The Death of Bela Tarr

I’ve never seen a movie by Bela Tarr. Part of it is that they are an acquired taste. They are reportedly long and not for weaklings. Tarr frequently collaborated with Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian Jewish author who just won the Nobel Prize. Both of them addressed serious audiences, accustomed to avant garde experiments with chronology and narrative, and meditative scenes that break with convention. Tarr’s work resembles Claude Lanzman’s films, with their endless running times and blasted landscapes. If your idea of a movie is Meet the Fockers, Bela Tarr may not be for you.

Which means that they may not be for me. I’m a pushover for light fare, like rom-coms and spectacles. I’m always arguing with my wife, Alice Blue, about what we’re going to see over the weekend. Since she commands the remote control, we almost always end up with Scandinavian dramas: bleak and cold, with dead bodies in snow drifts. I can’t actually remember a scene like that, but it’s a mark of their nature and collective impact that I always see that scene in my head, the blood oozing out onto icy pavement. Things barely rise to the level of dramedy.

What I know about Tarr is what I’ve recently read, mostly in the form of thoughtful obituaries. He died this month in a hospital in Budapest. Whatever renown he enjoyed as a filmmaker, he was also a political activist, implacably opposed to the Orban regime. For that alone, we should valorize his life. Our own politics calls for a tribe of Bela Tarrs, out in the streets of Minneapolis, raising the flag of Renee Nicole Good. Or maybe in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, defending Muslims trying to build a mosque.

I admire anyone who speaks such a message. But what really caught my attention in the obituaries was Tarr’s self-identification with the wretched. Raised in a family of Hungarian artists, he fixed his attention on impoverished villagers, day laborers and sh-t scrapers. He himself had worked in a shipyard and eventually stepped up to a position as a receptionist. Nancy Meyers interiors were not his metier. He believed, instead, that value and dignity were universality distributed in the human community, and that a vagrant lying in a city gutter had the same claim on society as a princeling or an autocrat. The words he used were quoted in the New York Times:

“About human dignity. One thing is important: human dignity. Please don’t destroy it. Please don’t humiliate. Poor, ugly, sad people have a right to life. The quality of their life doesn’t matter.”

Words like this, shapeless and inelegant, carry the force of an anvil or a sledgehammer. They are a rebuke to our obsession with style and celebrity, with the ruthless sorting that is the basic dynamic of our society. They tell us that our humanity is revealed in the way we think of the ruined and the demented, of people at the exhausted end of their lives. Everyone, Tarr argued, has inherent value, and he gave his career to foregrounding that commitment.