Béla Tarr, the Hungarian Plain, and the Endurance of the Long Take

28th February and 1st March | ONLINE | with Debkamal Ganguly

Course Overview
This two-day online intensive explores the cinema of Béla Tarr as a sustained philosophical inquiry into time, space, and existence after the erosion of metaphysical and historical certainties. Centered primarily on Sátántangó (1994) and The Turin Horse (2011), the course approaches Tarr’s distinctive modalities of long takes as ontological practices rather than stylistic devices — durational forms through which desubjectivation, exhaustion, and endurance are disclosed. These long takes suspend narrative hierarchy and dissolve psychological interiority, allowing time itself to become heavy and inescapable.
At the core of this inquiry lies the Hungarian Great Plain, not just as landscape but as a crystallization of historical and metaphysical conditions shaped by political upheaval, mechanization, and radical secularization. The course examines how Tarr’s cinema registers the transformed resonances of this open yet oppressive space, and how László Krasznahorkai’s (Nobel laureate in literature, 2025) prose — with its recursive syntax and suspended temporality — participates in the same spatial imagination, providing a literary ground from which Tarr’s long takes emerge. Selected poetic engagements by other writers with the Hungarian plain will further illuminate this shared sensibility.
The course situates Tarr within a broader Hungarian cinematic lineage through Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up (1966) and Electra, My Love (1974), examining how differing long-take strategies articulate power, exposure, and spatial hegemony across the same plains.
Finally the sessions bring the cinematic practices of Béla Tarr into dialogue with Heidegger’s thinking on Being and dwelling and late Nietzsche’s possible empathetic reflections on animality, focusing especially on Tarr’s treatment of animals as bearers of existential weight.
Through close viewing, textual excerpts, and guided discussion, the course offers an intensive exploration of cinema as modes of philosophical act.

Participant profile
The course is designed for persons interested in cinema, literature, artistic quest and philosophy, e.g. cinema of the great auteurs, cinema as philosophical acts, cinema’s methodological relationship with the historicity, temporality and sensations of a defining geographical landscape, the relationship between cinema and literature mediated through landscape

FACULTY PROFILE:
An alumnus from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata, DebKamal Ganguly is an independent filmmaker, researcher and teacher of cinematic arts. He has taught for 08 years (2012-2020) and designed curriculum in Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune,  in the departments of Film Editing, Film Direction and Screen Studies; and as a guest faculty in National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, Flame University, Pune, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar. Ganguly’s works have been published under special curator-ship from Lowave, Paris; his video art featured in the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’ and showcased in galleries of various cities of Europe and Asia. His films done in the capacity of editor, script-writer and sound designer have been shown in competitive sections of various international festivals and received recognition, including ‘Tiger Award for Shorts’ in Rotterdam (IFFR 2007). Ganguly has presented papers in various international and national seminars and conferences on various themes related to cinema, Deleuze studies, visual art, interfaces of art practices, translation studies, collective memory, Bengal studies, Media studies, pedagogy of cinema, film editing as a discipline, immersive sound etc including CARA-CILECT conference in Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg (2018), CILECT conference in VGIK, Moscow (2019), Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater (2019). He is a participant of an international project for artistic research involving BRICS countries, being the coordinator for India (2018).

BASELINE CONTRIBUTION TO CONFIRM PARTICIPATION:
₹ 1300 – For Indian Participants
€ 25 – For International Participants
(We invite you to contribute over and above the baseline – voluntarily, if you wish)

CERTIFICATES:
Digital certificates of participation will be issued.

QUERIES:
For queries, if any, please write to: filminstitute@auroville.org.in
or call / message +91 9969879319 (whatsapp and telegram only)