This week at 'Cinedays' in Skopje, Macedonia, during the 70 films in 10 days event, Bela Tarr's latest film (and final the director says), THE TURIN HORSE (2011) screened to local and international audiences. Bela Tarr is a loved auteur around the world and some even say, an 'apocalyptic' director.  

The first time I had heard about Béla Tarr was from a Serbian filmmaker friend who told me that if I wanted to know some real avant-garde plucky cinema, I hadn’t lived until I had seen a Béla Tarr film. As a writer myself, I’m big on unadulterated organic creativity and this exemplary director has gone against all the rules doing everything a filmmaker is taught not to do, making himself quite a name in his 34 years of doing so. Tarr even holds the credit to having directed one of the longest feature films ever made- SATANTANGO (1994), a 450 minute film about a group of villagers waiting to receive money in a small village in Hungary, where nothing much appears to happen on the surface but so much seems to be happening underneath. And that is the genius at work in Tarr’s films; they are long, bleak and seemingly without story and yet the viewer remains transfixed to the screen, hanging on in quiet suspense. Béla Tarr would most likely argue that the film just is what it is with no symbolism or allegory intended while viewers nonetheless ceaselessly attempt to attach multiple layers of meaning to his films. Well, before I ruin anything by trying to slap more words onto something that stands best on its own sans-explanation, I will simply stop here and let Béla himself shine light upon the point-of-view and unique world that is Béla Tarr's cinema...

CONTINUE HERE TO READ MY INTERVIEW WITH BELA TARR:

http://www.fest21.com/en/blog/vanessa_mcmahon/interview_with_bela_tarr_riff_2011

-written by Vanessa McMahon