There is a moment when the hegemonic film industry, in a kind of rite of passage, seems to confront one of André Bazin’s fundamental formulations on the relationship among cinema, time, and death: the idea that “death is nothing but the victory of time.” I am referring to the brief In Memoriam segment during the annual Academy Awards ceremony, in which death is suspended through a short archival inscription of images of those who have passed away. At the moment when photographs and flashes from films pay a final tribute to the dead before the collective gaze, a fleeting funerary interval is forged, elevating the ceremony into a unifying rite of disappearance.

Yet it is precisely through this opening that the hegemony of the classical industry wavers. Among so many figures consecrated by action and the American film market, Béla Tarr’s almost unnoticed face appears as a foreign body, an out-of-place apparition within the very ritual that summons him. His presence acts as a silent interruption, an unexpected antagonism that fractures the apparent closure of this discursive space. For a few seconds, he lays bare the incursion of another aesthetic regime at the apex of commercial cinema. More precisely, it is the image of pure time, released from the model of action in order to place the observer within temporality itself. That face, perhaps unknown to much of the audience accustomed to names consecrated by the North American industry, carries with it another history of cinema. I find myself confronting that toothless smile, which appears fleetingly beside an image from what was to be his final film.

It is no coincidence that The Turin Horse (2011) is constructed through long takes in which the subjects on screen seem to anticipate their own process of disappearance. Death emerges as more than an event: it becomes present in the slow preparation of the everyday rite, that is, waking, dressing, eating, crossing the wind, and persisting in survival beside a horse that gradually surrenders to paralysis. It is a film inhabited by faces hollowed out by the passing of days, bodies consumed by repetition, and figures that emerge from a darkness in which the edges of the frame are constantly seized by black-and-white gloom. Tarr silently deposits time upon each body, each gesture, and each landscape.

In this world where everything moves toward immobility, Nietzsche’s gesture in Turin in the winter of 1889 echoes. Faced with a horse condemned by human violence, the philosopher clings to the animal and breaks down in tears, as if recognizing in that exhausted body, unable to go on, the anticipation of death itself. Perhaps it is precisely in this anticipation that a connection with the Hollywood ritual resides. If, on the one hand, Tarr extends duration in order to accompany bodies before the end of the world, on the verge of succumbing, the In Memoriam performs the opposite movement by summoning subjects into a few seconds of appearance. Béla Tarr illuminates his characters with the same appeal that casts light upon ruins, shadows, slowness, and the traces of a world in decay; otherwise, we would be condemned to a cinema compulsorily organized by cutting, acceleration, and the incessant need to produce fragments, the fundamental marks of the hegemonic Hollywood imaginary.

There is something deeply curious about this fleeting encounter between such opposite temporalities: on one side, the filmmaker who dedicated his work to contemplating the exhaustion of time, watching seconds accumulate upon bodies destined to disappear; on the other, the cinematic machine that tries to condense an entire existence into a few seconds of light, a brief flash that whispers before the crowd: we remember you. At the center of the industry’s most visible celebration, only this ordinary and funerary instant remains, in which one face disappears to make way for the next, one dead person is succeeded by another through the inevitable precision of the cut, for even in the face of death there seems to be no time to lose. The machine that consecrated speed organizes memory through the rhythm of substitution, which is itself the fetish of the cut. It is within this contradiction that Tarr’s appearance becomes even more unsettling: while the filmmaker devoted his work to extending the duration of gestures, guided by his true love of the continuum, at the Oscars he was remembered precisely through a rite of passage that must interrupt in order to continue. Before the cut that separates ghosts, Tarr remains as the memory of another possible cinema.

But what discursive arc do the Oscars sustain by ignoring the work and exalting the author? This foundational question exposes a contradiction that operates through equivalence, through the collective “unification” forged by mourning; put differently, in its discursive practice, the ceremony attempts a possible suture that seeks to erase the differences of a strange, unassimilated cinema and, therefore, one that cannot be fitted into the hegemonic industry.

The mourning that brings the outsider in is, in fact, the final attempt at assimilation. André Bazin’s idea of the “mummy complex” describes an instinctive need to save being through appearance and to embalm time. Hollywood’s spectacular apparatus, in staging a funerary contemplation of Tarr, the author, not the work is, at bottom, a response to anxiety before finitude, but also a discursive practice that cannot ignore a director who enters film history at the margins of hegemony. Béla Tarr is inserted there as yet another assimilated figure, belonging to the group of the dead, all condensed into an appearance lasting only a few seconds: faces torn from the flow of forgetting and reorganized within an institutional narrative of memory. I recognize that there is something profoundly cinematic in this gesture, since the image itself has always inhabited this border zone in which what we see on the screen is, at the same time, alive and dead.

Yet when, in my living room, I see Tarr’s image appear radiant on the Oscars stage shortly after his death, the director immediately moves from the periphery to the center, for his films were always absent from the Academy Awards, revealing how deeply the logic of hegemony operates. According to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, a hegemonic relation occurs when a particularity assumes the representation of a universality incommensurable with it. Hollywood, with its model grounded in action, the archplot, and the compulsory fetish of the cut, has hegemonized much of cinema’s discursive field, presenting itself as the inevitable horizon of what it means to make sense in the seventh art.

Tarr’s slowness, grounded in the refusal of utilitarian narrative and in the exposure of an exhaustive temporality that the industry considers unbearable, represents an irreconcilable antagonism to this hegemonic structure, such that the Hollywood machine performs an endless stitching together of cinematic languages, yet without bringing in the films themselves, only the ghostly portrait of the Hungarian director. It is an endless stitching because the suture can never be completed—that is, other cinemas arising at the periphery of the North American discursive regime can never be fully assimilated. The gesture of trying to bring the other side into the ceremony neither conceals the contradictions nor closes the open wound carried not only by Béla Tarr but by other renegades; on the contrary, it reveals them through other routes, for:

The condition for total equivalence is that the discursive space be rigorously divided into two fields. Antagonism admits no tertium quid. And it is easy to see why. For if we were able to differentiate the chain of equivalences in relation to something other than that which it opposes, its terms could not be defined exclusively in a negative manner […] But just as the logic of difference never succeeds in constituting a fully sutured space, neither does the logic of equivalence. The dissolution of the differential character of the positions of social agents through equivalential condensation is never complete. (LACLAU; MOUFFE, 2015, p. 207, our translation).

The logic of equivalence, drawing on Laclau and Mouffe, creates a secondary meaning that seeks to dissolve difference in order to group discourse into a presumed unity. When the Hollywood machine projects the In Memoriam, it applies this logic, for the industry uses collective mourning as the “identical trait” capable of creating an enumerative chain. Within this chain, the radical asymmetries and political, narrative, and aesthetic differences among cinema professionals are suspended and homogenized. The ritual seeks to pacify the cinematic space, transforming directors of the hegemonic movement-image and marginal filmmakers into fully equivalent elements within a supposed universal of the industry.

However, Béla Tarr’s figure introduces a shock into this process because his work and his presence operate structurally according to the logic of difference. Tarr’s Slow Cinema, grounded in the contemplation of exhaustion, the materiality of time, and the refusal of the constraints of narrative action, expands and strains cinematic language, refusing to be reduced to the same rapid and spectacular paradigm. It is a funerary attempt at assimilation. It is precisely at this point that the appearance of ghosts acquires an overwhelming symbolic dimension, above all in the condensation of Tarr’s image, for he appears as a subversive irruption of the logic of difference within Hollywood’s equivalential effort. Tarr’s work, by granting density to precarious existences and inscribing itself in the fabric of the sensible, inhabits what Jacques Rancière calls the “time after”, that is, the time after History, which in turn brings narratives retold, repeated, and exhausted since the Old Testament. I like to think that Béla Tarr’s cinema, especially his later films, operates here as a margin-image that, through the director’s ghostly portrait at the ceremony, is condemned to a vague faciality, his toothless smile.

But beyond that face, his cinema is the very image of the limit of Hollywood objectivity, the geological fault through which the hegemonic system cannot fully close itself; this is why it turns to the face as the singular unit of his work. Béla Tarr is in foreign lands. He is an outsider, a displaced body within an awards ceremony that was never entirely celebratory of his work. His presence operates as that which returns from the margins to haunt the center, exposing the impossibility of any aesthetic territory remaining closed in upon itself. Tarr’s face in the In Memoriam is the momentary appearance of a difference that survived outside dominant codes. It is cinema’s other side, silent, waiting, enduring, crossing, even if only for a few seconds, the luminous surface of the industry.

It is a furtive presence, the margin-image: the instant when hegemony articulates equivalence and suspends the aesthetic and political difference of a filmmaker who wanted nothing more than to return time itself to cinema. When we look at the epicenter of the dominant industry, especially in this gesture of summoning not the work itself but the figure of the author – the maker of end-of-the-world films – we perceive an ambiguous operation: what could not be fully assimilated as language returns as mourning; what found no place as aesthetics and politics reappears as an ephemeral face. Thus, the fleeting passage of this encounter in the In Memoriam is visual proof that radical temporality, ethical slowness, and an aesthetics of degeneration haunt, like unresolved trauma, the margins of Hollywood hegemony. Even within a ritual designed to celebrate the victory of illusion over death, Tarr’s time after manages to seep in, making clear that there is a discursive margin, valuable to film history itself, that commercial cinema will never be able to tame.

Tarr’s cinema cannot be domesticated or translated by the ritual because its aesthetics rests precisely on what Gilles Deleuze diagnoses as the collapse of classical “sensory-motor schemata” in favor of “purely optical and sound situations,” which emancipate time from its subordination to action. In direct opposition to Hollywood narrative, which demands that each situation retain only those elements capable of generating causes and effects, Tarr’s realism rejects action in order to plunge into “dead time,” forcing us to confront the immobility of situations that simply endure. According to Deleuze, this crisis is already evidenced by Hitchcock, who “initiated the reversal of this point of view, by including the spectator in the film”; let us recall Rear Window (1954). Because his leg is broken, Jefferies is, in a sense, a spectator who, for much of the time, can do nothing, the crisis of action, so that “he records more than he reacts” (DELEUZE, 1990, pp. 2–12, our translation).

In Sátántangó (1994), there is a scene in which this spectator-character appears and, motionless, observes the unfolding of unsettling bodies. I am referring to Estike, who, trembling, watches through the window as the tango takes shape. The character’s innocence is contaminated: “I can do whatever I want with you,” she tells her cat before making it drink poisoned milk. Here I venture to say that Estike does not carry out this cursed gesture deliberately. It is neither out of sheer cruelty nor from any absence of love for her cat that Estike condemns everything to death. Estike’s eyes are pierced by bodies in decay at the exact moment of the tango. She is the indiscreet character; hence the importance of her perspective through the window, for her vision operates as an anticipation of death. In short, after witnessing from the window the central moment of Sátántangó—that is, the tango—the wide-eyed girl will take her own life amid the ruins of a cathedral, turning into an unruly body. Estike leaps into the unknown by condemning herself to death. Yet at other moments in his work, Béla Tarr replaces death with madness: both emerge as responses to the same abyss, the definitive loss of illusion. In this sense, Rancière clarifies that:

The specific task of cinema is to construct the movement according to which these effects are produced and circulate, whose modulation takes place according to the two fundamental sensible regimes of repetition and the leap into the unknown. The leap into the unknown may lead nowhere, just as it may also lead to pure destruction and madness (RANCIÈRE, 2013, p. 76, our translation).

Such a sensible regime, as Rancière describes it, is exemplified by Estike, who embodies pure destruction, but also by madness, as in the case of János in Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). Thus, both Estike and János embody what Deleuze identifies in the crisis of the action-image. These are characters who no longer respond to the world through transformative gestures, remaining before it as witnesses to its ruin.They are figures condemned by the act of looking, whether when János’s wide eyes glint before the carcass of the decomposing whale or when Estike’s dilated pupils confront the tango. They are eyes traversed by the sensible matter of this “time after” described by Rancière, where the great narratives have already been exhausted and all that remains is the experience of crossing their wreckage.

Let us return to Béla Tarr’s face, projected for a few seconds in the In Memoriam at the Oscars ceremony. Before that image, I am placed in the same condition as his characters. Just as Estike watches through the window and János faces the whale’s silent immensity, my eyes too dilate before that toothless smile. I am temporarily summoned into a Tarr-like experience: to look at what remains when action is no longer possible.

Inevitably, Tarr’s cinema has always been interested precisely in these remains. His characters inhabit worlds that come after events, places where promises of transformation have already failed and where no heroic journey can restore a lost order. Against Hollywood’s need to produce movement, evolution, and redemption, Tarr finds an ethics of remaining. He films those who stayed behind when History begins again, in a circular movement. This is why Tarr’s appearance within that rite should not be understood as a definitive reconciliation between center and margin. On the contrary, it reveals the impossibility of such total reconciliation. I reaffirm the contributions of Laclau and Mouffe, for no hegemonic formation can complete its own suture; there is always a fissure that escapes, a difference that insists on inhabiting the ruins. Tarr is precisely that ruin: a portrait that the industry casts under a spotlight yet can never fully decipher.

The In Memoriam attempts to organize the dead within a single narrative of cinematic memory, but Tarr silently resists equivalence. Not because his image lies outside cinema, but because it reminds us that other cinemas have always been possible: unsettling images of waiting, silence, puddles of mud, the manipulation of wind, a great obsession, and what happens when apparently nothing happens.

Thus, when his face briefly appears on Hollywood’s luminous surface, we see more than a tribute; we also see a fissure. The margin-image crosses the center to remind us that cinema never belonged entirely to the victors, to closed narratives, or to moving bodies fragmented by the cut. It also belongs to those who wait, those who observe, and those who remain within the long take. In the end, perhaps Béla Tarr’s greatest resistance, beyond his face, is that even before an industry obsessed with cutting in order to continue, he taught us to keep looking.

Rosa Fernan

References:

BAZIN, André. O cinema: ensaios. Translated by Eloisa de Araújo Ribeiro; Introduction by Ismail Xavier. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1991.
DE LUCA, Tiago; JORGE, Nuno Barradas (eds.). Introduction. In: Slow cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
DELEUZE, Gilles. A imagem-tempo (Cinema 2). Translated by Eloisa de Araujo Ribeiro. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1990.
DOANE, Mary Ann. The emergence of cinematic time: modernity, contingency, the archive. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
LACLAU, Ernesto; MOUFFE, Chantal. Hegemonia e estratégia socialista: por uma política democrática radical. Translated by Joanildo A. Burity, Josias de Paula Jr., and Aécio Amaral. São Paulo: Intermeios; Brasília: CNPq, 2015.
RANCIÈRE, Jacques. Béla Tarr, o tempo do depois. Translated by Luís Lima. Lisbon: Orfeu Negro, 2013.