Gilles et Jacques se disputent Béla: philosophies of cinematic modernism and the films of Béla Tarr

Abstract

This article argues that, in spite of superficial affinities between the work of Tarr and Deleuze's notion of the time-image, his films can be more fruitfully discussed within the rubric of Rancière's 'aesthetic regime of art', as evinced by the recent publication of the monograph Béla Tarr, Le temps d'après. This concept, providing for a more dialectical, spiralic relationship between cinematic classicism and modernism than that which is afforded by Deleuze's Cinéma books, allows our understanding of Tarr's work to escape the commonplace 'death of cinema' thesis which his recent retirement from filmmaking has prompted, and it will instead be argued that Tarr's films, in collapsing the distinctions between classical and modernist cinema, point to the potential for a continued vitality of the medium.