BELA TARR
"The Metamorphoses of a Visionary"
Béla Tarr's filmography, made up of ten feature films and a handful
of short films, fascinates moviegoers around the world. From the Family Nest (1977)
at the Cheval de Turin (2011), the filmmaker's career is as striking for its political and philosophical coherence as for the marked evolution of his style.
This book looks back on this journey based on four films ( The Family Nest , The Outsider , Damnation , Sátántangó ), starting from the documentary-inspired urban camera sessions that Tarr made at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, to the fables metaphysics that he conceived ten years later with the writer László Krasznahorkai, in the middle of the desolate spaces of the Hungarian countryside. It is a question of understanding the metamorphoses of this visionary artist by exploring the historical and sociological roots of his cinema, the influences and encounters that have nourished his aesthetic research, and the motifs that run through all of his work. The despair that characterizes it gives it all its relevance, especially in the way it encounters contemporary imaginaries of ecological disaster. The genius of the Hungarian filmmaker will have been to translate this feeling into a series of cinematographic experiences allowing us, one after the other, to better grasp the dark fabric of our present.
Mathieu Lericq is a researcher and teacher in film studies at the University of Paris 8 – Vincennes Saint-Denis, member of the ESTCA laboratory, specialist in central – and eastern European cinematography. Defended in 2019 and awarded a thesis prize from the University of Aix-Marseille, her doctorate focuses on the political value of bodies and sexualities in Polish cinema (1968-1989). He is the author of articles on the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jerzy Skolimowski and Sergei Loznitsa. He also works as a critic and as a programmer.
Damien Marguet is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Paris 8 – Vincennes Saint-Denis, member of the ESTCA laboratory, filmmaker and programmer. His work focuses on the cinemas of Eastern Europe and more specifically Hungarian cinema, the relationship between cinema, literature, language and translation, and ecological issues.
IN THE CINEMA APRIL 6