The radical humanity of Béla Tarr's films

The Hungarian director’s works, funny and heartbreaking, honor our struggle.

- BY JOHN PENNER

The contemplative cinema of Béla Tarr was as excruciatingly beautiful as it was brazenly original, often conjuring comparison to the work of a master painter.

His stark black-and-white imagery in assiduously long takes with creeping camera movements — hallmarks of his filmmaking — demanded that the viewer pause to look, to see, as one might in regarding a Picasso or a Bruegel.

Tarr’s revolution in form, however, cannot be separated from the radical humanity of his filmmaking. In a concentrated collection of 10 features over less than four decades, his gaze was fixed on the resolute dignity of his marginalized and downtrodden characters, which elevated his work beyond the realm of cinephile contemplation.

With the death of the Hungarian master on Tuesday at age 70, that enduring humanity makes his work as essential as ever.

“I despise stories,” Tarr once explained to an interviewer, “as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another, ... There are only states of being — all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time.”

His films typically did not concern themselves with the plots of individual lives, which in reality are revealed in retrospect, if at all. They focused instead on human experience as it unfolds, moment by uncertain moment, capturing everyday foibles, errors and foolishness in the face of quotidian ruthlessness. As in Samuel Beckett's tragicomic theater and novels, Tarr’s movies, by turns funny and heartbreaking, dignify human struggle with an uncommon tenacity of vision and empathy.

Some of Tarr’s most memorable scenes feature landscapes, often bleak and despairing settings of decaying Hungarian towns, punctuated with closeups of characters’ faces. Asked by film historian David Bordwell about this juxtaposition, Tarr replied: “But the face is the landscape.”