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THE LAST DANCE

by Fred Kelemen

The friendship between me and Béla Tarr began with a glance.
Béla had come to Berlin because a retrospective of his films was being presented in the cinema Arsenal. We sat by chance, not knowing each other, in the same café at different tables, but we noticed each other and our glances met. A few days later we saw each other by chance again in the office of the Berlin film academy (dffb). We spoke with each other. That was the beginning of our acquaintance, which became a friendship and a working partnership. This first moment is now 22 years ago and a long road led us to the last film "The Turin Horse".
During these 22 years there were more glances than words. Even while shooting, days would go by without us exchanging many words; our work together during the shooting was often silent for hours at a time.
In this silence lies a knowledge of something we share, which connects us, of an attitude, a tacit agreement, a synchronous heartbeat, which we pursue in a secret pact, which is more secretive than we can imagine.
Thus the silence also unfolds in the films, driven on by a heartbeat that is connected in harmony with the silence of a world that knows that nothing happens but the passing of time and the struggle of people to counter this passing, to avoid perishing in the elapsing of time. In vain. But this struggle brings out the most beautiful and the ugliest in people; their creativity and their despair, their glow - shrill, gruesome, violent and soft, healing, preserving. This struggle gives people life, although they still have to float struggling down the river of time and disappear into that black hole, into which everything temporal sinks.

Béla's films don't annunciate any visions. They describe a being. They articulate a progression into the abyss. Béla's films are a dance of disappearance.
Béla is no mystic. He's a demystifyer, an anti-mystic. Driven by this heartbeat, which is the echo of the world of disappearance, he shatters the myths of nationalism, capitalism, world-view absolutism, which surround us as political, economical, religious ideologies and rob us of the sight of a freer, wider plane. The myths of a world that wants to know nothing of the sound of silence, which the flow of time creates, that noise, which dwells as stillness in every tone, which forms as darkness the canvas for the light, which prepares as death the ground from which life awakes and in which it takes root.
But me and Béla want to know something about the murmuring of being, that darkness and stillness, and that ground, from which everything comes and into which everything reverts. We want to investigate it, we want to tear holes in the illusionary fabric of our artificial civilisation, to create circulatory passages where this reality, which is hidden behind it like a skeleton in flesh, can flow through and thus manifest itself to us.
Time in Béla's movies is, unlike in Andreij Tarkovskij's, not metaphysical; time in Béla's films is existential. It has to be endured.

The yearning for the beauty, for the clarity, symmetry and compositional equilibrium of the images is possibly the counterpart to and expression of a wound torn open by a decrepit and disintegrated world, which is staggering unsteadily towards its disappearance, like the only real heroes - the only ones we can believe - who, befuddled, clueless, driven by despair, walk paths their whole life long that lead to nowhere else as the starting point, the primordial ground, to this silence, this darkness, from which all paths come and to which they all lead.
And because this can't be changed, Sisyphus' hoarse laugh sometimes rings out to us from Béla's films.

And so, this caravan of all the heroes from Béla's films trudges into this black hole at the end of "The Turin Horse", in that the two characters of this last film disappear after the last flicker of their inner light, when all light has been extinguished; and all films with them. Thus ends our last film, whose every sequence, every image I also shot as a part of my visual farewell tune for Béla, like our first encounter with a glance: it leads into blackness, into silence. The future is black smoke.
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Sight & Sound, June 2012, Volume 22, Issue 6.
Translation: Phil Cooksey