To celebrate the release of his epic Sátántangó on DVD, David O Mahony places the film in the context of the Hungarian director's other collaborations with novelist László Krasznahorkai, and finds that, despite Tarr's assertions to the contrary, the films are about much more than depressing characters walking around in the rain.

In an interview following a London Film Festival screening of his most recent film, Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Hungarian director Béla Tarr fielded an inquiry from critic Jonathan Romney by stating that 'there are no symbols or metaphors in my movies, lets get that straight from the beginning'. And as to the possibility of political allusions, 'politics is a dirty business and should never be the object of a piece of art'. Tarr's work is, from a western perspective at least, elusive, and Romney was, with some justification, goading the director into disgorging himself of some salient nugget of information that might knit the disparate elements of Werckmeister into a cohesive whole. It proved a fool's errand; Tarr – intransigent, implacable, and not a little threatening – mitigated any possibility of his art being dissected for the benefit of a hungry audience.

What effect has this denial of meaning on the films themselves? By removing the burden of interpretation from the viewer Tarr is not really helping, as his films (which could at the very least be described as challenging) cry out to be 'read' in some manner. It is a cheeky side-stepping manoeuvre from an artist loath to reveal his motives. Perhaps, also, it is the viewer's weakness; hopelessly tied to conventional forms of cinematic expression where things mean 'things', we feel compelled to ascribe a rationale, however spurious. But how does one digest the seven-and-a-quarter-hour Sátántangó (1994) without recourse to some frame of external reference? I prefer to believe that Tarr is being playful when he says there is no coding, no hidden meaning. Time and again he has dismissed anything save the most rudimentary reading – his work seeks to capture the quotidian life of downtrodden folk in rural Hungary, nothing more – and by doing so forces us to engage with the work on a fundamental level; he is doing what so few directors do these days, which is asking us to interpret the images, forcing us to make judgments about what is happening (or, for that matter, not happening) onscreen. By effectively divorcing himself from artistic responsibility the director single-handedly makes his films all the more interesting.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 114.