Hungarian Composer Mihály Víg Reflects on Four Decades of Scoring Béla Tarr’s Films at Shanghai Masterclass
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- Mihály Víg held a masterclass at the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival following a screening of "The Turin Horse," reflecting on his four-decade creative partnership with director Béla Tarr
- Víg's collaboration began in 1984 when Tarr spotted him in a friend's concert footage and invited him to score "Almanac of Fall" over a glass of champagne, despite Víg having no prior film scoring experience
- Víg completes all music before principal photography begins, working from the screenplay's emotional impression — a workflow sustained by a shared conviction with Tarr and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai that people avoid confronting the true nature of existence
- Víg pushed back against readings of "The Turin Horse" as nihilistic, drawing a distinction from Kundera's 'lightness' versus Tarr's 'heaviness' and arguing that even unrelenting tragedy contains threads of comedy, likening the cumulative effect to catharsis
- Víg rejected the common perception of Tarr as a set tyrant, recalling the director as invariably mild-tempered, never raising his voice, and granting actors wide interpretive latitude during his signature long takes
- Víg named "Damnation" and "The Turin Horse" as his personal favorite scores — setting aside the widely admired "Werckmeister Harmonies" — and called "Sátántangó" the Tarr film he holds above all others
- László Krasznahorkai once stormed out of a screenplay argument with Tarr and returned two days later with a 60-page short story that became the foundation for "The Turin Horse," whose production team searched specifically for a horse with a 'sorrowful gaze'
Why it matters: For cinephiles and film composers, Víg's masterclass offered rare public detail on one of cinema's longest director-composer partnerships, including the unusual pre-production scoring workflow and the philosophical alignment with Krasznahorkai that minimizes revision. His public rebuttal of the 'tyrant on set' narrative and his reframing of "The Turin Horse" as cathartic rather than nihilistic could reshape how festivals and critics position Tarr's bleakest work going forward.
