22  Béla Tarr Interviewed by Jonathan Romney, National Film Theatre, London, 15.3.01

With kind permission of Béla Tarr and Jonathan Romney. The simultaneous translation was by László Hackenast.

The Hungarian director, Béla Tarr, has created a radical cinema which subverts conventional narrative and amongst other things ignores continuity as an editing device. His partner, Ágnes Hranitzky, is also his editor and co-filmmaker. Their films are built on long takes usually involving considerable camera movement, which at one level are reminiscent of that other Hungarian radical Miklós Jancsó. Yet there is something more disturbingly everyday about the milieu conveyed by their work. Their relationship with the composer is particularly unusual – more akin to the way animators work in the fact that the music is written before the film is shot.

‘It’s very difficult to talk about what we really think to be a film. The question really is what is film for? It’s a long time since we came to the conclusion that film is not about telling a story. It’s function is really something very different, something else. So that we can get closer to people, somehow we can understand everyday life. And that somehow we can understand human nature, why we are like we are’.

‘We believe that apart from the main protagonists in the film there are other protagonists: scenery, the weather, time and locations have their faces and they are important, they play an important role in the story’.

‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ a film by Béla Tarr (Courtesy Artificial Eye Film Company Ltd)

‘From the very beginning the way we handled time was probably different from other films. First of all because we cut and edited the film differently, most films are edited in the way pieces of information are edited, we didn’t do it that way. We are paying more attention to the internal psychological processes. And we concentrate on the personal existence and the personal presence of the actors and actresses. That is why meta-communication is that important, indeed is more important than verbal communication. And from here it is only a short step to put it in time and space’.

‘… there is a huge difference between literature and film. They use two different languages. Writers have much wider opportunities in terms of writing hundreds of sentences and they can invoke feelings in a much more varied way. Film in itself is quite a primitive language. It’s made simpler by it’s definiteness, by it’s being so concrete and that’s why it’s so exciting. It’s always a challenge to do something with this limited language. The writer Krasznahorkai always says ‘How can you do anything with such limited options, with such limited tools?’ He is exasperated by the fact that we, as he sees it, deal with such cheap things. Film is a cheap show in the marketplace and it’s a great thing that we can develop that into something valuable’.

JR:‘The other person that you worked with really closely right from the beginning is your partner and editor Ágnes Hranitzky. And she has really been more than an editor, because she is very close to the whole conception of the film’.

BT:‘Well she is present all through the making of the film and she is co-author and no decisions are made without her. Not only because she really knows and understands things, because we do work together, we make the films together. There is an everyday process of making these films with the preparations, the shooting and the editing.

There is another very important member of the family and that’s Vig Mihály, the composer with whom we have worked together for the past fifteen years. And without the composer the films wouldn’t be what they are. He goes into the studio a month before the actual shooting takes place, composes the music, gives it to us and then we use the music during the shoot. So the music plays an equal role to the actors or the scenes or the story. And we trust him so much that we don’t go there into the studio. He composes the music and brings the music to us. It’s a very close and very profound, very friendly relationship which has been shaped over the last fifteen years and it’s a relationship where we don’t need to talk about anything serious. We never talk about art, we never talk about philosophy, we don’t discuss aesthetics. We always talk about very concrete, very practical issues’.