February 18, February 25. Noon - 1:00 PM
March 4, March 11. 2:00 - 3:00 PM
“I went to Japan. And an old professor took me to the museum. There was a picture with white and two black dots, and the professor told me, ‘I’m sure, because you came from Western culture, that for you, the story is the two black dots.’ Then I said ‘Yeah.’ He said: ‘No, for us, it’s the white.’ And then I was really thinking a lot. What is story? And when you really think about it, why do we, in films, ignore, for example, the time?” Béla Tarr
Slowness was never the goal. It was a consequence of moral seriousness. His films were not slow because they lingered, but because they would not lie. They moved at the speed of erosion.
Béla Tarr occupied a singular position in late twentieth-century cinema, standing apart from both commercial filmmaking and conventional arthouse traditions. His work demanded patience not as a stylistic preference but as a moral stance. Viewers were not invited to consume stories but to endure them. Through extended takes, minimal dialogue, and circular structures, Tarr insisted that time itself carried meaning. This approach placed him at odds with an industry increasingly oriented toward speed and accessibility.
As his style evolved, narrative receded, and atmosphere advanced. Tarr’s films grew longer, darker, and more formally disciplined. Camera movement slowed, often following characters through bleak landscapes with relentless steadiness. Dialogue became sparse, subordinated to gesture and environment. The world he depicted felt suspended between historical trauma and metaphysical exhaustion. Rather than explain suffering, his films forced audiences to inhabit it. – Kolapse, Jan 2026
In the Stillness Lab’s first exploration of its generative series ‘Still Time’, Guy de Lancey explores ‘temporal depth’ and creates a projected installation of slow takes in Béla Tarr’s films, with motion interactivity, that encourages the viewer to consider stillness and ‘inhabiting’ the visual frame as an observational strategy for feeling the architectonics of time.
Please check the Events page on the ML Website for the upcoming schedule of curated Stillness Lab sessions.