Opinion The slow and ambitious cinema of Bela Tarr

Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, who died this week at the age of 70, was a master of cinema as mesmerism. The glacial pace of his films, with an average shot of two and a half minutes, demand more than the audience’s attention; those used to films composed of two-and-half-second shots have to prepare for total surrender. For, Tarr was a man of both enormous talent and towering ambition, committed to putting life itself on the screen, with all its beauty, banality and tawdriness — an endeavour hardly conducive to the neat patterns that mainstream cinema has trained viewers to expect.

Consider the punishing seven-and-a-half hour runtime of his 1994 adaptation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, about a village that abandons its life to follow a charlatan — the opening shot, which follows a herd of cows over a muddy field, is over six minutes long. Look at the lingering attention paid to the daily, unremarkable actions of a coach-driver and his daughter in The Turin Horse (2011), which takes off from the story about Nietzsche breaking down at the sight of a horse being flogged. Or marvel at how he turned Georges Simenon’s novel The Man from London into a meditation on guilt (2007). These films, with slow tracking shots and richly textured frames, don’t offer jolts of adrenaline, but a more enduring reward: An experience of immersion.

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Yet, haunting as their images are — a girl with a dead cat (Satantango), dogs sniffing around a wasteland of a town (Damnation, 1988) — Tarr’s films are also shot through with the kind of levity found in his frequent collaborator Krasznahorkai’s work. Eliciting wry chuckles over human foibles and the dark comic timing of fate, his films will last not only because of their artistry, but also the generosity of the vision that animates them.