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I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge And that’s why we expand (Béla Tarr, 2007)   Béla Tarr is a director who divides the field He makes slow, stark films about lives in which little happens, combining old-fashioned values and innovative methods He records the basic elements of domestic life with incongruously sweeping, virtuoso cinematography and picks apart the rudiments of human role-play with elaborate subtlety, coordinating gritty detail and a sense of the universal in a way that some see as visionary and others find tedious Jonathan Rosenbaum, the American film critic, has dubbed Tarr a ‘despiritualised Tarkovsky’ I find him a less lapsed and more conflicted creature: a hopeful cynic or scatological mystic, whose films are as aggressively earthbound as they are inspiring Born and raised in Hungary, Béla Tarr began his directing career in the 1970s at the Béla Balázs studios in Budapest, where he fell in with a group of ‘documentarist’ directors dedicated to representing the lives of the working class in as pared-down and unembellished a way as possible his early films Family Nest (1979) and The Outsider (1981) are classic examples of the school, but through the eighties he developed away from it as he absorbed the influences of European art house cinema, particularly Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard, and became interested in form, composition, metaphysics and the history of film   In 1984 he began collaborating with the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, with whom he went on to create many of his greatest films, Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) – these last two adaptations of Krasznahorkai’s novels Sátántangó and The Melancholy of Resistance, respectively The elaborate sentences and unorthodox structures of Krasznahorkai’s novels seem to have informed Tarr’s own formal innovations – the lengthy takes, chapter divisions and sprawling psychological odysseys of which his later films are composed It is also in Krasznahorkai’s literature that Tarr seems to have identified a vast and surreal perspective through which to envision the lives of ordinary people Though the range of Tarr’s artistic relationships and interests has shaped a highly distinctive approach, it also has much to do with his cultural position Working between Soviet-scarred Hungary and the