I Don’t Want To Be a Film Director: Béla Tarr’s Art of Refusal

Still from Damnation, dir. Béla Tarr, 1988

Throughout the years, I’ve spent a lot of time with Béla Tarr’s films. Watching his immersive black-and-white, rain-soaked, long-take worlds has helped to develop my appreciation of cinema, broadening my understanding of what films can look like and how different they can be. For a long time, I have been interested in and excited about Tarr’s distinct use of form and style, and what film meant to him. Since Tarr’s passing two weeks ago, I have been thinking about what his films and the way he understood filmmaking can still offer to us today.

A telling moment from an encounter I had with Tarr some years ago keeps resurfacing in my memory. During a public conversation with the Hungarian filmmaker at the Kaunas International Film Festival, which I was lucky to moderate, Tarr shared a recollection from an argument he had with another filmmaker. After the premiere of Tarr’s Damnation (1988), this other filmmaker publicly scolded Tarr, saying he should learn how “to tell a story” if he ever wanted to become a true director. At the Kaunas Festival conversation, Tarr recalled his reply: I don’t want to be a film director. “Truly, I never wanted to,” he told me. “And would rather not have become one, but it was the only language I had to speak in.” I took this anecdote as a rhetorical move in a familiar dispute about different conceptions of film narrative. Years later now, it seems to me more like a principle—a counter-model to the transactional logic that dominates film- and art-making today.

From the very start of his career, Tarr positioned himself at a distance from official institutions. As a young man in state-ruled socialist Hungary, he dreamt of becoming a philosopher, not a filmmaker, but the options available to him were few. At seventeen, he filmed a short documentary about a family living in a squat that got him into trouble with the police and drew scrutiny from the local Communist Party. After finishing high school, he was denied admission to university and went to work in a shipyard, where he stayed for two years before applying to the philosophy department at Eötvös Loránd University, only to be refused again. It was at the shipyard, among other workers, that he developed an interest in a cinéma vérité approach and started filming working-class life.

Tarr shot his debut feature, Family Nest (1979), when he was twenty-two, even before he enrolled in film school. Filmed in a “direct camera” style, the work focuses on the everyday struggles produced by a housing crisis, when a young couple and their child are forced into an impossible domestic arrangement. It quickly made him known, in Hungary and abroad, as a filmmaker whose social sensitivity was inseparable from his experimental film form. Making his first feature at this young age altered his life and opened the door to the world of cinema, yet he never ceased to feel like an outsider among other filmmakers both in his homeland and in the international film industry. Having started practicing cinema not as an art or entertainment, but as a means to speak out about reality, Tarr struggled with the idea of the film director as a job or title to aspire to. For him, “film director” was a privileged role entwined with careerism and conformism—exactly what he refused throughout two historical periods: state-run Hungarian socialism, and post-1990s wild capitalism. In our conversation, he talked about changes under capitalism with characteristic bluntness: “It is not here to help filmmakers; it helps only producers and bankers.”

The stories in Tarr’s films often unfold in the aftermath of grand ideological or ethical failures: the collapse of communism, the false promises of authorities, or the corrosion of an ethical or political framework. László Krasznahorkai—the acclaimed writer and Tarr’s long-time collaborator—examines these exhausted promises and crooked authorities in the novels that Tarr decisively took up: Sátántangó (1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). Tarr did not bluntly illustrate Krasznahorkai’s writing. Rather, his films found a form for conveying the experience of those left disenchanted and adrift by the historical events that Krasznahorkai was so interested in.

In Damnation, the protagonist is invited to join a smuggling scheme to scam naive villagers—a premise that, in a conventional movie plot, would drive suspense. For Tarr, it is just a peripheral detail. Instead of centering the scheme, the film focuses on the milieu that surrounds it—a bar, the streets, the rain—and on the repetitive circuits of movement and waiting that arrest any forward development of the plot. Rather than stitching reality into human-centered, shot–reverse shot scenes that would tell viewers what to look at and think, Tarr immerses viewers in everyday time, observed with aesthetic attention. Rather than approaching history as a dramatic plot that moves forward, Tarr focuses on its impasses, where waiting, repetition, exhaustion, and fatigue become the core materials of experience.

“I hate it when we fabricate things instead of listening to the logic of life,” he told me in our conversation. “That is why I do not want, and never wanted, to tell stupid fairy tales.” By “fairy tales,” Tarr presumably meant the neat genre formulas that dominate commercial cinema—plot-driven tales that impose artificial order on the complexity of reality. From his earliest works, Tarr revolted against such constructions. As his style evolved, he became even bolder in rejecting conventional plot mechanics. After he began working with Krasznahorkai, his film language became more stylized and the environment took on greater weight, with the long take becoming the basic element of his aesthetics. However, even then—demonstrating why Tarr did not like to divide his filmography according to stylistic changes—the social grounding of his films did not disappear. It just became slower and more embedded in the material world.

Films like Damnation, Sátántangó (1994), and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) are famously light on story in the usual sense. What happens in them? Plot-wise, often not much, or rather, nothing that can be easily summarized. “Why the hell are you making a two-hour film just to show dogs running in the rain?”—Tarr said he had heard many post-screening complaints like this. For him, though, “many things can become information,” not only the human story. A wall streaked with rainwater or stray dogs trotting through a muddy street can add to the film’s narrative as much as a line of scripted dialogue. It is all equally information to him, a part of the fabric of life. In the famous opening shot of Tarr’s eight-hour Sátántangó, a herd of cows slowly meanders through a desolate village for nearly ten minutes. Narrative causality stops dominating. The viewer enters a state of becoming within the film, where scenes that unfold in real time are governed more by the rhythms of nature or rules of chance than by preplanned dramatic necessity.

This commitment to the portrayal of lived time is the point where Tarr’s aesthetic form becomes inseparable from his ethics of representation. He often said that one can never truly present a person on screen—their gaze, their emotions, their being—if the filmmaker is constantly editing the footage to manipulate the viewer’s reactions. His long-take choreography favors uninterrupted shots presenting characters in a continuous duration, as in Damnation’s famous closing two-minute tracking shot, where the protagonist staggers through a muddy wasteland in the pouring rain, eventually dropping to all fours to howl like a dog. Despite the bleakness of this humiliating scene, Tarr refuses to cut away from the character. The camera keeps following him, presenting his human misery as something unbearably real, not just a dramatic plot device.

“Let’s not forget that there is always a poor person in front of the camera, and me, a person behind the camera,” Tarr said during our conversation. “As filmmakers, we must respect the people in front of the camera. We cannot mock them. We cannot judge them.” Even though many critics mistook his cinema’s bleakness and slow pace for pessimism, calling it a nihilistic aesthetic excess or even a melancholy of doom, this judgment belies the radical empathy running through Tarr’s films. Tarr himself opposed the defeatist label: “If you are pessimistic, you don’t do anything, you don’t want to communicate with people.” Even when the camera in Tarr’s films follows his characters—villagers, drunkards, stubborn peasants—at what might seem like their most mundane or abject moments, they are never presented for cheap shock, pity, or ridicule. He maintained that the rejection of traditional plot in his films was not a mark of apathy or ignorance, but a protest against the false comfort that mainstream cinema often provides. The scenes of wild collective celebration that populate his films are often cited as either rare moments of joy or portrayals of extreme despair. What some see as melancholic tableaux of doom are, from another angle, affirmations of life’s stubborn vitality. For Tarr, if there is no grand finale of history to wait for, no deus ex machina, then all we have in this life is each other: eating, drinking, dancing, enduring.

This outlook extends to Tarr’s filmmaking process itself. Despite his outsider attitude, Tarr never worked in isolation or as a domineering auteur. Quite the opposite: he cultivated an ethos of shared authorship and often spoke of his collaborators as coauthors, with gratitude and humility. “Of course, many people help me,” he said when I asked about his long-time collaborators. “Mihály (Víg), László (Krasznahorkai), Ágnes (Hranitzky) … This is the core of the creative group. I trust my group completely.” Over decades, Tarr built an almost symphonic unity with his creative partners: Víg’s haunting musical scores, Krasznahorkai’s literary ideas, his life partner Hranitzky’s editing, and Fred Keleman’s cinematography, describing his own role as like a coordinator or conductor who relies on the collective intuition of his team to carry out his vision.1

A lot of people were surprised when in 2011 Tarr suddenly announced his retirement from filmmaking after finishing The Turin Horse, his ninth feature. However, given Tarr’s philosophy and the reasons he started making films in the first place, this was not an illogical choice. Filmmaking, he said, had become “a nice job.” He could easily churn out “ten more movies,” repeating his own style “just to make money,” as a “real film director” would—but this was precisely the path he had never taken.

Tarr’s legacy today, in the context of a cultural field dominated by industry-imposed imperatives of productivity, endless instrumentalization, culture wars, and the algorithmic manufacturing of information, offers a radically different paradigm: one of refusal. Tarr refused the idea of filmmaking as a pleasant job that one does for money. He also refused the frantic pace of productivity, opting instead to spend years making a single film. He refused to conform to the market-shaped expectations of what films should look like. He refused to turn film form into a set of conventions that tell the viewer what to feel and what to conclude. Above all, having made films on both sides of the twentieth century’s political world orders, he refused both ignorant pessimism and cruel optimism, striving to produce images of real people rather than the allure of spectacle. In all these refusals, Tarr affirmed a belief that cinema, and by extension any art, can teach us how to reclaim and respect our lived time and search for meaning within it, not beyond it. Today, when myriad narratives promise endings and solutions by manufacturing reality into ideological positions, his films offer a look into a time after all stories, a time in which the world continues to materially transpire, as rain seeps into walls, into clothes, into bodies, until it becomes inseparable from what we can bear.