Tarr's thematic and stylistic concerns have their expressive motifs in showing the subjective logic, a kind of movement of thoughts. The subtlety of the lighting effects is not simply a source of legitimate aesthetic pleasure in its own right, but part of the thematic and psychological structure of the film. The stylistic universe of Béla Tarr forms a world apart not only from Hollywood but also from the fractured forms and shock techniques of western modernism. Tarr has developed a new cinematic art from the long take, multi-planar composition and the complex orchestration of characters, sounds and objects in and out of the frame.
It is a meeting place for themes and styles, a kind of wonder cinema: a fascination with the interface of nature and culture that co-exists with a sense of the terror lurking in the material world. This has been called "magical realism", but it is not supernatural by nature. Instead this kind of cinema exists in the face of adversity, both human and natural. In Tarr the very presence of different elements percolates the texture of the image, with its intimations of infernal wind, rain and cold and the flood of biblical proportions that threatens at the end of Damnation.
Tarr’s cinematic patterns are intimately connected with what he shows.
He gives the viewer enough time to see these patterns. For Tarr, the duration of the image is very important and part of his filmic tactics. The shot as a composition is clearly the main coordinator of things. The focus on single image is one step of his visual strategy since the approach of his visual design is
25 Valkola, Jarmo (2000), Aesthetic & Cognitive Perceptualism: Signs, symbols, and Concepts in Art Educational Context. JULPU: University of Jyväskylä, 100-102.
dealing with shapes and lines of the images arranged to balance the frame. The delicateness of the Tarr-shot has a lot to do with framing. When dealing with closer views of characters and objects Tarr uses selective perspectives. The elemental space is often portrayed as a clear composition with everything in focus. They have a special pictorial quality, which is related to the spectator’s perceiving of them. These characters therefore provide Tarr with the opportunity to disperse observations, and thereby to enlarge and complicate the perspective of the film. In Tarr’s visual world, pictorial appreciation of details can give us enough encouragement to read the pictorial elements of the shot, and configure them in a new way. It is tempting to think that when reading an image our visual attention moves across it relating its relationships and configurations to each other. Our mind treats the image as a real object and as a depiction of something else very simultaneously.
Tarr's cinema is an art of filming more than of editing or montage. Its rhythms come from the weight of duration and the choreography of the image.
The 39 shots of Werckmeister Harmonies may indeed contain one or two surgical stitches. Yet the approach is uncompromised by such tidying up of loose ends.
Tarr's camera movement registers both immanence and imminence. It acts as a slow unveiling of a psychic landscape that produces both narrative suspense and an abiding sense of mystery. Throughout his films, there is a constant stream of views being posed about how to convey the feelings associated with a particular moment or image. These reflexive observations are intricately intertwined with film as a medium and reflections upon the nature of representation. These forms of style take a number of forms, but share a consistent complication of the perspective through which we view the film. In the most straightforward of these, Tarr at several points invokes metaphors of the passage of the cinematic medium itself. These metaphors are further augmented, as we are ethically and morally invited into the Tarr-universe, by the implied parallel between the immobility, anticipation and the subject position of the cinematic spectator.
We can now return to the ending of Werckmeister Harmonies. As a coda to catastrophe, Tarr goes back to source, to the largest whale in the world which still lies, beached, in the town square. A slow track along the surface of the dead skin ends with the face and then the eye, which comes to fill the screen. The gaze of the camera is met with a counter-gaze. The baleful look may well be a reproach, yet equally it could be holding up a mirror to the camera lens. It could be the sign, reflected back, of disaster that emanates from the lens itself. Is the camera standing-in for the malevolent gaze of a fallen angel that fixes human folly with an evil eye? We can certainly sense here what this camera's spectral gaze is not: it's not the high-angle 'divine' POV, that ingenious make-over of Orthodox iconography it had been in Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) or Andrei Rublev (1966). It is something much darker altogether. Yet the promise of good is never quite liquidated - which brings us back to Valushka's yearnings, the ramblings of the holy fool. In spite of everything, he must go on believing in
something. This belief may foment further disaster, but equally it ensures that hope is never extinguished.
In a malign world, the power of life may come from the power of human illusion. Valushka can still believe that the whale is a thing of infinite beauty.
Valushka is physically heading for some destination. His passage involves real space and time. The "evil" which the man encounters can be external and concrete, but also diffuse and hard to define. For Tarr it is also a moral question in a world where humanity seems to have lost, and for which his protagonist increasingly seeks. Moreover, the promise of a perfect tone and scale of the Werckmeister Harmonies, on which his musicologist uncle endlessly speculates, is a promise of harmony and beauty for distraught nephew, a promise of order out of chaos. In his willingness to believe, Valushka adheres to the promise against all odds. In a world darkness light will always break through some day.
As a whole, Tarr’s films are dialogical and constructive enterprises, phenomenological considerations of time and space, and they create relations between consciousness and the object. In a Tarr-world, phenomenology will account for the affective side of experience. In watching a Tarr-film, we are in a state where perception involves interpretation and constructed ideas through which we can react to sensory and symbolical qualities as well as the semantic information contained in the film. Watching an image is an existential and social experience, which happens through active reception and the framing of the subjective and mediated world. Perception of a film by Béla Tarr through phenomenological perspective will acknowledge the creative possibilities of audiovisual composition, framing, extending, freezing of fragmentizing, and expanding the role of images and sounds into a philosophical argumentation.
The wholeness of human life conveys through estimation of respect and directness of their actions. For Tarr, it is essential to use pictorial and aural signs of film and join them together in various ways. These joints will include other elements of cinematic narration starting from storytelling devices in to different techniques of representation, and from actors’ performances in to the structures of meanings. Authenticity is one hallmark of Tarr including both the subject matters and modes of narration. Tarr’s stylistic commitments underlie the game of presence and absence, manifestations of his aesthetic system whose breadth of details and suppleness of variations give it an unparalleled place in the history of film and in the language of cinema. Every work of Tarr has a unique viewpoint and aspiration of the ways he can point out certain historical, social, moral, and ethical questions.