Béla Tarr, the Time After Quotes

“The performance of the actors falls within the province of this same “realism.” They are neither traditional actors, nor individuals living their own story on the screen. It hardly matters, however, if they are career actors like János Derszi, the young man of Almanac of Fall who became the old man of The Turin Horse, or amateurs like Erika Bok, little Estike of Satantango who became the daughter of the old coach driver. They are, in the first place, “personalities,” says Béla Tarr. They have to be the characters, not play them. We must not allow ourselves to be tricked by the apparent banality of the prescription. Their task is not that of identifying themselves with fictional characters. No realism in their words, which punctuate a situation without intending to translate the particularity of the characters. But no need to adopt a “neutral” tone, à la Bresson, either, in order to make the hidden truth of their being appear. Their words are already detached from their bodies, they are an emanation of the fog, of repetition, and of expectation. They circulate throughout the place, are dispersed in its air, or they affect the other bodies in it and arouse new movements. The realism is in the manner of inhabiting situations. Amateurs or professionals, what counts for actors is their capacity to perceive situations and to invent responses, a capacity formed not by classes on the dramatic arts, but by their experience of life, or by an artistic practice forged elsewhere.”
― Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After

“Béla Tarr insists: if montage, as a distinct activity, has so little importance in his films, this is because it takes place in the heart of the sequence, which never ceases to vary in its own interior: in a single shot, the camera passes from a close-up of a stove or a fan to the complexity of the interactions for which a bistro serves as theater; it climbs from a hand toward a face before leaving the latter to enlarge the frame, or to explore other faces; it passes through zones of darkness before illuminating other bodies, now caught on a different level. In this manner it establishes an infinity of miniscule variations between movement and immobility: tracking shots that advance very slowly toward a face, or initially unperceived halts in the movement.”
― Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After

“From this point on, a Béla Tarr film will be an assemblage of these crystals of time, in which the “cosmic” pressure is concentrated. More than all others, his images deserve to be called time-images, images from which duration – the very stuff of which those individualities, which we call situations or characters, are woven – is made manifest. This has nothing to do, then, with the “pieces of nature” that Bresson wanted to take from his models, and to assemble into a painter’s canvass through montage. There are no pieces, no demiurge of montage. Each moment is a microcosm. Each sequence shot has a duty to the time of the world, to the time in which the world is reflected in intensities felt by bodies.”
― Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After

“A style, as we know after Flaubert, is not the embellishment of a discourse, but a manner of seeing things: an “absolute” manner, says the novelist, a manner of absolutizing the act of seeing and the transcription of perception, against the narrative tradition that rushes on to the effect that follows from a cause. For the writer, however, “to see” is an ambiguous word. It is necessary “to make the scene visible,” says the novelist. But what he writes is not what he sees, and it is this very gap that brings literature into being. The situation is different with the filmmaker: what he sees, what is in front of the camera, is also what the spectator will see. For the filmmaker, though, there is also a choice between two ways of seeing: the relative, which instrumentalizes the visible in the service of the succession of actions, and the absolute, which gives the visible the time to produce its specific effect.”
― Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After