The last time I saw Béla Tarr was a few years ago at the Nexus conference in Amsterdam. We were invited to speak about the state of the world and of the arts. We both thought light and darkness existed in the world, even if our perception about them differed. Béla was already weakened in his body, but the spirit was still ferocious, rebellious, furious. We sat down to talk. It seemed fairly obvious this would be our ultimate, and most heartfelt, conversation. As the former apprentice, I was able to see the master one last time, with all his rage, sorrow, love and hate.
I first met Béla in 2004 when he was preparing The Man from London. I wanted to learn film-making and applied to become an assistant on the film. He gave me my first real job: as an assistant, I had to find a boy for one of the main parts. I spent months in the casting process, for a part that eventually was cut from the shooting script. But for Béla, every effort put into a given movie was never lost – it was integrated into the energy field of the enterprise. The final outcome had to be the product of difficult processes. The harder the task, the better quality one could expect. He wanted to film life, and its constant dance. The choreography was a revelation for me: 10-minute, uninterrupted takes, unifying space, characters and time. All in black and white.
I gradually understood that this was the best way to learn about film-making, much better than any film school: find a master and be initiated to the mysteries of a given art form, the way painters or artisans learned their craft for centuries. In Béla’s case, the work had to involve a closely knit group of trusted collaborators, a particular attention to craft (a level hardly reached nowadays, sacrificed on the altar of speed and efficiency), a deep connection to everything human, especially to those forgotten by an increasingly superficial society, and a profound love of physical film as opposed to anything computer-based, because all his films were grounded in the physical world. And yet, they all yearned to reach a metaphysical level, which corresponded to my natural inclination.
In retrospect, The Man from London was an enterprise of madness – a Hungarian movie, based on a French language book by Belgian writer Georges Simenon, shot with international actors and Hungarian half-amateurs, all speaking on set in their native language, in a complex European co-production involving a shoot in Corsican town Bastia, dressed as a port in Normandy – all this in a period, 1930s setting. The project also involved the building of the main set element, a metal monster watchtower overlooking the bay. It all seemed to be a Fitzcarraldo-like project with gargantuan ambition, but the sheer talent, resilience and inspiring presence of Béla, his partner and editor Agnes Hranitzky, production designer László Rajk, and screenwriter (and now Nobel prize winner) László Krasznahorkai, and all the other crew members also made me believe this was the centre of the world.
The filming was fraught with difficulties and constant challenges, primarily because of a structural discrepancy between the available funds and the scope of the film. Béla, in his unrelenting quest for perfection, was switching between cinematographers while looking for new finances. It was then that I understood the difference between compromise and compromission. A film-maker has to navigate on that spectrum. Sometimes, sacrifices have to be made. At other times, artistic integrity requires the director stand firm. It wasn’t easy, even for Béla, to find the right path forward. French producer Humbert Balsan killed himself during the months of uncertainty that had engulfed the movie. It was a tragic example of how Béla’s art was profoundly linked to the real world. Life is cinema and cinema is life – with a little help from people like him.
One day, when filming was stopped, I stumbled in a bookstore in Bastia upon a book containing the transcripts of the Sonderkommandos of Auschwitz. It then took me 10 years of maturing to find a form to tell the story of what would become my first feature film, Son of Saul. One cannot depart easily from Béla Tarr’s world – it has to be a fierce gesture. When I left, it was a great loss for me, but I also took with me the rebellious attitude, the one always questioning the conventions of cinema, the codes and academic attitudes of those making films.
In the winter of 2004, Béla was tasked to shoot with Robby Müller, the great cinematographer, a short film in Budapest about Hungary entering the EU. He called it Prologue. With a couple of assistants, I was tasked to find overnight 300 homeless people, all agreeing to be filmed while waiting in line for some food: a flow of endless faces, humanity, fragility, the forgotten ones. This is how he saw Hungary in Europe. Béla was driving me to the shoot, and he asked me, almost in a shy way, whether I thought this would be a good short film. Why would the great director ask a young assistant such a question? Maybe, he knew already, that I would always honour the tradition that he belonged to, and that I would do my best to keep the flame burning.
