The death of Béla Tarr was a great loss for everyone, including me. I have lost a great friend, a company in the visual magic of cinema fosc on the screen, is a general: I lost a dark cinema, where there will no longer be as much light as the one created by Béla. Roman cinema, for me and for us, empty. Béla Tarr was one of the greatest artists of our time. Unstoppable, brutal, indestructible. When art loses such a radical creator, for a while it seems that everything will be terribly boring. Who will be the next rebel?? Who will step forward? Who will destroy everything? Béla, returns.
With these words, l'escriptor hongarés László Krasznahorkai, awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025, mourned the death, the past 6 of gene, of his friend and collaborator Béla Tarr. European cinema icon, his very personal staging has been a source of inspiration for some of the most important creators of recent decades: Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, László Nemes and Gus Van Sant (they wouldn't exist Gerry i Elephant without the deep emotion that caused the American filmmaker to watch Tarr's films, which led him to reconsider film grammar).
the past 12 of February, in an exciting session at La Filmoteca, José Luis Guerin lamented that the grammar of majority cinema, hui, consists of cutting and cutting, to fragment and reassemble the images of the world. miss it, he said, the ability to observe the movement of characters and elements in the space of the first Lumière views. well, no one like Béla Tarr revealed himself against a cinema based on the fragmentation of time and space. His dazzling staging is built on long sequence shots in which hypnotic tracking shots they turn each scene into a self-sufficient microcosm.
This style of Tarr is closely related to the torrential prose of his co-writer, l'escriptor László Krasznahorkai. By awarding him the Nobel, the Swedish academy emphasized that his work “explore with melancholy, humor and rigor the failure of the individual and of social structures in times of chaos, with a formal intensity that demands and rewards”. His first novel, satanic tango (1985), he already pointed to what would become a personal brand of writing characterized by long sentences, a minimum score and dense atmospheres. That book obsessed Béla Tarr and would inspire his own film universe, from the eixe moment inseparable from the atmospheres created by Krasznahorkai. In paraules by Violeta Kovacsics, “the universe of the novel, at times concrete and local and at others universal and abstract, it opened a door to the depths for Tarr: of the fantastic, of humanism, of the fragility of the community, of the collapse of certain political projects, of hopelessness, of moral decay, “of the end of life”.
Tarr met Krasznahorkai at that time and soon began their fertile creative relationship. In 1988, the two signed the script of The condemnation. The high point of their collaboration was marked by the film adaptations of the novels satanic tango i Melancholy of resistance (the film would be released in 2000 under the title Werckmeister Harmonies). The writer also signed the script ofThe man from London (2007), based on a novel by Georges Simenon, and of the latest feature film directed by Béla Tarr and her other regular collaborator Ágnes Hranitzky, the overwhelming The Turin Horse. Newly inspired by texts from the Nobel Prize winner, and composed by only 30 sequence plans, it's a cinematic experience like no other.
We can't bring Béla Tarr back, com pide Krasznahorkai. But we can invoke his legacy in the best possible way: projecting his films on the big screen, where all movies must be seen, but especially those of Béla Tarr. Because in his cinema the viewer finds –in addition to the unique universe he used from the novels of the Nobel Prize– the joy of staging, the deep emotion you feel in front of a cinema screen when you contemplate the perfect symbiosis between background and form, ethics and aesthetics. In the cycle we find many such moments of fulfillment. Just look at the sequence shots that open some movies: the slow movement that recedes from the view of a window – a landscape traversed by a chairlift – to the interior of a room in The condemnation, he travelling side that follows a group of cows in Satan Tango, whatever you open Werckmeister Harmonies with one of the characters staging an eclipse in front of the rest of the customers in a bar or the virtuous and intriguing plucked fromThe man from London, which creates a prodigious choreography between the movement of the camera and that of the characters within the frame.
24.03.26 TUESDAY / 18.00 h > PART 1 (137’)
24.03.26 TUESDAY / 20.30 h > PART 2 (125’)
25.03.26 WEDNESDAY / 18.00 h > PART 3 (187’)
Satan Tango
BÉLA TARR. Hungary, Germany, Swiss. 1994. VOS SPANISH. B/N. DCP.
Int. Mihály Víg, Horváth Putyi, Székely B. Nicholas, Erika Book, László feLugossy, Alfréd Járai, János Derzsi, Irene Szajki.
The failure of a collective farm during a few days of a rainy autumn. the dreams, intrigues and betrayals that occur in the cooperative, observed from the perspective of different characters in a film full of sarcasm and apocalyptic black humor. Restored version of Béla Tarr's monumental film, which films some of the most dazzling sequence shots in the history of cinema.
