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The Hungarian film director is known for his existentially daunting black and white films. He explains why he left his home country to run his own film school, and why he loves Chekhov, Hitchcock – and Gus Van Sant

For years, Béla Tarr’s daunting films were unavailable in the UK and he was the much-discussed fugitive genius of high European cinema, the Col Kurtz of the movies, hidden deep in the jungle of ideas.

But in the 80s and 90s the work of the Hungarian auteur began to be shown in Britain and connoisseur audiences were stunned or puzzled or electrified by his extremely long movies. Often adapted from the equally revered and difficult novels of Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai, these films were edited and latterly co-directed by his wife Ágnes Hranitzky and featured the music of Mihály Vig.

If Béla Tarr’s mammoth 1994 opus Sátántangó allegorized the fall of communism on Hungary in its depiction of widespread social anomie and grotesque jockeying for power, 2000’s Werckmeister Harmonies (the first of three features on which he receives a co-director credit with wife Ágnes Hranitzky) might be taken as an extreme literalization of Francis Fukuyama’s notion that the end of the Soviet Union represented the so-called “end of history.”

But where Fukuyama’s words summarized a new world order of Westernized democracy and internationally inter-reliant capitalism, Werckmeister Harmonies runs with the idea to apocalyptic ends. Set in a small Hungarian town, the film presents a haunting monochrome world where the overcast gray sky represents the closest thing to full daylight as one can get. Otherwise, everything seems to exist in an inky void of starless night, dotted only by the faint glow of fading streetlights.

Populating this fading world...

Marking perhaps the greatest coup any festival’s managed these last ten years, the Film Fest Gent––recently in our sights for their addition of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new(er) feature Gift––are celebrating their 50th anniversary with 25 new shorts by an absolute murderer’s row of filmmakers, among them: Paul Schrader, Terence Davies, Bi Gan, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Helena Wittmann, Naomi Kawase, and João Pedro Rodrigues. Ff Gent’s unusual method was to first hire composers for a short, one- or two-minute piece, then asking this range of filmmakers––”who engage in more “traditional narrative cinema, as well as experimental work and documentary, to ensure diversity––letting sound inspire image. The majority of them (Schrader being a notable exception) are showing completely free.

Find the available films below:

The post Film Fest Gent Are Now Streaming New Shorts from Terence Davies, Bi Gan, Jia Zhangke, and More first appeared on The Film Stage.

When I asked Béla Tarr if he ever suspected that his seven-hour “Sátántangó” would resonate 25 years after it first screened at the 1994 Berlinale, the semi-retired Hungarian filmmaker hunched forward in his chair and responded with the raspy, “who gives a fuck?” grumble of a barfly at last call: “I’m not prophetic,” he grinned, revealing a well-punctuated set of teeth. “I was just an ugly, poor filmmaker. I still am. I don’t have power. I don’t have anything — just a fucking camera.”

When it comes to auteurs who look as if they could be characters in their own movies, the 64-year-old Tarr has to be near the top of the list, somewhere between Wes Anderson and Clint Eastwood. I met him on a brittle February afternoon, when he sagged through the lobby doors of Berlin’s Savoy hotel in a thick winter coat and a sour cloud of cigarette smoke.

Sátántangó, following its bewildering eight-minute prologue tracking shot of cattle wandering aimlessly around the weathered structures and mud-soaked grounds of a deserted farming estate in rural Hungary, opens with a shot of a dim and basic furnished room gradually filling with morning light as a man named Futaki (Miklós Székely), having risen off-screen out of bed, hesitantly approaches the window to investigate the tolling of imaginary church bells that have woken him from his sleep. The final shot, seven hours later, is its inverse: another man, known as the Doctor (Peter Berling), boards up his cluttered room by nailing wooden planks to the window, the room incrementally robbed of light, the disembodied echoing peel of bells ringing in his (and our) ears as the screen turns a final black. Two mirroring images reflecting opposites: lightness and darkness, a move towards and away from the world, from cradle to coffin, a circle opening and closing.

As far as black and white Hungarian dramas that push into the eight-hour running-time range, Bela Tarr’s epic “Sátántangó” doesn’t have much in the way of competition. And while many of its basic elements — its length, its style, its subject matter — might sound prohibitive, the wide-ranging study of life in a rural village during the final days of Communism is one of cinema’s most fascinating and immersive films.

It’s also one that’s rarely seen, thanks in part to that 439-minute length (not so appealing for many theaters) and a very brief home video release (many fans have been forced to watch it on VHS bootlegs). But that’s all changing, thanks to a brand-new restoration that will soon hit theaters and eventually be available for Blu-ray consumption. Fans of Tarr can thank Arbelos Films, which worked with the Hungarian Filmlab to restore the film from its original 35mm camera negative.

Béla Tarr © Zero Fiction FilmThe Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr bid a farewell to the active filmmaking at the age of 55 with the 146-minute long reckoning The Turin Horse (2011), consisting of 30 takes. His filmography counts nine features that elevated him into the pantheon of world cinema, earning Tarr epithets as legend, master, cult or visionary, among others. Tarr started shooting films as an amateur at the age of 16, and at 22 he got a shot to make a feature-length film, Family Nest (1979), at Béla Balázs Studio. The early stage of the filmmaker's career marked by Family Nest, The Outsider (1981) and The Prefab People (1982) is defined by social themes and documentary style akin to cinéma vérité. However, the core of his work features his singular aesthetics and bleak visions of the post-communist landscape, notably in Damnation (1988), the cinephiliac 432-minute long treat Sátántangó (1994), and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). His distinctive style stems from black and white,...

Operating somewhere between Bergman and Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr has been a wholly original inspiration for remodernist filmmakers for his spiritually exploratory form of cinema that revels in extremely long takes and the dire desolation of humanity itself (see his 7.5 hour epic Sátántangó). With his longtime editor, Ágnes Hranitzky, Tarr co-directed what may turn out to be his final feature, the brutal, coldly intense paragon of philosophic, but to-the-point filmmaking, The Turin Horse. Pushing his craft to the bleakest edge of mankind, Tarr masterfully paints the maddening monotony and utter futility of waking up day after day in austere black in white. This is dark stuff, people. Real dark. And sadly, Tarr is said to be leaving cinema (directing) on this high, bleak note.

The film begins with a spoken word preface that tells the tale of Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1889 in Turin, Italy, observing a cab driver whipping his stubborn horse.

The opening event of Béla Tarr‘s The Turin Horse may, perhaps, set up false expectations for many a viewer — set over a pitch-black screen, a coarse-grained voice-over recounts the demise of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, which, according to the story (as well as popular belief, in some sense), was initiated by the philosopher’s lamented reaction to a cab driver’s whipping of an unresponsive horse. The incident took place on January 3, 1889, and was followed by ten years of catatonic inactivity for Nietzsche.

The most obvious reason why this introduction might tweak viewers’ expectations in the wrong direction is the presence of words. While the curtain-raiser is sustained, without imagery, by an off-screen articulation, the rest of the film — maybe ever-so-slightly ironically — is the exact opposite. It’s image-driven, with unimaginably long takes (often exceeding five minutes) and with an almost complete aversion to dialogue. Even the one...

Still from The Turin Horse

Among the various elements of camera style, the long uncut sequence has a way of getting attention for itself. Originally, the device was a constituent of mise en scène or the articulation of cinematic space (as opposed to montage, which is the articulation of time). Where mise en scène has regard for the subject in front of the camera and is associated with the realist aesthetic, montage enables expression by making new associations. The uncut sequence in films by Max Ophuls (e.g. The Earrings of Madame de…, 1954) is a way of maintaining the integrity of the space while narrating and this is also true of Miklós Jancsó (The Red and the White, 1967). In Ophuls’ dance hall scenes, for instance, the camera catches different elements of the action without a single cut, thereby establishing the unity of space instead of dismembering it – as Sergei Eisenstein...

With the ever-reliable award season upon us, here are my favourite movies of 2011. All of these films were released in the UK in 2011 (which is a long way of saying I haven’t seen Shame). That still doesn’t mean I saw all the year’s releases, and there are probably movies that equally deserved a place, but these are all films I have either already seen more than once or eagerly look forward to watching again.

10. Midnight In Paris

I remember Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Year’s Eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it and we said it was a good book but there was no need to have written it, because Charles Dickens had already written it. And we laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth. –

Woody Allen,...

Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melancholia Melancholia Tops European Film Awards, Lars von Trier Bypassed, Colin Firth Beats Jean Dujardin Lars Von Trier/Melancholia Dominate European Film Awards European Film 2011 The Artist, France Written & Directed By: Michel Hazanavicius Produced By: Thomas Langmann & Emmanuel Montamat Le Gamin Au Velo (The Kid with a Bike), Belgium/France/Italy Written & Directed By: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne Produced By: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Denis Freyd & Andrea Occhipinti HÆVNEN (In a Better World), Denmark Directed By: Susanne Bier Written By: Anders Thomas Jensen Produced By: Sisse Graum Jørgensen The King's Speech, UK Directed By: Tom Hooper Written By: David Seidler Produced By: Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Gareth Unwin Le Havre, Finland/France/Germany Written & Directed By: Aki Kaurismäki Produced By: Aki Kaurismäki & Karl Baumgartner * Melancholia, Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany Written & Directed By: Lars von Trier Produced By: Meta Louise Foldager & Louise Vesth European Director 2011 * Susanne Bier for...

The live stream of the European Film Awards from Berlin this evening was pretty spotty, but a few fine moments came through, particularly the moment when a special honorary award was inaugurated and presented to a very surprised Michel Piccoli by Volker Schlöndorff and Bruno Ganz.

Another special award was given to producer Mariela Besuievski, Stellan Skarsgård presented the European Achievement in World Cinema Award to Mads Mikkelsen, and Stephen Frears received this year's Lifetime Achievement Award.

The full list of winners and nominees:

European Film 2011: Melancholia, Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany

Written and Directed by Lars von Trier

Produced by Meta Louise Foldager and Louise Vesth.

Also nominated:

The Artist, France

Written and Directed by Michel Hazanavicius

Produced by Thomas Langmann and Emmanuel Montamat

Le Gamin au Velo (The Kid with a Bike), Belgium/France/Italy

Written and Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Produced by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne,...

Melancholia, The Artist, Le Havre and the other nominations for the 2011 European Film Awards have been announced. The 24th Annual European Film Awards are presented “by the European Film Academy to recognize excellence in European cinematic achievements. The awards are given in over ten categories of which the most important is the Film of the year. They are restricted to European cinema and European producers, directors, and actors.” This year’s European Film Awards “ceremony will be held on December 3, 2011 in Berlin’s Tempodrom near Potsdamer Platz.”

The full listing of the 2011 European Film Awards nominations is below.

European Film 2011

The Artist, France

Written and Directed by: Michel Hazanavicius; Produced by: Thomas Langmann & Emmanuel Montamat

Le Gamin au Velo (The Kid with a Bike), Belgium/France/Italy

Written and Directed by: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne; Produced by: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Denis Freyd & Andrea Occhipinti

Hævnen (In a Better World), Denmark...

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia leads the nomination race for the 24th European Film Awards with 7 nominations in various categories including Best European Film and Best European Director.

The award ceremony will be held in Berlin on December 3, 2011.

The complete list of nominees:

European Film 2011

The Artist

The Kid With A Bike

In A Better World

The King’s Speech

Le Havre

Melancholia

European Director 2011

Susanne Bier for In a Better World

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne for The Kid with a Bike

Aki Kaurismäki for Le Havre

Béla Tarr for The Turin Horse

Lars von Trier for Melancholia

European Actress 2011

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia

Cécile de France in The Kid with a Bike

Charlotte Gainsbourg in Melancholia

Nadezhda Markina in Elena

Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin

European Actor 2011

Jean Dujardin in The Artist

Colin Firth in The King’s Speech

Mikael Persbrandt in In A Better World...

"Melancholia" is the film to beat at this year's European Film Awards, which announced its nominated films Saturday at the Seville European Film Festival. The Lars von Trier film leads the pack with eight nominations including best film, best director, two best actress nods for Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg and best screenwriter. Following "Melancholia" -- all with half the number of noms it earned -- are Tom Hooper's "The King's Speech," Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artist," Aki Kaurismaki's "Le Havre," Susanne Bier's "In a Better World" and Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne's "The Kid with a Bike." "The King's Speech" and "In a Better World" won best picture and best foreign film, respectively, at the Academy Awards this year.

Whether "Melancholia" will get as much love outside of Europe remains to be seen, when it opens in the U.S. in limited release on Nov. 11. The film,...

"Lars von Trier's Melancholia led the 24th European Film Award nominations, which were announced this morning," reports indieWIRE's Peter Knegt. "The film took 8 nominations including best film, director, screenplay and a double nominations for best actress with Kirsten Dunst [who, of course, won Best Actress in Cannes] and Charlotte Gainsbourg." Peruse the full list below and note that the list of nominees for European Film 2011 is identical to the one for European Director 2011 — except that Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) has been switched out for Béla Tarr, whose The Turin Horse also scores nominations for cinematographer Fred Kelemen and composer Mihály Vig.

European Film 2011

The Artist, France

Written and Directed by Michel Hazanavicius

Produced by Thomas Langmann and Emmanuel Montamat

Le Gamin au Velo (The Kid with a Bike), Belgium/France/Italy

Written and Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Produced by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Denis Freyd and Andrea Occhipinti

Haeven (In a Better World...

The Turin Horse

Directed by Béla Tarr

Written by Béla Tarr

Hungary, 2011

The Turin Horse is Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s first film since 2007. Working with frequent co-writer László Krasznahorkai, but without a novel as their source material for the first time in over a decade, Tarr uses the tale of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s horse as prologue for a despondent film in his signature long takes.

As the story goes and as Tarr’s own voiceover tells us in the beginning of the film, Nietzsche saw a horse being beaten. He ran to protect it, throwing his arms around the animal. For two days following he was mute and prostrate, and then suffered from dementia for the next ten years until his death. The horse at the center of Tarr’s film is owned by a husband and daughter who solely occupy the large majority of the screen-time. Living...

Above: Composer Cliff Martinez. Photograph by Robert Charles Mann.

Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Georges Delerue, Toru Takemitsu...sometimes it seems like cinema's greatest composers are all behind us. But just as films were not "better back then," soundtracks weren't either. Looking for great soundtrack artists nowadays is akin to looking for great movies: there seems a lot more of everything, and it takes a roving gaze (and ear) to find that excellence and expression splintered across film festivals, creaking home video releases, YouTube videos (see, recently, a gathering of music by Jorge Arriagada for Raúl Ruiz's films) and other disseminations of the ever-widening world of cinema.

While I may look forward to a film by a director I like, or one shot by a cinematographer I'm interested in, it's not every day I'm excited to hear a movie. One major exception to this aural ignorance is a name that...

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

We are told, to begin with, that Frederick Nietzsche once saw a horse being beaten in Turin and threw his arms around its neck, before collapsing to the ground. This (possibly apocryphal) tale is reasonably well-known; afterwards Nietzsche barely spoke again for the remaining ten years of his life. But what, it is reasonable to ask, happened to the horse?

Béla Tarr’s deceptively simple new movie – it is widely reported to be his last – begins with this question.

In Tarr’s fictionalised version, he gives the horse to an old man who lives in a farmhouse with his daughter. There is too little evidence of vegetation to call it a ‘farm.’ They live a simple existence: collecting water from the well, feeding the horse, eating a single boiled potato each (with their hands) every day. Outside, the wind howls constantly. Every time they leave the...