Honor D’A 2025 Award
First, the sound of the name. Béla—dawn’s light, breath of the primordial—followed by the hard, terse T of a surname as dark as it is closed off, with a single blinding vowel. And the double R at the end, lingering, as if reluctant to let go of something vital—vital, precisely because it ends. Behind the name: a filmmaker, Hungarian, perfect, complete. That is to say: finished. And yet awake. An atheist who made us believe—and whom we must believe when he says that The Turin Horse (2011) is his final ride. To catch Béla Tarr, one must move backward, trace his steps across barren plains and, above all, let time carry us—until we realize that time, itself, begins to take shape. We will witness life under the effects of what we call “black and white,” but which is, in truth, pure light overwhelming all things. We will find things, yes. The legacy of the master and filmmaker crowds together indecipherable realities (Pere Gimferrer, a Bazinian at heart, says that cinema is necessarily realist). Tarr began unsettled, in a world in motion. So it was in Family Nest (1979), his first feature film, where the historical context of communism clings to the narrative. The young Tarr dissects the social machinery so thoroughly that he ends up revealing the collapse of relationships, the isolation and ruin of individuals stripped of the everyday—that quiet privilege which becomes the foundation of his final film. In 2019, he presents an audiovisual performance, Missing People, a defense of human dignity in our terminal world. Every beginning contains its end, and nothing resembles the future more than the past. The opening (and the title) of Family Nest could well be the mother-image, already holding within it everything to come—including the final meal in The Turin Horse. His shots, often described as interminable, are in fact reaching for finitude. It is the inevitable struggle for an impossible transcendence. Sovereign of his own work, Tarr closes it by making it grand, whole, unfathomable: a legacy for all humankind.
-Marc Barceló
