their pooled savings, he will arrange a better future for them… Structurally, the film retains the novel’s organizing “tango”: six steps (chapters) forward, six steps back. Shifts in perspective create overlaps or folds in the chronology, so that, for example, in one scene we see the eponymous dance from the not-yet-dead little girl’s point of view, and then again in another from the point of view of carousers themselves.
This latter scene, which you can watch here, demonstrates a few of the characteristics typical of Tarr’s work. First, the long take. In “Talking About Tarr,” a symposium transcribed in the Sátántangó DVD booklet, moderator Susan Doll compares an average Hollywood film’s “1,100 shots per 100 minutes” to the 39 shots that make up Werckmeister Harmonies’ 145 minutes. That’s an average shot length of 5.5 seconds vs. almost four minutes! Over Sátántangó’s 435 minutes there are something like 172 shots, averaging 152 seconds or about two and a half minutes per shot. This stylistic habit is so common in Tarr’s films that one interviewer begins his question about it, “You’re probably sick of being asked about the long takes in your films…”—to which Tarr responds: “Yes, I’m getting mad about it. I’ve answered it a thousand times.”
Béla Tarr’s 432-minute epic is less a movie and more a physical climate you inhabit. It stands as a monumental achievement in slow cinema, transforming the bleak, rain-soaked landscape of post-communist Hungary into a hypnotic, circular purgatory.
The image above highlights the film's most devastating narrative thread involving the young girl, Estike. Shot in high-contrast monochrome by Gábor Medvigy, the sequence captures the tactile texture of the mud, dead leaves, and profound isolation that defines the entire film.
Three structural and thematic elements give Sátántangó its unique, gravitational force:
1. The Choreo-Structure of the Tango
Following the architecture of László Krasznahorkai’s source novel, the film is divided into twelve distinct chapters structured like the steps of a tango: six steps forward, six steps back.
Rather than moving linearly, the timeline constantly folds back on itself. You will watch a sequence of events unfold from one perspective—such as the drunk Doctor meticulously logging the minutiae of the village from his window—only to revisit the exact same block of time hours later from the perspective of the characters walking past his house. Time becomes a trap, a loop where escape is structurally impossible.
2. Time as a Material Medium
With roughly only 150 shots across its seven-and-a-half-hour runtime, Tarr forces you to experience time in its rawest form. The camera tracks behind characters walking down wind-whipped, desolate roads for ten minutes straight without a single cut.
The effect: This extreme duration strips away conventional passive viewing. The rhythm of Mihály Víg's haunting, accordion-led score and the relentless sound of falling rain induce a trance-like state where the space between actions becomes just as heavy as the actions themselves.
3. False Prophets and Cosmic Decay
Set on a decaying, communal farm carcass right after the collapse of communism, the narrative tracks a small group of desperate, untrustworthy villagers. When Irimiás—a charismatic figure presumed dead—returns to the collective, the villagers instantly treat him as a secular messiah, willingly handing over their remaining money to him.
Tarr uses this setup not merely as political allegory for post-Soviet disillusionment, but as a broader cosmic statement on human vulnerability. The characters are caught between spiritual starvation and a desperate need to believe a lie, dancing a slow dance of self-sabotage while the world rots around them.
Damnation (1988)
Karrer (Miklós B. Székely) wakes up every day in the shadow of the mining carts that clank back and forth in a seemingly endless cycle above the decrepit village in which he lives. He spends his life meandering from one rundown bar to another while espousing his thoughts and opinions to a series of people who have heard it all before. At one of his favorite spots, Titanik, there is a singer (Vali Kerekes) with whom he is currently involved; however, she is unfortunately married — and has told Karrer that she wants to end their affair.
Damnation (Kárhozat) is the definitive watershed moment in Béla Tarr’s career. Before this 1988 masterpiece, Tarr was known for gritty, handheld, documentary-style social realism. With Damnation, he pivoted entirely into the hypnotic, monolithic "slow cinema" style that would define his masterworks, Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).
The film's skeletal plot follows Karrer, a detached, desolate man living in a crumbling, rain-slicked Hungarian mining town. He is completely consumed by a desperate obsession with a singer at the local Titanik Bar. In an attempt to get her husband out of the frame, Karrer involves him in a risky smuggling scheme, setting off a bleak, slow-motion noir narrative of ultimate betrayal.
In Damnation, the plot is largely secondary to the atmosphere. The film is famous for establishing three core elements that became Tarr's artistic signature:
The Hypnotic Long Take: The camera moves with agonizing, majestic slowness. Instead of cutting away, it lingers on textures—peeling walls, pools of mud, coal buckets gliding on overhead cables, and relentless downpours—treating the decaying environment as a primary character.
The Krasznahorkai Partnership: This film marked Tarr's first collaboration with novelist László Krasznahorkai. Krasznahorkai’s distinct brand of existential weight, cosmic pessimism, and rhythmic pacing fundamentally reshaped Tarr’s cinematic universe.
Mihály Víg’s Cyclical Score: The melancholy, repeating musical motifs—especially the haunting tango played inside the bar—create a sonic loop that makes the characters feel permanently trapped in time.
It is a demanding but deeply rewarding piece of film history, culminating in one of the most starkly metaphorical final sequences ever put to celluloide, involving a rain-drenched mud pit and a stray dog.
The final scene of Damnation—where Karrer drops to all fours in a rain-drenched mud pit and barks aggressively at a stray dog—is one of the most starkly uncompromised codas in modern cinema. It serves as the ultimate punctuation mark to his moral and psychological trajectory.
Thematically, this bizarre, visceral sequence operates on several profound layers:
1. Total Dehumanization and the Failure of Language
Throughout the film, Karrer is highly articulate, using baroque, clinical, and deeply philosophical language to justify his existential paralysis and emotional violence. He fancies himself an intellectual master manipulator, orchestrating a smuggling plot to get the singer's husband out of the picture.
However, when his grand scheme utterly collapses—resulting in his ultimate betrayal (tattling to the police) and the singer abandoning him anyway—Karrer realizes his words and machinations mean absolutely nothing. In the mud pit, he completely surrenders his humanity. By abandoning human speech to bark at an actual animal, he accepts his regression into a feral state. He has shed the veneer of civilization because it failed to give him what he desired.
2. The Absolute Fulfillment of "Disintegration"
Earlier in the film, Karrer cynically notes:
"All stories end badly, because they are always stories of disintegration. The heroes always disintegrate, and they disintegrate the same way."
The final scene is the literal, physical manifestation of this prophecy. He doesn't just emotionally disintegrate; he descends into the literal grime, mud, and waste of the industrial landscape. His "damnation" is not a theological hell, but a self-inflicted earthly state where he has eroded his own dignity so entirely that he is indistinguishable from the stray, scavenging dogs that roam the town's periphery.
3. Conquered by the Indifferent Environment
In the cinematic universe that Tarr and writer László Krasznahorkai construct, nature and the environment always win. Humans are not heroic agents shaping history; they are fragile things slowly being dissolved by relentless rain, wind, fog, and mud.
By lowering his body into the wet earth to challenge a dog, Karrer is physically and symbolically swallowed by his environment. He becomes just another object in the bleak landscape, completely defeated by the grim, cyclical reality of his surroundings.
4. The Autonomy of the Camera
Tarr’s camera work in this final sequence underscores Karrer's cosmic insignificance. As Karrer barks, the camera eventually continues its slow, indifferent lateral tracking shot, moving past and away from him. The camera doesn't linger to offer comfort or a traditional narrative resolution; it treats Karrer with the same clinical, detached distance as it treats a pile of coal or a rusted fence. The world, the rain, and the camera keep moving, entirely indifferent to his localized existential agony.
The Turin Horse (2011)
Béla Tarr's bleak and bitter film is a glacially paced nightmare in which the scare factor has been replaced with desperate melancholy; it is composed with his characteristic long takes, anvil silences and fiercely unsmiling faces, shot in undersea monochrome, and prefaced with Tarr's habitual austere titles in Times Roman. The movie is about the end of time and the end of days. At 56 years old, Tarrhas announcedthat this is his final film.
It is a meditation on Nietzsche who, in Turin in 1889, was said to have seen a horse being thrashed, and protectively threw his arms around the beast, then sobbingly collapsed due to some kind of breakdown, possibly a stroke. Whatever it was, the calamity neither destroyed nor made him stronger, but sent Nietzsche into a long decline that ended with his death in 1900.
Tarr's film imagines what happened to that horse, whose suffering triggered the philosopher's collapse. It is being driven by a hard-faced, bearded man back to his farm, where he gives a terse series of orders to a younger woman, evidently his daughter. We are not obviously anywhere near Turin, or Italy, but rather in Tarr's central European wasteland (it is shot in Hungary), ravaged by a continuous gale that finally makes this setting look like a polar icecap. The orchestral score by Tarr's long-time composer Mihály Víg is as incessant as the wind, repeating and repeating like Philip Glass.
The horse now refuses to work, or to drink, and the old man and younger woman, stricken with dismay, receive disturbing news from a neighbour about an approaching apocalyptic breakdown. Are we witnessing the death of God? Or man? Among the characters, the horse has a Houyhnhnm-like dignity. Perhaps it was the Fool to Nietzsche's Lear, or perhaps Nietzsche has transmigrated into the horse itself, and now impassively watches humanity's final days – though the old man, with one arm incapacitated by a stroke, has himself a faint look of Nietzsche. The movie exerts an eerie grip, with echoes of Bresson, Bergman and Dreyer, but is utterly distinctive: a vision of a world going inexorably into a final darkness.
Béla Tarr’s final cinematic statement, The Turin Horse (A torinói ló), is less of a traditional narrative and more of a heavy, monolithic experience. Co-directed with his long-time collaborator and wife Ágnes Hranitzky, the 2011 film serves as a bleak, hypnotic masterpiece about the slow, quiet unmaking of the world.
The film opens with a voiceover recounting the legendary 1889 anecdote of Friedrich Nietzsche in Turin, Italy. Witnessing a cabman brutally whipping a stubborn horse, Nietzsche wept, threw his arms around the animal's neck to protect it, and subsequently suffered a permanent mental breakdown.
But Tarr isn't interested in the philosopher. Instead, the film turns its gaze to the forgotten elements of that story: the horse, its aging owner Ohlsdorfer, and his daughter, living out a grueling existence in a desolate, wind-swept rural homestead.
Fred Kelemen’s striking, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography captures the characters not as grand tragic figures, but as extensions of the harsh landscape itself. Notice how the visual framing traps them between the stark, empty sky and the barren earth, emphasizing their total isolation from the rest of humanity.
The Anatomy of an Anti-Genesis
The structural brilliance of The Turin Horse lies in how it subverts the biblical creation story. Structured across six consecutive days, it chronicles a cosmic regression into absolute nothingness:
The Weight of Repetition: The film forces you to experience the crushing monotony of their survival. Day after day, they perform the exact same tasks in real-time: dressing the father’s paralyzed right arm, drawing water from a drying well, and peeling steaming, boiling potatoes with bare hands.
The Relentless Score: Mihály Víg’s haunting, circular musical theme—a repetitive, heavy organ and string loop—acts as a sonic representation of time grinding down. It plays intermittently against the constant, howling gale outside that never lets up.
The Technical Hypnosis: Clocking in at 146 minutes, the entire film consists of only 30 long takes. The camera drifts through the cabin like a ghost, observing the characters from shifting angles, making the domestic space feel both vast and intensely claustrophobic.
As the days progress, the universe slowly shuts down. The horse refuses to eat or move. Neighbors bring news of a ruined world. The well runs dry. Finally, the light itself ceases to exist, leaving them in a dark, silent void. It is an apocalyptic vision stripped of any cinematic drama—leaving only the quiet, terrifying reality of a fire going out.
Béla Tarr’s decision to retire after The Turin Horse wasn’t a sudden burst of frustration, nor was it a marketing stunt. It was a deeply calculated, philosophical conclusion to a life's work.
When the film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011, Tarr repeatedly stated in interviews: "I’ve said everything I wanted to say, and my cinematic grammar has reached its natural end point."
For an artist whose entire career was an evolution toward absolute stylistic purity, The Turin Horse represents a conceptual brick wall. There was simply nowhere left to go.
1. Reaching "Absolute Zero" Stylistically
To understand why this had to be his final film, you have to look at the trajectory of his aesthetic language. Tarr began his career in the late 1970s making gritty, handheld, social-realist documentaries (Family Nest). Over decades, he gradually stripped away traditional Hollywood artifice—abandoning fast cutting, conventional plots, and standard close-ups in favor of monumental, hypnotic long takes.
By the time he made The Turin Horse, he had reduced cinema to its barest essentials:
Minimalist Geometry: The entire 146-minute film relies on just 30 shots.
Narrative Reduction: There is almost no plot, no character arcs, and virtually no dialogue outside of a single neighbor's monologue.
The Ultimate Loop: The film focuses entirely on the base mechanics of human survival—eating a potato, putting on clothes, looking out a window.
Tarr realized that if he made another film using this style, he would merely be copying himself. He had distilled his visual grammar down to an atomic level; going any further would mean shooting a blank screen.
2. The Finality of Cosmic Pessimism
Thematically, The Turin Horse acts as the perfect, pitch-black bookend to his filmography. If his previous masterpieces like Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) explored the decay of communities, institutions, and human ideologies, The Turin Horse goes a step further: it chronicles the decay of the physical universe itself.
The film is a literal "un-creation" story. By the sixth day, the fire goes out, the sun stops rising, and the characters are left sitting in pitch darkness, unable even to eat their raw potatoes.
"The film is about the end of the world, but it’s not an explosion. It’s a very quiet, slow dying. And after the end of the world, what can you show? There is nothing left."
— Béla Tarr
Once a filmmaker has successfully staged the quiet, absolute end of all things, returning to make another movie about ordinary human drama would feel like an ideological regression.
Life After the Camera
True to his word, Tarr has kept his promise. Since 2011, he has completely refrained from directing feature films. Instead, he transitioned his immense energy into supporting the next generation of filmmakers, famously founding the radical, short-lived film.factory film school in Sarajevo in 2012, where he mentored avant-garde directors from around the world without standard academic hierarchy.
By walking away at the absolute height of his powers, Tarr ensured that his filmography remained a closed, pristine monument. The Turin Horse didn't just conclude his career; it sealed it.
.jpg)
.jpg)
