"[the] problem is not that of sending a message about the end of illusions and, eventually, about the end of the world. No more than that of making "beautiful images." The beauty of images is never an end. It is only the reward for a fidelity to the reality that one wants to express and to the means that one employs in doing so.

Bela Tarr never stops hammering out two very simple ideas. He is a man concerned with giving the most precise expression possible to the reality that people live. And he is a filmmaker entirely occupied by his art. Cinema is an art of the sensible. Not simply of the visible. Because all his films, since 1989, are in black and white, and because silence plays an ever-greater role in them, it has been said that he wanted to bring cinema back to its silent origins. But silent cinema was not an art of silence. Its model was the language of signs. Silence only has tangible power in the sound film, thanks to the possibility it offers of dismissing the language of signs, of making faces speak not through expressions signifying sentiments, but through the time taken to turn around their secret."
-- Jacques Rancière, from the book Bela Tarr, the time after