A Narration of Bergson’s Duration by Formal Elements of Bela Tarr’s Cinema

Problem statement: 

Bergson’s Duration is adding a qualitative aspect to the perception of time and in fact, removing the quantitative aspect and space of time. This view of Bergson prompted Deleuze to show a narration from Bergson’s Duration from classical cinema to modern cinema in two books, “Cinema 1” and “Cinema 2”, with a historical look at cinema as an image of modern man. He shows how classical cinema indirectly and modern cinema directly can do this narration. He did not make a distinction between form and content elements in explaining how this narration is happening. The article tries to evaluate this narration by separating all cinematic formal elements from each other and only emphasizing formal elements in Bela Tarr’s cinema.

The article seeks to reach the possibility and manner of narrating time as a Duration through the formal elements of Bela Tarr’s cinema.

After explaining Bergson’s theory with Deleuze’s interpretation of it, which was made using library sources, and after seeing all the Bela Tarr’s works, the article isolated (Epoche) all the formal elements of his cinema from other formal elements with a phenomenological method, and the effect each of these elements has been measured on the narration of Duration.

The article shows that Bela Tarr’s cinema has the ability to narrate Bergson’s Duration due to its purely formal elements. These formal elements are two categories: structural and non-structural. The non-structural formal elements in Bela Tarr’s cinema activate Artistic devices that in the first step, provide a foundation for the narration of Duration, and in the next step, due to the existence of the Boredom Artistic device and non-structural formal elements that lead to this Artistic device, they make it possible for the audience to perceive time as the Duration.