The following exchange is from Senses of Cinema, an interview with Bela Tarr
titled ``Waiting for the Prince'' by Fergus Daly and Maximilian Le Cain.

Daly's introduction includes the following comment: ``In Tarr's Satanic
universe there is no place for a benevolent force such as God, merely a
conflict of equally ill-conceived belief systems.''

Interview excerpts follow:
FD & MLC: You've often said you wanted to be a philosopher. Do you think you
're doing philosophy cinematically?

BT: No. When I wanted to be a philosopher, I was sixteen and when I wanted
to go to university, I was twenty. And they stopped me for a political
reason, because we made an 8mm movie about a gypsy worker's group in Hungary
who had sent a letter to the boss of the communist party saying "Please, we
would like relief from the country. We would like to go to Austria because
we cannot live here anymore. We have no job, we have no food, we have
nothing." And it looks like a letter the Russian Mouzhik sent to the Tsar...
And I made this movie about them when I was sixteen and afterwards applied
to.

FD & MLC: Film school?

BT: No, to university. And I wanted to be a philosopher and they said
immediately "No because what you do is incredible." It was really an
absolutely political reason. And afterwards I started another short film
about a worker's family in this squat house. And the police took the family
away and were very brutal and aggressive and I wanted to shoot on 8mm and I
couldn't because the police took me to prison. And afterwards I applied for
some money from the Béla Balász Studio which was a little independent film
studio in Hungary. It was a group of young film makers and they had some
money at that time just for experimental things. And I explained I would
like to make a movie about the family, a worker's family who squat in a
house and finally they said "Okay, we will give you a little money and you
can shoot for two days and afterwards we will watch what you did and if we
like it, we will give more money to finish it, the whole movie." That was my
first movie. And afterwards I didn't go back to the university and I didn't
apply anymore, I didn't worry about philosophy. I am not a philosopher and I
don't want to be a philosopher in movies.

FD & MLC: So when critics describe your work as metaphysical, does that
appeal to you?

BT: No, no, no. I never think about theoretical things when we are working.

FD & MLC: But there are cosmic themes in your films, and you've been quoted
as saying that you're "trying to look at things from a cosmic dimension."

BT: You know how it happens, when we started we had a big social
responsibility which I think still exists now. And back then I thought
"Okay, we have some social problems in this political system - maybe we'll
just deal with the social question." And afterwards when we made a second
movie and a third we knew better that there are not only social problems. We
have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is
coming from the cosmos. And there's the reason. You know how we open out
step by step, film by film. It's very difficult to speak about the
metaphysical and that. No. It's just always listening to life. And we are
thinking about what is happening around us.

FD & MLC: But in terms of the cosmos, how does that fit in? If man is
responsible for the shit, how does the cosmos come into it?

BT: Everything is much bigger than us. I think the human is just a little
part of the cosmos.

FD & MLC: If there's evil going on, do you think it comes from elsewhere?
From outside the human sphere?

BT: No. I think human responsibility is great, enormous. Maybe the biggest
factor. You know, I don't believe in God. This is my problem. If I think
about God, okay, he has a responsibility for the whole thing, but I don't
know. You know, if you listen to any Mass, it looks like two dogs when they
are starting to fight. And always, I just try to think about what is
happening now.


These are, I think, interesting comments from a filmmaker who at one point
had ambitions to be a philosopher, but turned--by circumstances, by
drive--to filmmaking. What is interesting is that Tarr deliberately denies
any philosophical notions, or any metaphysical notions, regarding his art.
Note, as well, how the interviewers continually bring the discussion back to
the ``cosmic,'' the metaphysical, the philosophical, while Tarr continually
shifts the focus back to the present, a world as it is now, a world probably
without God.     In his opening comments, Daly stresses his side, with this
statement: ``Such an existential terror has ensured that a "carceral
principle" (in the words of Stephane Bouquet) has remained the key to Tarr's
intriguing cinematic world, even if, beyond the enclosed domestic spaces of
his early features, it is now Time that holds us prisoner.'' I believe that
this is a serious misreading of Tarr's cinema, which is instead based on
perhaps the most radical view of the material--as opposed to the
spiritual--that we have seen in the cinema in many, many years. Tarr's
cinema has also been misread as ``mystical,'' and likened to Tarkovsky. This
misperception is compounded when the tidbits of his formative years emerge
(i.e. that he studied to be a philosopher).
    This isn't to rule out the possibility of interpreting Tarr's extremely
complex and dense films along philosophical lines (and I would LOVE to see
someone in this Salon or at the Film-Philosophy web publication take up that
assignment!). However, it's important that, just as a world-class filmmaker
is finally emerging into the consciousness of an international audience, he
isn't misidentified or misconstrued.
    I plan to write more extensively in the future--in essay form--on my
argument regarding Tarr. But I thought it was useful and interesting to this
Salon's discussion on the question of making a philosophical film to hear
from a filmmaker who has considered the question, and decided to reject that
choice.
     I believe that part of what underlies Tarr's skepticism about making
films-as-philosophy stems from his understanding of the unique intellectual
rigours of the philosophical argument and exchange, the process of
formulation and reformulation, and how it can't be properly transferred to
film. Early in his career, he had adopted an approach somewhat akin to
Bergman, in transferring the meanings of arguments or positions over to
individual characters. Nothing in ``Almanac of Fall'' (1984--Facets Video),
for example, is overtly philosophical. In its depiction of a chamber drama
enclosing various characters in power plays with each other, it strongly
recalls both Bergman and Strindberg. But a line of philosphical argument can
perhaps be made, and a Nietzschean perspective could easily be drawn up to
analyze the entire film.
    But by the more recent films, Tarr has shifted into another arena as an
artist. He is now less interested in characters and stories (though they are
very much there), and more interested in the entire material world as it
appears in front of our eyes, and how that world affects and changes us.
This is in fact his prime subject. The confusion with the ``mystical'' may
derive from such things as the opening scene of ``Werckmeister,'' in which
the central character playfully places drunken revellers in a saloon in
position as planets in our local Solar System, ``directing'' his ``actors''
to the point of a lunar eclipse, and then past the point of the eclipse's
end, when light returns to Earth. Of course, then, the drunken men fall
apart and are pushed out the door by the impatient barkeep. What could have
been ``mystical'' is actually brillliantly mocked by Tarr, and establishes a
foreshadowing for the rest of the film.
     Like Malick, Tarr has studied and explored philosophy, but then found
another form of expression in film, while consciously rejecting
film-as-philosophy.

Robert Koehler