These are sweeping, earthly films that portray mankind in his existential despair. However, an occasional glimpse of deliverance appears, when the drink flows, the orchestra plays and bar guests lose themselves in drunken merriment.
Exhibtion, films, talks & events
Béla Tarr
Till the End of the World
21 January — 7 May 2017
© Studio Hans Wilschut
He is a master of the magnificent long take, a master of wonderfully shot, melancholic films that express the human condition.
From 21 January to 7 May 2017, Eye presented the exhibition Béla Tarr – Till the End of the World. Béla Tarr is widely regarded as one of the most influential film authors of the past thirty years.
© Studio Hans Wilschut
© Studio Hans Wilschut
Béla Tarr (Pécs, Hungary, 1955) made his mark internationally with Damnation (1988) and enhanced his reputation and standing with the more than seven-hour-long Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). All three films can be considered a commentary on the vulnerability of human civilization. Unexpected, threatening developments seem to bring out the animal instincts in people and rapidly any sense of mutual solidarity in a closed community.
Watch the exhibition trailer:
Tarr considers his final film The Turin Horse (2011) to be a film about the end of the world, and hence the end of his own filmography. He could not imagine ever making another film that was more pared-down, more reduced to its essence. Since then, Tarr has run a film school in Sarajevo. For the exhibition at Eye, however, he has once again picked up the camera to film one final scene.
© Studio Hans Wilschut
© Studio Hans Wilschut
His anger about how refugees and migrants are treated in Europe, and especially in Hungary, has compelled him to make a statement and voice his views.
© Studio Hans Wilschut
About Béla Tarr
Béla Tarr was sixteen when he started to make films, chiefly naturalistic and social dramas and documentaries. He developed his distinctive and influential style after his studies at the film academy in Budapest. Since Damnation (1988), Tarr’s films have been characterized by long takes and little montage, mostly shot in breath-taking black and white. His characters live impoverished lives in a mood of dead-end despair in the desolate landscape of rural Hungary. Tarr presents his audience with an existence stripped of all trimmings and invites them to feel compassion.
Style and substance are inextricably linked to each other in the work of Béla Tarr. His films present a sombre view of a world in which people have no grip on their existence and are forced to suffer their fate passively. The characters in his films feel abandoned by life. The films are chiefly set in dreary surroundings dominated by decay, disintegration and disinterest. But out of this situation, Tarr, one of the great masters of contemporary cinema, has created a body of work that is hypnotic in its visual power. Tarr displays more courage than anyone in trusting the image to lift viewers out of the misery. After Damnation he filmed in black and white only, although grey might be more accurate, and used extremely long shots in which he lets the camera ‘explore’ a space or landscape very slowly.
© Studio Hans Wilschut
About the exhibition
Especially for Eye, Tarr created an exhibition that is a cross between a film, a theatre set and an installation. In his films, Tarr has always presented the downside of progress, the other side of the coin. It therefore comes as no surprise that he feels called upon to make a statement against the inhuman treatment of thousands of migrants and refugees who are trying to give their lives a dignity that – in Europe – is denied them.
At Eye, Tarr drew on ‘found footage’, images of war, fragments from his own films, props and a version of the tree from The Turin Horse and a new scene, specially filmed for the exhibition, to articulate both his bleak view of the world and his compassion for those marginalized by society. Béla Tarr is renowned for his love for the long shot, in which he explores the extreme boundaries of the language of cinema.
“I still consider film not as show business, but as the seventh art. I have never been interested in stories, because the story is forever the same. Just read the Old Testament; it’s all in there. We don’t need to tell any new stories, since we always end up telling the same old story.”
Béla Tarr
Eye has been following the work of this internationally celebrated director for some considerable time, and his films have been screened regularly in the Netherlands. Eye has distributed two films of Béla Tarr – Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse – and has twenty films of him in the collection, among which are early short films and coproductions with Hungarian television.
Publication
The exhibition was accompanied by a publication about Béla Tarr’s oeuvre, with an essay by Dana Linssen (NRC Handelsblad, de Filmkrant), which could be used as a guide for the exhibition.
Films, talks & more
The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of films, discussions and other activities.
Take a virtual tour through the exhibition:
© Anna Viktoria
Watch the ArtTube item on the exhibition:
© Studio Hans Wilschut
credits
Director of exhibitions / Curator
Jaap Guldemond
Associate curator
Marente Bloemheuvel
Project managers
Sanne Baar, Claartje Opdam
Graphic design
Joseph Plateau, Amsterdam
Technical production
Indyvideo, Utrecht
Installation
Landstra & De Vries, Amsterdam
Light
Theatermachine, Amsterdam
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