Director's Statement: Why I Make Films
Right at the center of a seemingly incomprehensible world, at the age of 32, the question "why do I make films" seems unanswerable. I don't know.
All I know is that I can't make films if people don't let me. If I don't receive trust and funding I feel like I don't exist. The last one-and-a-half to two years of my life went by in just such a state of apparent futility - I was given no opportunities to realize my plans through the official channels. Two courses of action were left open to me: to gradually suffocate or search for some alternative. Then followed a terrible year of begging for money and trying to discover whether it's even possible to make a different type of film in Hungary, one that doesn't depend on the official and traditional sources of funding. And once the money's finally all there and I've managed to create some small opportunity, kidding myself that I'm "independent," that's when it hits me that there's no such thing as independence or freedom, only money and politics. You can never escape anything. Those who give you money also threaten you. All that remains is obligation. The film has to be made. Then you desperately clutch onto the camera, as if it were the last custodian of the truth that you had supposed existed. But what to film if everything is a lie? All I can be is an apologist for lies, treachery and dishonor.
But in that case, why make films?
This also leads to internal conflicts, as my self-confidence wanes, the crew start to leave because the venture appears uncertain and I can't pay them enough. And I am left with a general feeling of anxiety. So I flee from this form of desperation into another - the film.
Probably, I make films in order to tempt fate, to simultaneously be the most humiliated and, if only for a few moments, the freest person in the world. Because I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being - all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine - time itself: the years, days hours, minutes and seconds. And film time has also ceased to exist, since the film itself has ceased to exist. Luckily there is no authentic form or current fashion. Some kind of massive introversion, a searching of our own souls can help ease the situation.
Or kill us.
We could die of not being able to make films, or we could die from making films.
But there's no escape.
Because films are our only means of authenticating our lives. Eventually nothing remains of us except our films - strips of celluloid on which our shadows wander in search of truth and humanity until the end of time.
I really don't know why I make films.
Perhaps to survive, because I'd still like to live, at least just a little longer....
-Bela Tarr, during preproduction for Damnation, 1987