Béla Tarr’s Masterclass at the Film Museum, Vienna, Austria (June 9th, 2019)
By Işıl Karataş
The Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr[1], – entered the extremely warm and almost full screening room of the Film Museum in Vienna with a broken arm, and started his almost two-hour long masterclass by saying ‘Let’s talk’. The manifesto-like, genuine conversation moderated by journalist Patrick Holzapfel began there. Tarr came to Vienna for his latest installation film, Missing People (2019) that he created based on a performance ‘involving about 250 homeless people’.[2] The master class topics ranged from his first film-making experience that led to him being expelled from university, to his personal approach to film-making. As he used expletives almost as a punctuation, the atmosphere in the room soon turned casual and relaxed, just like himself. Tarr gained the undivided attention of the audience within the first few minutes.
The discussion started with a question on his inspiration for his film Family Nest (1979), which was produced in five days with a crew of five people and costed 500 euros (in today’s currency). Tarr was very clear on what has always motivated him to make films and what has, as well, prevented him from developing particular projects: ‘It is life itself which is the inspiration. So, the inspiration comes from everywhere: to shake someone’s hand or look them in their eyes’. He was very clear on his reason for making films: ‘It is not to show off as a great filmmaker, but to say something to people’. Although he was only twenty-two years old when he shot his first film and knew nothing about filmmaking, he already knew that all he wanted was to metaphorically ‘punch’, ‘beat’, or ‘shake’ the audience, and nothing more. What made this Master Class bold was this unshakable attitude towards filmmaking and how he expressed his thoughts with emotion: ‘If you want to be a filmmaker, forget it! You cannot be a (expletive)-ing professional filmmaker’. These aphorism-like between-the-lines comments show clearly why his films are so strong in revealing the ontological problems of life and revealing the different layers of reality. This was a quest for the essence of life which, no wonder, led to the Turin Horse (2011), his masterpiece which he defined as a film about ‘anti-genesis’, that won the Jury Grand Prix at the Berlinale.
His interpretation of video as a medium is as clear as his philosophical approach to it. Tarr defines the main characteristics of a film as ‘casting’, ‘location’, and ‘music’. The striking example of how he spent years to find a location for Turin Horse (2011), only to find a lone standing tree and then build a house there, reflects his vision of filmmaking. His habit of playing the soundtrack of his films on set during the shooting reflects how serious he is about such aspects. He says that his film crew breathes in sync during the shootings. This fascination for life and reality, and his ability to ‘hunt’ and capture human feelings is so important to him, that even the process of editing the film – which is normally done in post-production -, happens during the shooting ‘where the real rhythm happens[sic]’. Tarr also mentioned an anecdote that once he was on a Jean-Luc Godard set and heard the director say that ‘a real filmmaker cuts the film on set’. Tarr says that he took it seriously even though Godard himself never did what he said. Everyone laughed in the room.
Another arresting detail in the talk relates to his view on the nature of digital and analogue cinema. He affirmed that ‘people are using the digital camera like a fake film camera’ and emphasized that the digital domain should find a new language and stop imitating the film language. ‘You cannot use the same form to ask new questions’, he expressed, an idea which also explains his approach to teaching filmmaking during several editions of the Film Factory at the Sarajevo Film Academy. He declared that being a mentor for young filmmakers is work that comes with significant struggle, as every student is different and as the teacher needs to adopt a different approach for each person and consider their personalities. Tarr, as a very sensible advisor who exerted extra effort to establish a spiritual relationship with each of his students, expressed how it is, at the same time, a very rewarding practice as he has built a a wide international network with his former students, now great cineastes.
Thus, the aim to go beyond appearances and find the
peculiarities of each layer seems to be the impulse for Tarr. His monotonous
and deep voice wrapped the room as the heavy warm air pushed us further down in
our chairs and made it hard to breathe. Fortunately, it was again Tarr’s
sincerity which saved us from this almost unbearable heaviness. He finished with
a line as simple as the one he started with: ‘Let’s go have some fresh air!’
This masterclass was important for two main reasons, among others. First, it
was valuable, especially for the young audience who attended, to witness the
honest interrogation that Tarr made of himself and his own audio-visual praxis
in order to both resist the certain dominant aspects of industrialised cinema
and to create his own personal cinematic culture. Second, it was highly
interesting to hear the milestones of many years’ experience first-hand, with his
unique way of telling stories and to mark his openness while sharing the most
crucial aspects of his empirically hard-earned artistic wisdom. Tarr’s
masterclass provided rich food for thought for anthropologists interested in exploring
visual anthropology.
[1] Béla Tarr is an award-winning filmmaker who dealt with the nebulous approaching of the end of the world as a philosophical leitmotif in well-known films such as Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and The Turin Horse (2011) – all co-written with Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai.
[2] According to the leaflet of Missing People by Wiener Festwochen, p.6 https://www.festwochen.at/fileadmin/user_upload/WFW19_AP_MissingPeople_20190612_low.pdf , Last access: 22.06.2019.
Işıl Karataş has Studies of Communication / Radio, Film and Television at the Galatasaray University in Istanbul (2008-2014), of Film and Communication at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 (2011/12) and the tri-national Master’s Program “European Film and Media Studies” at the Lumière University Lyon 2 (2014-2016), Utrecht University (2015), Bauhaus University, Weimar (2015-2016). Since December 2018 Işıl has worked as a university assistant “prae doc” at the Institute for European Ethnology at the University of Vienna.
(Image – Bela Tarr at the Sarajevo Film Festival – Wikimedia Commons)
