Exhibition
and film programme
21 Jan – 7 May 2017
Béla Tarr
Till the End of the World
EYE Filmmuseum
Amsterdam
eyefilm.nl /tarr
Filmography of
Béla Tarr
(1955)
Hotel Magnezit, 1978,
black and white, 10’
Hungary
Family Nest
(Családi tűzfészek), 1979,
black and white, 108’
Hungary
Scenario: Béla Tarr
Cinematography: Ferenc Pap
Montage: Anna Kornis
Music: János Bródy, Mihály
Móricz, Szabolcs Szörényi,
Béla Tolcsvay, László Tolcsvay
The Outsider
(Szabadgyalog), 1982, colour,
122’
Hungary
Scenario: Béla Tarr
Cinematography: Barna Mihók,
Ferenc Pap
Montage & assistant director:
Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: András Szabó
The Prefab People
(Panelkapcsolat), 1982, black
and white, 102’
Hungary
Scenario: Béla Tarr
Cinematography: Barna Mihók,
Ferenc Pap
Montage & assistant director:
Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg
Macbeth, 1982, 72’,
television film, colour
Hungary
Scenario: Béla Tarr,
Ágnes Hranitzky, based on
William Shakespeare
Cinematography: Buda Gulyás,
Ferenc Pap
Music: András Szabó
Almanac of Fall
(Őszi almanach), 1984,
colour, 119’
Hungary
Scenario: Béla Tarr
Cinematography: Buda Gulyás,
Sándor Kardos, Ferenc Pap
Montage & assistant director:
Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg
Damnation (Kárhozat),
1988, black and white, 120’
Hungary
Scenario: László
Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr
Cinematography: Gábor
Medvigy
Montage & assistant director:
Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg
City Life, episode entitled
The Last Boat ­(Az utolsó
hajó), 1990, Béla Tarr, black
and white, 30’
Argentina / Netherlands
Scenario: Béla Tarr, László
Krasznahorkai
Cinematography: Gábor
Medvigy
Montage: Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg, Zbigniew
Preisner
Satantango (Sátántangó),
1994, black and white, 450’
Hungary/Germany/Switzerland
Scenario: László Krasznahorkai
(based on his novel Sátán­tangó,
1985), Béla Tarr
Cinematography: Gábor
Medvigy Montage & co-author:
Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg
Journey on the Plain
(Utazás az Alföldön), 1995,
television film, colour, 35’
Hungary
Scenario: based on the
poems of Sándor Petőfi
Cinematography: Fred
Kelemen
Montage: Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg
Werckmeister Harmonies
(Werckmeister harmóniák),
2000, black and white, 145’
Béla Tarr
Till the End of
the World
Hungary/Italy/France/Germany
Scenario: László Krasznahorkai
(based on his 1989 novel
Az ellenállás melankóliája
(The Melancholy of
Resistance)), Béla Tarr
Cinematography: Gábor
Medvigy and Jörg Widmer, Rob
Tregenza, Patrick de Ranter,
Emil Novák, Miklós Gurbán,
Erwin Lanzensberger
Co-director & montage:
Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg
Jaap Guldemond
Visions of Europe, segment
entitled Prologue (Prológus),
2004, black and white, 5’
Hungary
Cinematography: Robby Müller
Music: Mihály Víg
The Man from London
(A londoni férfi), 2007, black
and white, 139’
Hungary/Germany/France
Scenario: László
Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr,
adaptation of Georges
Simenon’s novel L’homme
de Londres, 1934
Cinematography: Fred
Kelemen
Co-director & montage:
Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg
The Turin Horse
(A torinói ló), 2011, black and
white, 146’
Hungary/France/Germany/
Switzerland/United States
Scenario: László
Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr
Cinematography: Fred
Kelemen
Co-director & montage:
Ágnes Hranitzky
Music: Mihály Víg
2
EYE is proud to present the first
ever exhibition by the Hungarian film­
maker Béla Tarr (Pécs, Hungary, 1955).
Béla Tarr is widely regarded as one of
the most important and influential film
authors of the past three decades.
He is the master of the long take, the
master of wonderfully shot, languid,
melancholic films about the human
condition. After making his international
breakthrough with Damnation (1988),
he enhanced his reputation and standing
with the more than seven-hour Satan­
tango (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies
(2000) and The Turin Horse (2011).
Tarr considers The Turin Horse to
be his very last film, the one in which he
has said all he wanted to say as a
filmmaker. For Tarr views filmmaking,
not as a profession, but as an urgency.
If there is no need to say something,
better to remain silent. In recent years,
however, Europe has been confronted
by huge influxes of refugees from Syria,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia and
other countries in Africa. Tarr was
moved by the way Europe – after an
initially positive response – reacted by
closing its borders. Europe simply
stood by and watched as a humanitarian
tragedy unfolded before its eyes. One
of the first countries to close its borders
was Béla Tarr’s native Hungary.
Anybody who is at all familiar with the
work of Béla Tarr will not be surprised
that these events provoked him into
making a statement in this exhibition at
EYE. Not so much a political statement,
but more an appeal to humanity, to the
people and politicians of Europe, to
respect universal human values.
The work of Tarr reveals a sombre
view of the world, in which people have
little control of their own existence. The
characters in his films feel abandoned
by life. The films are chiefly set in dreary
surroundings dominated by decay,
disintegration and disinterest. An out­
sider sometimes appears, upsetting the
established patterns within a small
community. But Tarr also makes it clear
that there can be no escape. Life
remains as it is.
As one of the great masters of
contemporary cinema, Tarr has carved
out this bleak view of the world a body
of work that is hypnotic in its sheer
visual force. More than anyone else, he
has the courage to trust the image. After
Damnation (1988) he filmed in black
and white only, or rather in shades of
grey, using extreme long shots in which
he lets the camera ‘explore’ spaces or
landscapes very slowly. In combination
with the almost total lack of a traditional
story line, his style of filming reinforces
the state of mind of his characters and
the futility of existence. Even though
Tarr has an unmistakeably sombre view
of society, he shows great compassion
for his characters by infusing the rain,
the mud, the wind, the disintegration and
the despair with a poetry that testi­fies to
his empathy.
For EYE, Tarr has made a filmic
installation that is a cross between a
film, a theatre decor and an installation.
Tarr shares with us his anger with the
help of ‘found footage’, images of war,
fragments from his own films and props.
The exhibition starts with a space that
confronts visitors with the inhuman
1
I
conditions from which migrants try to
escape, and in which they find them­
selves after a long journey. War,
bombings, poverty, hunger, oppression,
fear and finally closed borders and
local henchmen who strike fear into the
migrants, rob them, and try to force
them back. Visitors then enter the world
of Tarr, populated by similar characters
on the margins of society.
Border. We enter the exhibition by passing
through a border checkpoint. A no-man’s-land
surrounded by fences. Like those being built
again today all over Europe, like those that
Béla Tarr increasingly encounters in his native
Hungary. Behind the fences we see refugees,
immigrants, transients, illegal residents. Despair
has wiped the last gleam of hope from their
faces. This is the reality of an open Europe.
Tarr collected photos and news images for this
installation.
Tarr picked up his camera one
more time specially for this exhibition
and filmed an 11-minute shot as the
ultimate epilogue to his work in film. In
it, a small boy plays the accordion in an
anonymous shopping centre. A look of
dismay falls across the face of the boy,
unsure as he is whether he can trust
the world before him — a world that we
viewers cannot see. With this, Tarr asks
us: can we create a world we can
believe in?
2
Béla Tarr:
‘I still consider film not
as show business, but
as the seventh art.’
Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000
3
Béla Tarr
This is no oeuvre;
this is a universe
II
Exterior. The cinema of Béla Tarr reduced to its
purest essence, to a single image. The tree that
valiantly stands firm in the lashing wind in his
final film The Turin Horse (2011). This is a space
in which to feel and hear the wind. To experience
the solitude and desolation of emptiness.
Being-in-time is an important aspect of the films
of Béla Tarr. The time that passes in his famous
long shots. Moving through the space, visitors
create their own long take, their own tracking
shot. Our eyes become the eyes of the camera.
Dana Linssen
4
‘This is a true story.
It didn’t happen to
the people in the film,
but it could have.’
(Family Nest, 1977)
Damnation, 1988
6.
This story begins in the dark. You
could say that all film fables begin in
the dark. But this one begins in the dark
because it ends in the dark. This story
begins with the end. Few artists
announce at the height of their artistic
powers that they’re quitting because
they ‘have said all they had to say’. And
then make a final film about the last six
days before the light dies. As though the
end of humanity and the end of cinema
coincide. Yet that is precisely what
Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr did
when his film The Turin Horse premiered
at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, and the
jury promptly awarded him a Golden
Bear.
The Turin Horse opens with a dry
voice-over that tells how the philos­opher
Friedrich Nietzsche, on 3 January 1889,
witnessed a coachman mal­treating
his horse in Turin. The story goes that
Nietzsche threw his arms around
the horse’s neck and then went mad.
‘About the horse,’ the narrator con­
tinues, ‘we know nothing.’ You could
say that the film follows that horse, all
the way to the Hungarian puszta, where
an apocalyptic wind lashes the land.
There we encounter the half-paralysed
driver and his adult daughter who
watch with resig­nation as the world
ends, filling their days with the only
chores that people can still carry out:
fetching water, washing clothes,
cooking potatoes, sleeping. Until the
night is no longer safe for their dreams.
‘But what’s happening, papa?’
asks the daughter. It’s not about the
answer, which her father doesn’t have
anyway, but the weak tone of her
question, about the terrifyingly natural
way they adapted themselves to their
fate centuries ago. We think that the
film is set in the past, but it could just as
easily be the future. Or the present. For
time no longer seems to exist. Man’s
ability to normalize, adapt and conform
is precisely his downfall. Father and
5
III
Interior. The hardships of the first two spaces
are followed by the apparent protection of an
interior. For this space, Béla Tarr selected four
key scenes from his work. Two are taken from
Damnation (1988). This film tells the story of
the unemployed and depressed Karrer, who is
in love with the singer from the local Titanik Bar.
We see a night-time dance scene in which the
camera observes the dancers like an outsider.
The other scene is a long panorama shot
out­side the bar. We see the regulars, the
­inhabitants of the town, staring into the distance
motionlessly. It is an ominous, absurdist tableau
of living ­statues, with the off-screen accordion
music still encouraging dancing.
Another classic scene comes from Werck­
meister Harmonies (2000), and consists of an
intense burst of discontentment, a procession
of angry men who are out to destroy everything
of value in the town.
Together with cameraman Robby Müller,
Tarr contributed a short segment entitled Pro­
logue to the anthology film Visions of Europe.
The section consists of a long tracking shot
past people queueing at a soup kitchen. A reflection of the scenes from Damnation and Werck­
meister Harmonies, and an echo of the refugees
we passed at the entrance to the exhibition.
daughter are made up of nothing but
actions. Repetitive automatisms.
Reflexes. The characters of Béla Tarr
float somewhere between Beckett and
Antonioni. Get dressed, muck out the
stable, eat, another day. Until that day
probably doesn’t arrive.
Tarr said he had said all he had to
say with this film, and had no desire to
repeat himself. But that is not to say he
had lost his faith in the art of film. After
nine feature films and a handful of
shorter productions that had changed
the landscape of modern film once and
for all, he went and founded a film
school in Sarajevo.
6
5.
That is why this story, which is
a story that begins in the dark, and is
a story in which many endings beckon,
is still a story of hope. Or of courage.
Or of the courage of desperation with
which we continue to tell stories. Till the
end.
You have just watched a film by
Béla Tarr. The world has just ended.
But something has happened and you
can no longer ignore it. You are touched
and moved, invigorated in some strange
sort of way. And you try to think what it
means. What that experience means
for your sense of inner self. You have
just been very close to people who
deceived and lied to one another, who
loved one another but no longer know
how to express that. You have seen
throngs marching through the streets,
you have seen the light die out, and
here you still are.
That ‘having said what there is to
say’ from Béla Tarr calls to mind the
famous line by philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein at the end of his Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus: ‘Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent’. Wittgenstein is not saying that
we must remain silent. We can always
sing or write poetry or roar with
depravity. But he wants philosophy to
tread carefully when it comes to making
metaphysical statements. Only empirical
and logical statements about the
physical world are meaningful.
Tarr is also called a philosopher.
And a mystic. His films started out in
the realm of documentary before
moving through politically and socially
committed work into increasingly
metaphysical, transcendental images
and stories which, for that matter, never
lost sight of the lives of ordinary people.
It was more a process of paring down,
of edging ever closer to the essence.
That is not to say that we have to
interpret those films more symbolically.
Time and again he reminds us that his
films are not allegories. They have no
political or religious meaning. Even so,
some­times the viewer cannot escape
his own associations. Werck­meister
Harmonies (2000) is set in the shadow
of a looming eclipse in a small provincial
town. The sense of ordinari­ness is
disrupted by the arrival of a travelling
exhibition of wonders and curiosities of
nature, among them a stuffed whale,
and a mysterious prince, whom we
never get to see, but who is ascribed
the role of firebrand.
You could say that this is a film
about chaos and order. János Valuska,
the village postman, and our eyes and
ears in the film, is fascinated by a
cosmical order, which is not necessarily
religious. In the fabulously dancing
opening scene, he explains how the
coming solar eclipse actually happens,
without any interference from a higher
power. At closing time in the local pub,
he makes the regular guests stage
how the sun occupies the centre of our
solar system. ‘You are the sun. The sun
doesn’t move.’ And he arranges the
drunken regulars as the earth and moon
and other planets around it. Lonely and
inebriated on pálinka, each of them
is a motionless star occupying his own
universe.
7
IV
Children. The most famous scene by Béla Tarr
probably comes from Satantango (1994), in
which the young Erika Bók walks day and night
with her dead cat. She killed the animal, her only
playmate, in an act of cruelty and tenderness.
A mixture of sadness and aggression. The
­children in his films are not spared such complex
feelings. Look, for example, at the scene in
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) in which the
two sons of the village policeman jump on
their beds in a mad frenzy. Even play becomes
destructive.
As the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain
was lifted in Europe, Béla Tarr made the short
film The Last Boat (1990), about an abandoned
Buda­pest. The camera travels along empty
streets, hospitals, abandoned factories as the
last inhabitants depart.
Satantango, 1994
8
4.
It’s a classic dramaturgical
starting point: what happens when the
status quo is upset? When things no
longer go the way we are accustomed
them to going, as the philosophical
neighbour in The Turin Horse puts it to
us. Does the unease, the angst, the
dread and the discomfort then exposed
lie somewhere within mankind, or are
they provoked by the arrival of strangers,
by inexplicable events? We encounter
a comparable situation in the sevenand-a-half-hour, twelve-chapter
Satantango (1994), made up of twelve
centrifugal stories about a crumbling
agricultural collective. It is that fifth
season between autumn and winter,
when the land lies fallow and barren,
and the roads will soon be impassable
because of the rain. The harvest has
been gathered, and everybody is wait­ing
for the winter. They are also waiting for
the fruits of the harvest: the earnings
that might enable them to set off for the
horizon. But although there is enough
horizon for everybody, they are all
fearful there will not be enough profit.
So various characters hatch a scheme
to make off with the money. This plot is
thwarted by the return of Irimiás and
Petrinas, a duo whom everybody fears
for one reason or another. But is their
arrival the final push needed to make
the farming community fall apart?
Decay has already set in. Searching for
external causes and excuses doesn’t
change anything.
You simply have to yield to the
associations that strike you while
watching the work of Béla Tarr. The
way communism numbed people, the
way capitalism does the very same.
The thought of holocaust and ecocide.
They could be there even without the
filmmaker putting them in. They concern
your own world.
His films depict the world he sees.
The world he encounters. But they also
convey his vision of that world. The
world in front of the camera and the
view of that world through the camera
are one and the same.
The cinema of Béla Tarr is an
empirical cinema about the physical
world. It is a cinema of wind, mud and
rain. Dull, desolate, desperate, fatal.
Populated by absent women and
drunken men who fall off chairs. A
cinema of gravity. Of recurring names
and faces, of actors who grew older in
front of his camera. Of cinemato­
graphers Gábor Medvigy and Fred
Kelemen. Of the waltzing harmonies of
composer and regular contributor Mihály
Víg (who also played the leading role in
Satan­tango). Music often composed
before the images exist. A cinema by
László Krasznahorkai, author of
melancholic dystopias, who co-wrote
the scenarios since Damnation (1988),
of editor, ex-wife and sounding board
Ágnes Hranitzky. Béla Tarr is more
than a filmmaker; he is a team. Together,
they travel a world of country roads that
cut right from the end of the day,
straight through the night, and into the
following day. To the wind that sweeps
through all his films, blowing away the
last city in The Turin Horse. Until the
road ends, because there is no world
on the other side of the hill to flee to.
3.
This story started at the end,
because The Turin Horse is, for the
present at least, the final film in the
traditional sense made by Béla Tarr.
Ten years before The Turin Horse,
Tarr said in an interview at the National
Theatre in London, held on the occasion
of the English premiere of Werck­
meister Harmonies, that he believed
you essentially make the same film
over and over again, gradually getting
closer and closer to a simpler and
clearer style. That comment reveals
the tradition from which Tarr emerged:
European author cinema. His work
reveals a totally authentic voice. A quick
9
V
Kitchen. Here we see the original table and
companion stools from Béla Tarr’s last film
The Turin Horse (2011). It is the setting for the
daily meal of potatoes eaten by the father and
daughter in this apocalyptic film. The stage
for the philosophical monologue of a drunken
neighbour who comes to collect a bottle of
pálinka fruit distillate, because the village has
already been blown away. The neighbour
­describes the approaching end of time as a
­judgement that man has brought upon himself,
even though ‘God also plays a role in it’. Life,
he says, is an eternal cycle of acquiring things
and then discarding them. Of profit and loss.
And we people think that it will always remain
the same, and are only really surprised when
something interrupts that cycle.
Damnation, 1988
10
glance at the stills from his films – if
such a thing as a quick glance at his
work is even possible – is all you need
to detect a consistency of visual
language, mood, theme, style and
characters. You could view his films as
modulations of one another, variations
on a theme. And then you discover: this
is no oeuvre; this is a universe.
You see the black and white as it
shrouds all the grey in between. Wide
shots that stretch the frame. Inhabited
by vagabonds and lost souls. People
with fatigue and destitution etched on
their faces. You also see something
essentially elusive. His films are usually
set in post-communist Hungary, or in
some unspecified past. A time before
and a time after. There is always a
sense of not entirely being in the present.
That makes them timeless. As though
nostalgia is something futuristic. As
though films about the past are portents
of the future. Damnation and The Man
from London (2007) are literally films
from the shadows, film noirs about a
nihilistic and threatening world. Portraits
of men: the unemployed Karrer in
Damnation and railway worker Maloin
in the Georges Simenon-inspired The
Man from London, who sense an
opportunity to make a fortune in a
shadowy world of crime and intrigue,
only to lapse into sloth and stagnation.
And if there is one thing that you
cannot sense in those stills of lives that
have come to a standstill, it is time. His
films take time. They usually last longer
than two hours. Satantango lasts sevenand-a-half hours, and some shots take
up to ten minutes. His television film
Macbeth (1982) contains one hour-long
take. That says nothing about how long
the films really last, because Satan­
tango is one of the shortest films I know.
Werck­meister Harmonies lasts as long
as it takes a tear to roll down your cheek.
His early work featured lots of
close-ups. He later captured faces in a
different way. Because of the time we
spend with his characters, long shots
become close-ups in time, as it were.
We not only get to know people better
through their facial expressions, their
often seemingly impassive expressions,
their big eyes. The small Erika Bók in
Satantango with her dead cat. Her gaze
turns more inward in The Turin Horse.
In Werckmeister Harmonies, Lars
Rudolph stands face to face with the
primeval gaze of a dead whale. Silent
witnesses from a speechless world full
of absurdist savagery and existential
pain. But we get to know them best of
all by their movements through space.
Through their gestures. In space-time.
By the way they walk. With every step
of a determined Bók on her way to
an uncertain goal, pulling one foot after
another out of the autumn mud that
tries to stall her. Rudolph the holloweyed and sleepwalking postman in a
film that squeezes eternity in one
sleepless day.
And all that walking. These films
capture kilometres in celluloid.
2.
For the sake of convenience, the
oeuvre of Béla Tarr is often divided into
two periods separated by a pivotal film:
the black-and-white films he made after
Damnation, in which the travelling
and tracking shots and the Steadicam
are haunted by longer and longer
takes; and the films before Damnation,
social-realistic films at the intersection
between documentary and fiction with
which he debuted (Family Nest, 1979;
The Outsider, 1982; The Prefab People,
1982) and Almanac of Fall (1984), with
The Outsider as his only film in colour,
the first in which he started to experi­ment
with the longer shots that are typical of
the formalism of his later work. The
central thread running through that early
work is always the lives of ordinary
people, cinéma-vérité style. His
characters often play themselves, or
versions of themselves. These are the
11
VI
Muhamed. Béla Tarr and his cameraman Fred
Kelemen filmed one extra scene specially for
EYE. We see a boy playing the accordion as
the camera pulls away and moves towards him
in eleven minutes. It is the purest form of the
long camera movements for which Tarr is
renowned. Film unfolds over time. We shift
from close-up to mid shot to wide shot within a
single take, allowing us to see how a character
occupies his environment yet remains alone.
12
The Turin Horse, 2011
dying days of communism, the early
days of something else. Apathy lingers
in the streets.
Hungary has had a respectable
film culture since the early twentieth
century. Miklós Jancsó and István
Szabó were already established names
when Tarr made his debut as a 22-year-­
old in 1977, becoming the youngest
filmmaker in his country to have directed
a feature film. After the Hungarian
Revolution of 1956, a year after Tarr’s
birth, the climate became less benign.
Many films were banned, and film
production came under the control of a
central authority. The climate turned
somewhat milder again in the 1960s.
As film technology became cheaper,
every village had its own film club, and
demand for home productions grew.
The establishment of the Balázs Béla
Studio in 1959, named after a Hungarian
film pioneer, writer and theorist from
the early twentieth century, created a
venue where young talents could
experiment and gain experience.
Western modernism, French
nouvelle vague, the observational style
of cinéma-vérité and the genre of direct
Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000
cinema were the biggest influences on
the new filmmakers. It is worth noting,
however, that, just like in other Eastern
Bloc cinemas of the time, these
influences were not imitated or copied,
but appropriated and woven with native,
often literary tradition of narration and
drama. They carried out formal experi­
ments to thematise questions about the
position of youths in communist
society, the annexation of history, and
class struggle. The strong docu­mentary
movement of the 1970s developed into
the Budapest School.
1.
Béla Tarr’s father gave him an
8mm camera for his fourteenth birth­day.
During his secondary school years he
aligned himself with a group of left-wing
intellectuals and artists who strongly
identified with the working class. That
sounds like an odd act of rebellion in
communist Hungary. But the times can
occasionally be that absurd.
During one of their activities, they
met a group of gypsies who had
applied for exit visas to work in Austria.
Concerned about their fate, Tarr wrote
13
VII
Overtures. Four opening scenes. Four ways to
start a film, to direct the eye, to enter the world
of a story. For Béla Tarr they are connected
‘not directly, but in a philosophical way’. He
calls them ‘four ways to look at eternity’. In
Damnation we see a procession of cable cars
through the air. Then the camera moves, and
with it our perspective. The start of Satantango
consists of one long camera movement across
an abandoned farmyard. All that remain are the
cows. Werckmeister Harmonies opens with
a cosmical dance by the drunken regulars of a
local café at closing time. A horse is driven
across the Hungarian plains in The Turin Horse.
Four scenes that enter into dialogue with one
another. Four scenes that Tarr calls universal,
and that are also, in a certain way, characteristic
of him and his work.
The Turin Horse, 2011
14
a letter to János Kádár, leader of the
communist party, about their difficult
predicament. He then decided to write
a film about it. The authorities were not
enamoured, to put mildly. Together
with two friends, he set up the Dziga
Vertov film collective, a homage to the
Russian filmmaker of Man With A Movie
Camera and to Jean-Luc Godard and
Jean-Pierre Gorin, who in the late 1960s
had made political films as the Groupe
Dziga Vertov. The film Guest Workers
(1971) won a prize at an amateur
festival, and was a huge success at
com­munity screenings that Tarr
organized with a film projector and tape
recorder. All seemed to pass off
peacefully, until a year later Tarr sat an
entrance exam for the faculty of
philosophy and was rejected. That may
have been because he had previously
called The Communist Manifesto more
an ‘artwork than a political programme’.
This was the first in a long series of
clashes with all sorts of authority and
censorship, whether it was called
communism or capitalism. It is also
typical of the dry humour that per­meates
his work.
Satantango, 1994
‘That’s a long time ago,’ said the
filmmaker when asked why he ever
wanted to become a philosopher.
Guest Workers has been lost.
To young filmmakers who ask him
for advice, he replies:
‘Be more radical than I am.’
15
Films, Talks
& Events
1. Films
Accompanying the exhibition is an
extensive programme in the cinemas.
EYE is screening the most important
films by Béla Tarr during the exhibition
period, including The Turin Horse,
Werckmeister Harmonies, Satantango,
Damnation and The Man from London,
and less well-known short work.
Credits
Publication
This brochure was published
on the occasion of the exhibition
Béla Tarr – Till the End of
the World, EYE Filmmuseum,
Amsterdam
21 January – 7 May 2017
Edited by:
Marente Bloemheuvel,
Jaap Guldemond
Texts:
Dana Linssen (essay and short
texts), Jaap Guldemond
Translations:
Billy Nolan (Ned-Eng)
Final Editing:
Marente Bloemheuvel,
Mariska Graveland
Project Managers:
Sanne Baar, Claartje Opdam
Graphic Design:
Joseph Plateau, Amsterdam
Printing and Lithography:
Drukkerij Rob Stolk,
Amsterdam
Paper:
Munken Lynx 120 and 240 grs
Font:
EYE Schulbuch
Publisher:
EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam
Exhibition
The exhibition is curated by
Jaap Guldemond and Béla Tarr
2. Specials
EYE is also organizing a programme of
accompanying activities, related to the
work of Béla Tarr, that include lectures
and contextual programmes.
Tuesday evenings: 24 January,
7 February, 7 March, 4 April, 2 May.
For current information, see:
eyefilm.nl / tarr
16
CEO EYE:
Sandra den Hamer
Director of Exhibitions/Curator:
Jaap Guldemond
Associate Curator:
Marente Bloemheuvel
Project Managers:
Sanne Baar, Claartje Opdam
Associate curator to Béla Tarr:
Amila Ramović
Graphic Design:
Joseph Plateau, Amsterdam
Film Programmer:
Ludmila Cvikova
Publicity and Marketing:
Inge Scheijde, Marnix van Wijk
Digitization films:
Hungarian Film Lab (Borbála
Mihályfy, Éva Haraszin, Ákos
Saufert), Jan Scholten (EYE),
Haghefilm Digitaal BV, Béla
Toth (Mokep Film), Gabor Téni
Technical Production:
Indyvideo, Utrecht
Technical Support:
Sven Jense
Subtitling:
Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam
Audiovisual Equipment:
BeamSystems Amsterdam
Installation:
Landstra & De Vries, Amsterdam
Fence:
Lesta Hekwerk B.V., Nieuwe
Wetering
Tree:
Kuinderbos, Staatsbosbeheer
(Harco Bergman)
Lighting:
Theatermachine, Amsterdam
All rights reserved. No part
of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the
publisher. Every effort has
been made to obtain the
necessary permissions to
reproduce all copyrighted
material contained in this
publication. Should copyright
have been unwittingly infringed
in this publication, interested
parties are requested to contact
EYE Filmmuseum.
The exhibition was made
possible by:
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to all
those who contributed to this
exhibition:
Béla Tarr and
Amila Ramović
Noémi Blastik
David Karikas
Kinga Keszthelyi
László Rajk
Crew Muhamed (2016)
Muhamed Osmanović
Kouros Alaghband
Anna Fernandez de Paco
Reinis Kalvins
Fred Kelemen
Nenad Kovačević
Amila Ramović
Dino Topolnjak
Nihad Ušanović
Images
All images: courtesy Béla Tarr
Cover
Front: Damnation, 1988
Back: The Turin Horse, 2011
Damnation, 1988
© 2017 Béla Tarr, the authors,
the photographers, EYE
Filmmuseum
EYE Filmmuseum
IJpromenade 1
1031 KT Amsterdam
The Netherlands
+31-20-5891400
www.eyefilm.nl