Bela in Bangkok
- Published: 24/01/2012 at 02:53 AM
- Newspaper section: Life
Like a cool uncle, Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr breezed into Bangkok this weekend without much fanfare and managed to blow the audience away with his film The Turin Horse. Tarr is one of the world's most visionary film-makers, a great formalist who sculpted his hypnotic cinema through long takes and lateral tracking. In town to accept the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 9th World Film Festival (in addition to so many Lifetime trophies he has received in the past year) the director, a soft-spoken titan of European cinema, also answered questions after the screening of The Turin Horse on Sunday at Esplanade Cineplex.
Tarr talked about the apparent difference and yet inherent similarity of humanity _ "the poverty and the ugliness are the same everywhere." The Turin Horse is a story of the horse that Friedrich Nietzsche saw before he went mad; here the film-maker imagined the life of that horse and two peasants who keep it in a storm-whipped field devoid of life and hope. "It's not the apocalypse.
"The apocalypse is what you see on TV series," Tarr said. Instead this is a bleak, powerful, stunning sketch of life and its irrevocable, irredeemable end.
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