This thematic thread is conceived as a tribute to Béla Tarr, who has left us. Returning to our encounter with him in Locarno in 2019, we realise how his spiritual legacy is at once demanding and gentle. Demanding, in its rigorous commitment to a cinema that confronts reality and allows its very flesh to emerge through an aesthetic of long takes and slowness. Gentle, because this realist credo always places people at its centre. Through expanded time, faces and gestures are amplified within a humanist choreography.
Many films resonate with Béla Tarr’s cinematic art. Shahram Mokri’s Fish and Cat and Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis XIV explore the possibilities of the long take, which are used as emotional climaxes in Bi Gan’s films, from Kaili Blues to Resurrection. Other Chinese works, such as Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Stillor Zhang Miaoyan’s Silent Mist, radicalise cinematic realism in an expressive and critical manner. This approach is a defining signature of Wang Bing’s cinema — here represented by his lesser-known Ta’ang — and finds further echoes in the cinematography of Tsai Ming-liang and Lav Diaz. Will the thread of “expanding time” also extend to Alexei German’s final masterpiece, Hard to Be a God? Giuseppe Di Salvatore
