Hungarian Composer Mihály Víg Reflects on Four Decades of Scoring Béla Tarr’s Films at Shanghai Masterclass

Mihály Víg, the Hungarian composer, actor and screenwriter who has served as Béla Tarr’s closest creative partner for more than four decades, held court at the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival, speaking at a masterclass following a screening of “The Turin Horse.”

Víg’s bond with Tarr began in 1984 when the director, already an emerging figure in Hungarian cinema, tracked him down after spotting him in a friend’s concert footage. Their first meeting was brief: Tarr invited Víg to score “Almanac of Fall,” and the collaboration was sealed over a glass of champagne. Víg had no prior experience composing for film, and the project – which relied heavily on documentary aesthetics and improvised performance – made for a steep learning curve.

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As the partnership evolved across works including “Sátántangó,” “Werckmeister Harmonies,” “Damnation” and “The Turin Horse,” an unconventional workflow solidified. Víg completes every musical composition before principal photography begins, working from the screenplay rather than the finished cut. His starting point is the overall emotional impression the script leaves on him. “I listen deep within myself, waiting for inspiration and quietude to descend,” he said, drawing on a line from a behind-the-scenes documentary about “The Turin Horse.”

That process works, Víg explained, because he, Tarr and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai share a fundamental creative conviction: that people habitually avoid confronting the true nature of existence. The three men’s alignment on that philosophical premise means that Víg’s scores rarely require lengthy revision rounds. Tarr, he said, trusts the composer’s instincts entirely – though Víg typically delivers several iterations from which the director picks the version that best serves the film.

Sound, for Víg, encompasses far more than scored music. He pointed to the relentless rain in “Sátántangó” and the howling wind in “The Turin Horse” as integral sonic elements. “If we quiet our minds and truly listen, we can call them beautiful music,” he said.

Víg’s relationship with Tarr’s films extends to performance. He delivered one of his most notable screen turns as the con man in “Sátántangó,” a role he could only accept after memorizing more than thirty pages of script and committing to an uninterrupted dialogue sequence of around a dozen minutes. The experience, he said, gave him a direct understanding of how the director approaches casting – not by matching actors to written characters, but by finding individuals who embody those characters at their core. Tarr mixes professional and amateur performers, yet demands the same unrehearsed naturalism from each.

Asked about the common outside perception that Tarr is a “tyrant” on set, Víg offered a starkly different picture. He recalled the director as invariably mild-tempered throughout shoots, never raising his voice, addressing any grievances with staff privately rather than publicly. Shooting Tarr’s signature long takes felt akin to working in theatre: once the camera rolled, the director fell silent, waiting until the full shot wrapped before offering feedback. He granted actors wide latitude to interpret their roles, placing complete trust in everyone he cast.

On the long-take aesthetic that defines Tarr’s work, Víg traced its lineage to Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, a personal mentor to Tarr. In the director’s view, fragmented editing breaks emotional continuity; an unbroken take mirrors the uninterrupted flow of lived experience.

Reflecting on the bleak minimalism of “The Turin Horse” – a film of sparse dialogue and repeated domestic rituals – Víg pushed back against readings of the film as simply nihilistic. He drew a distinction between the “lightness” in Milan Kundera’s writing and the “heaviness” in Tarr’s images, arguing they are not straightforward opposites: even unrelenting tragedy, he said, contains threads of comedy. “It is akin to catharsis,” he said. “By the end, everything feels cleansed. Audiences peer into the heart of things, and the whole world suddenly becomes lucid. Life is undeniably harsh, yet it also holds profound beauty.”

Among the behind-the-scenes details Víg shared: Krasznahorkai once left a screenplay argument with Tarr mid-dispute, only to return two days later with a sixty-page short story that became the foundation for “The Turin Horse.” The production team also spent considerable time searching for a horse with a sufficiently sorrowful gaze, and after filming wrapped, ensured the animal was placed in a home where it could live out its remaining years comfortably.

Asked which of his scores he holds most dear, Víg set aside the widely admired “Werckmeister Harmonies” soundtrack and named “Damnation” and “The Turin Horse” as personal favourites. Among Tarr’s features, “Sátántangó” stands above the rest in his estimation. He had playful advice for those daunted by its seven-hour runtime: push through the first hour, he said, and the rest takes care of itself.

Closing the masterclass, Víg offered a phrase he attributed to Tarr’s guiding philosophy: “Life is a gift, and it would be discourteous to turn that gift away.”