Béla Tarr’s quest for cinematic perfection made him my ideal, impossible mentor | László Nemes

The Son of Saul director recalls how getting his first job as assistant to the austere master was a hard but inspiring lesson in the most ambitious kind of movie-making News: Hungarian director Béla Tarr dies aged 70 The last time I saw Béla Tarr was a few years ago at the Nexus conference in Amsterdam. We were invited to speak about the state of the world and of the arts. We both thought light and darkness existed in the world, even if our perception about them differed. Béla was already weakened in his body, but the spirit was still ferocious, rebellious, furious. We sat down to talk. It seemed fairly obvious this would be our ultimate, and most heartfelt, conversation. As the former apprentice, I was able to see the master one last time, with all his rage, sorrow, love and hate. I first met Béla in 2004 when he was preparing The Man from London. I wanted to learn film-making and applied to become an assistant on the film. He gave me my first real job: as an assistant, I had to fi...

‘Everything became a lie, a performance’ – Werner Herzog on Soviet Russia

The German director is championing Georgian film-maker Rezo Gigineishvili’s movie about the dying days of the USSR. But, he says, he won’t be drawn into contemporary political debates

What was Stalin like when he was ill? Did he have stomach pains? Did it make him sad? In Rezo Gigineishvili’s film Patient #1, a frail communist leader in the 1980s Soviet Union seeks urgent answers to these questions as he feels his life slipping from him. But the comrade he calls from his hospital bed provides no reassurance: Stalin was never ill, he was only ever strong.

Spurred on to live up to the dictator they called the Man of Steel, the general secretary brushes off his doctors’ concerns and orders to be driven to the Kremlin. But he dozes off before his limousine starts rolling, and the motorcade merely circles the hospital grounds: a melancholy image of a Russian empire locked in ever-repeating cycles of history.

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