Traduzione di Serena Ciccarone, Silvia Pellecchia, Eliana Carlucci

The symbol of a generation, even regardless of all generations: initiates delving into timeless wormholes, into the early nineties cathode-ray tube lighted tunnels as in a Videodrome.
A surrender. A planned and pacified surrender, incubated in the womb of both cinematic and televisual image: that specific, sublime midnight broadcasting. This was and still is Béla Tarr.
Back to the Fuori Orario nights officiated by Ghezzi’s cinema - that asynchronous, disheveled simulacrum - summoning metaplasms and fluctuating ghosts in the misting nights, priestly in a white calico robe. Nocturnal winters abused their power over the dusk light and let their tarry murmur be sensed along with their innermost adhesion to the Void. Those nights when movies like Perdition and Satantango - a plodding, lingering seven-hour pilgrimage throughout long takes teeming with galvanised matter, wind and dust - would shine out of the screen; keeping your eyes wide open and jaded venturing the Void while yearning for Perdition.

As in the years of the five-hour movie Until the End of the World - yet in an utterly different way - the “duration” matter, the stretching of the cinematic and narrative syntagm was essential. It was a sort of reaction to the frugal and concise advertising image subject to the immediate consumption typical of the eighties. Béla Tarr’s cinema is configured in a separate universe far from that scenario. A movie camera so aware of itself that it validates its autogenous matter by choreographing its enticing intricate protracted dance. A Cinema as multiple emphasised visions, echoing vividness of the objects, into the objects, which unveils their truth: their life, their time - inscribing and turning them into words, pictures.
There, the truth of the event was its life, a magnetic, immersive duration that lured and engulfed you - in the spirit of a bruised black and white: an exhibit of blubber, scraping and dullness - and its perpetual peristalsis handed you back the character. A no-longer jaded character at the mercy of reality and its undying carcass: the final aesthetic act.

The first story of Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai - whose books and characters inspired three of Tarr’s films - evokes Heraclitus’ Universal Flux «everything around it moves , the water moves, it flows, it arrives and cascades; now and then the silken breeze sways». Not only does he bring it up, he means it and mimes it through the hypotactic writing. A flux of long gapless coordinates, subordinates and appositions: phrasal tubercles persistently reviving the dictation.
The literary counterpart of the long take cinema, Béla Tarr’s cinema, appears to translate the cosmos’ hypotaxis, its continuous flux into images: that endogenous matter emerging and blooming.
Flowing at the book’s service: Krasznahorkai’s stories, mainly dystopian and hopeless - the epigraph of his latest novel Herscht 07769 quotes «hope is an error» - are fully embodied in Tarr’s cinema.

If the novel can be film adapted then Tarr’s cinema is its exemplification. It depicts in chiaroscuro contradictions, violence, greed and violated innocence which articulate the twentieth-century novel dating back to Musil, Céline, Faulkner as well as Simenon whose novel inspired the 2007 Béla Tarr film The Man from London scripted together with Krasznahorkai.
Tonight, the Hungarian director is attending the Registi fuori dagli scheRmi exhibition at the Anche Cinema film theatre in Bari. A chance to screen the Wrekmeister Harmonies restored version which twenty three years ago ushered in the new millennium by transposing the apocalyptic spirit of Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance.

Symbols, allegories of a dark fairytale; characters eponym of the human; ash-grey, scraped off, scrawny foreshortening: the cornerstones of Tarr’s cinema. An omen for the upcoming millennium.
He had us waiting eleven years for his comeback with his last astonishing film The Turin Horse, the umpteenth depiction of a drifting humanity. Yet, a fragment, an echo of Harmony is still possible: if the movie camera sheds its light on inanity, then conscience - the self-determination of this artificial gaze - and light stand. A light revealing and inexorably marking the steps, the enduring and solemn strides, the dazzling flux.