Pere Alberó presents the Honorary Award to Béla Tarr
Last Saturday, “the most important living filmmaker” set foot at the D’A. That’s how Pere Alberó, director of the Escola de Cinema de Barcelona, describes him. Before that, Carlos R. Ríos had welcomed the expectant audience and expressed heartfelt thanks to La Foradada, the production company of Manel Raga, a filmmaker from Ulldecona and a disciple of Béla Tarr. There were also thanks to ECIB, where the Hungarian director had conducted a workshop throughout the past week. Alberó, then, on behalf of his school, the city of Barcelona, and the D’A, had the privilege of presenting the festival’s first honorary award. He himself refrained from crafting overly eloquent phrases to justify the prize: “For the brilliant long takes? For the unique atmosphere?” Reducing it to just a few traits, however talented, would not do it justice. “Béla Tarr’s cinema is a mystery.”
Alberó sensed it from the very first shot he ever saw of the director, in The Prefab People. “The shot lasts 3 minutes and 40 seconds, and I was already certain that the film was going to be a bombshell. It never happened to me again.” Tarr’s almost eschatological shot durations, as Alberó pointed out, may be a response to close masters like Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos; in his case, without the transcendence that characterizes the others. “Tarr stands out by focusing on topics that aren’t the ‘big’ themes. Perhaps his theme is… waiting?”After this personal and eloquent introduction, Tarr appeared to enthusiastic applause, which he himself had to put an end to. The masterclass took the form of a dialogue with Manel Raga, who opened the conversation by asking Tarr to share his creative process.
Blunt, tender, and precise, the master recalled that the camera comes into play when words are no longer enough. “Cinema exists when something matters to you and you want to share it—that’s very human.” In fact, if forced into grandiloquence, he immediately admits that his goal has always been to fight for human dignity. More than that, it’s a moral issue: “In Europe, we use subsidies; I’ve made films with your taxes… What you give back to the audience matters.”
Far from limiting an artist’s choices, Béla Tarr fiercely defends freedom. He had the courage to embrace it entirely after a trip to Japan and discovering nō theater, with “plays” lasting up to nine hours. “No borders! No rules! No limits!” Sátántangó, his 1994 seven-and-a-half-hour film, was born from that drive—the same drive he instills in aspiring filmmakers: “You are free! And to hell with the film industry!”
Despite this, he makes it clear that, once free, young filmmakers should not follow in his footsteps: “You must find your own language. Live life, study life. Cinema… will come.”
A cinema that, precisely, distrusts the language of scripts. “Those are just papers… to secure funding and reassure investors. Films are about people.” Tarr says that since the Old Testament, everything has already been said. What remains, what derives from it, what we lack… is a mystery. The Mystery that Béla Tarr has helped us glimpse through a filmography as vast as the greatness of the lowest classes.
-Marc Barceló
Fotos: ⓒ Clara Orozco
