IFFK 2022: An auteur who steals actors’ emotions and presence for his films

Hungarian Bela Tarr, who will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 27th IFFK, terms himself an autocrat who has scant regard for the script which is just ‘a piece of paper and some words.’ He made his last film in 2012 and terms the decision final.

Bela Tarr the person comes across as a starkly different being from the image conveyed by his deeply contemplative and philosophical works. Here is a straight-talking auteur who uses his words as quick stabs or unkind cuts, the kind of which are so few in his films. Yet, one can easily connect the philosophy of cinema that he puts into words to what he portrays on screen.

This is what he is, take it or leave it, as he repeats more than once. The Hungarian filmmaker, who is at the 27th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, spoke to The Hindu on Thursday on his filmmaking process.

One would imagine the young Tarr to be a kid who was drowned amid books and movies in his room, but he had begun experiencing the life outside, something which he says has fed into his films.

“I was a kind of street kid with my friends we did lot of stupid things and we enjoyed it. I was never the kind of kid who sat in the room. I was 16 when I did my first shooting stuff. I got an 8 mm camera from my father as a birthday present. I was thinking the camera is a tool and can use it to show that things I want to, but I never believed that it was an end in itself,” says Tarr.

For three years, he had a working class life, in a ship factory, but he says that life did not specifically influence his cinema. Rather, every experience in his life came together in his works.

“My influence is not from any other filmmaker, because every filmmaker is different and belongs to different worlds and cultures. All my influences are from life. Of course, I have a social sensibility, but I never made a story about people from a different world than mine. For me, the main subject has always been human dignity,” he says.

The timeless quality of his films, be it Satantango or The Turin Horse, it seems, comes from a conscious set of choices, ranging from the thought process to his shooting location.