News  ·  20 | 11 | 2018

The Insatiable Explorer

Béla Tarr at L’immagine e la parola. Announced also Jacopo Quadri as Guest, to pay homage to Bertolucci.

Unstoppable and absolute. One given name, one last name, and thirty years of filmmaking: Béla Tarr. The great Hungarian master will be the guest and key player of the seventh edition of L’immagine e la parola, the spring extension of the Locarno Festival that sets out to explore the relationship between the written word and moving images. It goes beyond the dual notion of “literature and film” to delve into a conception of art where creating means experimenting with language. 

Béla Tarr is an uncompromising auteur, one of the few to fearlessly tackle Nietzsche’s thought process and produce a masterpiece as a result (The Turin Horse, 2011). That definitive film became his testament, the last work before retiring, apparently for good. With a mixture of readings, encounters and screenings, the weekend of March 29-31 will give the opportunity to take a closer look at the director’s oeuvre, a path that stretches from feverish socialist realism (Family Nest, 1977) to visionary existentialist cinema (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000). He also crossed paths with the works of unforgettable writers such as Lászlo Krasznahorkai and Georges Simenon. Tarr’s images, engraved in stunning black and white, are the result of the tireless exploration of cinematic art, whose temporal dimension he blew up through the clever use of long takes. 

Tarr, the lonely explorer, has been part of the Locarno line-up in the past, and will be in town as a teacher of cinema. L’immagine e la parola will last one weekend, whereas two weeks will be devoted to the workshop Mountains – Loneliness – Desire, aimed at ten young filmmakers and organized by the Locarno Festival and CISA, with the support of the Ticino Film Commission and Enjoy Arena SA. Béla Tarr will guide them in the planning and filming of a collective project about the region’s mountains, and that film will be shown as a special screening at the 72nd Locarno Festival. 

Click here for all the relevant information concerning the seventh edition of L’immagine e la parola, and here to sign up for the masterclasses with Béla Tarr and Jacopo Quadri.

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