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This chapter focuses on the career of Béla Tarr. Tarr was born in Pécs, in southern Hungary, in 1955. For his fourteenth birthday he received an 8mm camera from his father which started his journey into filmmaking. At the age of twenty-two, he released his first full-length feature film, Family Nest (Családi tűzfészek, 1977), which also won the Grand Prize at the 1979 Mannheim International Film Festival. In 1980, Tarr was among the founders of a newly formed studio called Társulás Studiá. Officially the studio's mission was to create and promote the semi-documentary, semi-fictional style the founders of the studio initiated five years earlier. However, filmmakers with clearly avant-garde ambitions could also come and make films in the studio. By the early years of 2000 Tarr was already well-known for his international successes and was recognized as a somewhat eccentric but important figure of Hungarian cinema. In 2010 he was elected president of the Hungarian Filmmakers Association.

In the films subsequent to Damnation (1987) the basics of the Tarr style do not change, but a certain evolution can be detected in several details. This chapter discusses this evolutionary process. The constants in his films are rather obvious: all are black and white; the average shot length (ASL) does not go under two minutes, but in two cases it increases by 84 per cent as compared to Damnation; the environment is characterized always by some combination of desolation and poverty; a film noir visual style dominates; and all the stories continue to be based on the situation of entrapment, but from Damnation on these stories strictly and consistently adhere to a circular structure and are detached from all historical and geographical concreteness. However, there is also an increasing degree of emotional expressivity in Tarr's films. He seems to seek an ever more powerful way to express a feeling of general desperation over the impossibility of changing the situation of human helplessness.

This chapter examines four aspects of Tarr's narration that are more or less constant in his oeuvre: banality of narrative events; slowness of narration and suspense; static situations and circular narrative form. Manifestations of these four aspects in individual films are also discussed. The basic building block of Tarr films is the banality, or the unexceptional, everyday character, of the events. At his best Tarr can render even the most excessive or exceptional event an everyday banality that has no effect on the characters' way of life. Slowness of narration is a cornerstone of the Tarr style and one of the main ingredients of the circular structure—a structure producing the feeling that the return is inevitable. Circularity of dramatic form characterizes stories in which characters go through a series of events but these events do not get them closer to the solution to their initial problem. Not only does this remain unresolved, but at the end they lose the perspective to resolve it that they may have had at the beginning. At the end of the film they find themselves in a situation that is the same as or worse than before.

This concluding chapter looks at the reasons behind Tarr's outstanding international reputation. One part of the answer could be that Tarr did not just make “interesting” or “good” films. He created an original version of stylistic features that are part of recognizable and important international art-film currents. Another element is the “added value” of his style, which is threefold. First, an incredibly grim, depressed atmosphere; second, a landscape entirely unknown to the international audience yet very typical of a geographical and historical region: Eastern Europe; and third, a historical situation—all of this appeared when international art-film culture had just started to rediscover the value of these elements in the films made in regions far from Western Europe. The third element is a consequence of all this. With Tarr's films a very strange form of realism emerged in art cinema.

This chapter examines Béla Tarr's early filmmaking style. Tarr's early films were considerably different from the documentary-fiction stylistic norm which they otherwise followed. Although this difference can be grasped in stylistic terms, it concerns in the first instance the thematic focus. Tarr was interested mainly in human relations rather than in sociological or political reality, which he considered only as a background for his stories. He wanted to catch the “real” on the level of human communication, and he tried to adjust the stylistic norms of the documentary current to this level, which already had some stylistic constraints. He also realized that this was possible only if he accepted a particular authorial position, since what he wanted to provide was not an “objective” sociological description, but a subjective interpretation of human relations. He gradually selected and combined his stylistic and narrative devices so that the authorial aspect became more prominent, while the “reality effect” remained intact, thanks to improvisational acting. After all this, Tarr reached the stylistic system of John Cassavetes' films made in the 1970s, which he knew well and respected.

This chapter deals with the characters in Béla Tarr's films. His characters belong to the general conception of his films rather than to the individual stories. While each story has its particular characters, they represent identifiable types and many are very similar to each other. The chapter considers the social status and personal traits of Tarr's characters as well as their lack of development during the story. It also discusses how his films explore the same basic problem: the problem of human dignity in extreme moral and existential circumstances, which makes a moralizing attitude impossible. His films represent an existential situation from which there is no escape, which is in itself demoralizing, and which is rendered even more serious by moral failures. Tarr represents characters who are at the terminal phase of their struggle for saving their human dignity. They are about to lose this struggle, and their survival has long ago been taken out of their hands, but as long as they live, they try to save their dignity.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the style and oeuvre of Hungary's most prominent and internationally best-known film director, Béla Tarr. Tarr follows a very particular method in developing his works, dubbed as the permutation principle. This principle concerns not only the stylistic level, but also higher narrative and thematic levels. Once he found the successful ingredients and their combinations, he continued developing this style in various radical ways until he arrived at a point where only two possibilities seemed viable: returning to a more classical formal system, or abandoning his formal and thematic world altogether. He chose the second way, but made this choice in a radical manner, by announcing his potential withdrawal from filmmaking. Tarr's films include Damnation (1987), Satantango (1994), and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

Contemporary Hungarian cinema has been often coined as "dark", depicting an "ontological melancholia" paired with a preference for the still image. In films by Béla Tarr, Kornél Mundruczó or Benedek Fliegauf for example, tableau-like compositions serve as "interruptions" revealing the single image as a site in-between where figuration happens. These painterly images relate to the narration metaphorically, triggering an aesthetic detachment of a "pensive spectator." This chapter focuses on a corpus of contemporary Hungarian films in which bodies are represented in pictorial compositions evoking either Andrea Mantegna's The Lamentation over the Dead Christ or Hans Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christin the Tomb, with the aim to identify 'the figural' that makes sense without a story. Relying on Kristeva's controversial "gendered" interpretation of melancholia, the chapter includes comparative analyses of films by Hungarian female and male directors (Ágnes Kocsis and Kornél Mundruczó, for example).

Alcoholism forms a constant presence in the films of Béla Tarr. The focus of this chapter is on one episode from Tarr’s seven-hour-long masterpiece Satantango (1994), a film about life in a collective farm during the end of communism in Hungary. The episode centres on a reclusive, obese, and severely alcoholic doctor, played by Peter Berling, whose chief pastime is to sit at his desk drinking and obsessively recording every aspect of the petty goings-on at the estate in a journal. However, in this episode he finds himself having run out of alcohol and reluctantly resolves that he must leave to get some more. In this hour-long episode the camera follows this sick man on a veritable odyssey through the rain to the pub where the rest of the peasants are cavorting riotously. This intimate and yet epic treatment of bodily needs has few equals in cinema. In this chapter I show through close formal analysis of scenes featuring the doctor that what is often considered the essence of Tarr’s style – slowness – is found to have its roots in an attentive depiction of the physical life of the body. In addition, it is typical of Tarr’s style to situate the body within a material environment, a theme brought out in Satantango through vast images of the Great Hungarian Plain and as the doctor is shown reading from what seems to be a geological prehistory of Central Europe. Through an engagement with key writers on Tarr (András Bálint Kovács and Jacques Rancière) as well as Gilles Deleuze, I suggest there are two times at work in Tarr’s depiction of alcoholism: the heavy present of the body and another time which takes flight from the travails of the body.

This chapter discusses the Tarr style of filmmaking, particularly his use of extremely long takes. It characterizes four types of use of long takes, most of them combined with long camera movements, which were the most influential in the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in Tarr's work: (i) the process of de-dramatization; (ii) the choreography of continuous change; (iii) the immersion and psychological participation; and (iv) the distanced observation and self-conscious authorial presence. Tarr's long-take style has something of each of these effects. He mainly uses long takes to connect events, but because there is very little narrative content in most of them, he uses long takes alternatively to create the sensation of immersion or, on the contrary, to alienate the viewer through mechanistic movements or static compositions or by making the camera independent of the character's movement. The chapter discusses the Tarr style as it appears in Damnation (1987).

Chapter 4 explores the sensuous dimension of contemporary soundtracks through examples of soundtrack musicality drawn from diegetic sounds such as physical activities, walking, or environmental sounds. The chapter argues that the overall musical effect produced by the interaction between repetitive sound and rhythmicized visual movement creates musicality of an inherently cinematic nature, a type of audiovisual musique concrète. This approach is theorized through the concept of the erotics of art, contending that the practice of blurring the boundaries between music and the soundtrack’s other elements is intimately connected to the emergence of a trend that emphasizes the sensuousness of film form—its sonic and visual textures, composition, rhythm, movement, and flow—without confusing it with sensory overload.

The filmmakers discussed in earlier chapters attempted to construct long-form works whose phenomenological intensity was tied to their status as integral temporal experiences that could open up new affective possibilities for the spectator. The mode of viewing required by these works contrasts starkly with the mobile spectatorship engendered by contemporary multimedia projects that attempt to apply the principles of the Gesamtkunstwerk within a multiroom gallery setting. It also differs significantly from the type of intermittent viewing engendered by more recent long-form works, which, made entirely with inexpensive digital equipment, are no longer conceived as continuous units and are instead intended to be viewed in pieces, with the audience members encouraged to come and go as they please. What is most important for the filmmakers studied in this book is a conception of art as mystery, as spiritual elevation, as something that, like a cathedral, could “protect time.”