Death is working overtime: R.I.P. Bela Tarr

It seems as if death has been working overtime over the past year, especially in recent months. Numerous personalities from the worlds of acting and film directing disappeared from the earth in 2025: David Lynch, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, Claudia Cardinale, Hark Bohm, Brigitte Bardot, Marcel Ophüls, Udo Kier, Alice and Ellen Kessler, and Rosa von Praunheim. The underground scene was not spared either: Wilhelm Hein, who edited legendary experimental films with his wife Birgit in the sixties, was also called to the eternal film studios. And it continues in the new year: Bela Tarr passed away yesterday.

The Hungarian master never made it easy for his audience: he forced them into unbearable desolation, tediousness, reduction, and the colorlessness of everyday life. A minimalism that clearly exceeded the pain threshold of some cinema fans. One example: THE TURIN HORSE, which Tarr shot in 2011 with his wife Agnes Hranitzky. The plot refers to an incident in Turin in 1889: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, already marked by madness, embraced a carriage horse while crying. The reason: the coachman had whipped it violently. In the nearly two-and-a-half-hour black-and-white film THE TURIN HORSE, Tarr and Hranitzky show the everyday life of the animal in a farming family whose fields and livelihood are slowly withering away.

The most powerful antidote to the pain of transience is the medium of film: neither photography nor painting can capture life as realistically as cinema. Deceased actors and actresses: on the screen, they still seem to be alive: as ghosts. Without bodies, yet still present. Every film that survives is a small bulwark against final disappearance. That’s why Filmkunst Videothek offers you films with (or by) these people on rental DVD. Our staff will be happy to advise you.