'Glacial pace' Master of slow cinema perfected isolation

The semiofficial genre of “slow cinema” has been around for decades: glacial pacing, unhurried and unbroken takes, characters who appear to be looking - often wordlessly and unsmilingly - at people or things off camera or into the lens itself, the immobile silence accumulating into a transcendental simplicity.

- Peter Bradshaw

Robert Bresson, Theo Angelopoulos, Joe Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz, Lisandro Alonso; these are all great slow cinema practitioners. But surely no filmmaker ever got the speedometer needle further back to the left than the tragicomic master Béla Tarr. His pace was less than zero, a kind of intense and monolithic slowness, in films that moved, often almost infinitesimally, like vast gothic ships across dark seas.

Audience reactions were often a kind of delirium or incredulity at just how punishing the anti-pace was, but - given sufficient investment of attention - you found yourself responding with awe, but also laughing along to the macabre dark comedy, the parable and the satire. A Béla Tarr movie gave you drunkenness and hangover at the same time. And people were often to be found getting despairingly drunk in his films.