"We don't observe them without them observing us right back. We don't listen to them; the sounds and songs creep around us, the manifestation of unhinged but repressed emotion in endless repetitions. The movies become music boxes. Even in the dark, bitter nowhere he made his cinematic home-the same phantom towns beset by wild dogs and barflies with faces like old gourds and uncured meat-we hear a town's every thought."
"We don't consider them, because he insists we think about life instead of the cinema. Béla Tarr's art lay in something deeper, heavier, wilder than plot or images. Béla Tarr tamed time itself, uncovered the world like a pre-industrial cartographer, wrote poetry in the abyss while madmen danced to his tune. We are become Béla Tarr, who freely gave himself away."
Béla Tarr's films create a reciprocal gaze in which viewers feel observed as they observe. Sound and music function as creeping, repetitive forces that make films into music boxes and surface repressed emotion. His fictional settings are phantom towns marked by wild dogs, barflies, and a pervasive sense of decay. Tarr emphasizes life rather than cinematic technique, working in long takes and extended temporality that tame time itself. He approaches existential questions in Tolstoyan fashion, inspired by early exposure to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He began with 8mm documentaries, was courted by the Béla Balázs Studio and monitored by the secret police. His 1978 film Hotel Magnezit depicts an eviction from a worker's hostel.
Read at Roger Ebert
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