When Tarr ceased to be a marginalised outsider and became one of the touchstones of the mainstream high-brow art-film culture, he decided it was time to stop.
For Tarr filmmaking has always been a question of inner moral conviction rather than a profession.
For Tarr no film of his was 'just a film'. Each of them was a 'cause' to which everybody in the crew had to dedicate himself or herself entirely with inner conviction.
Each shot is a long sequence, a block of time, and it has to have an exact atmosphere, an opening and closing, and a dramaturgical curve of its own, depending only to a small extent on the next or previous shot.
The basic theme of all Tarr's films is entrapment. The main problem Tarr resolves in different ways in different films is how to create the deceptive sense that the characters' situation is evolving toward some solution and, at the same time, to make one feel the hopelessness of this situation right from the beginning; the art of Béla Tarr is thus to make believe without hiding anything.
On The Turin Horse:
In no other Tarr film is the helplessness of the characters laid bare so powerfully as in this film[....] everyone in this film faces ultimate helplessness, and for the first time in Tarr's oeuvre, the characters do not make their own life or others' lives any harder. They are entirely at the mercy of exterior circumstances, and these circumstances have no mercy for them. No real human qualities are manifested by the characters of this film; be it good or bad, there is only base human existence reduced to its simplest physical and biological substance. That is why the last sentence uttered in the film is what the father says to his daughter; 'One must eat'.
... extensive representation of temps mort is more excessive in this film than in any other Tarr film. In fact, what is represented all through the story is empty time, since nothing is envisaged in the plot, nothing adds up, and the characters' acts lead nowhere. The story represents the time elapsed between two extraordinary events: Nietzsche's final mental breakdown, related to the beating of the horse, and the final apocalyptic blackout. But this is not the empty time within a process between two significant events representing important turns in an event series. The empty time in the story will not end. This is the process of time emptying out for good, which is represented on the concrete level by the events contributing to the disappearance or the fading out of the world. The last event, the fade out, therefore, is not an event. It is the end of all events, the end of time. The time of the plot takes place in a kind of 'day after', where the apocalyptic event in Nietzsche's mental breakdown followed by an undetermined natural catastrophe where the chances of survival are zero.
The most spectacular thing about the narrative is that there is no progressing element in it related to the characters. The characters have no intentions, goals, plans, or desires that could become the motivational basis of the narration.
... since the last human connection is the manifestation of the final mental collapse, the apocalypse occurring in the story can be interpreted in a way as a result of nor as a metaphor for Nietzsche's mental breakdown, as if Nietzsche's collapse were a premonition, the first sign of the apocalypse. Or else, as if the latter were a consequence or the physical continuation of the former.
On Damnation:
Causes and effects go round and round and everything is part of the same web of circumstances that takes it impossible for anyone to step outside of this infernal circularity. this conspiracy-like structure is what evokes the universality of this human condition, which is not specifically moral, social, historical or psychological. It is not geographically located either. It is also natural (no consolation in natural beauty), meterological (constant rain and mud) and physical (run-down environment): universal, in one word.
... the only hope they have is to push back the inevitable bad ending a little. His only hope is to slow down the process leading to his downfall, or, in other words, slowness is his only hope. We can see now how how the only positive element of the story is intimately linked to slowness. Slowness postpones the tragedy, making the characters and the viewer believe that there remains some hope. On the other hand, slowness together with suspense raises a presentiment of something inevitable to come.
In Damnation, it is no longer 'Hungary of the 1970s or 1980s', but an unspecific degraded, deserted semi-urban, semi-rural landscape on the way to slow, gradually disintegration displayed in a careful visual composition, fitted with meticulously chosen objects and architectural elements, and lit in a strong chiaroscuro style. Yet the elements are recognisably East European, bearing the signs of a destroyed tradition and an unfinished modernisation blocked halfway to completion.
András Bálint Kovács, The Cinema of Béla Tarr