The Hungarian director’s films moved slowly like vast gothic aircraft carrier-sized ships across dark seas, giving audiences a feeling of drunkenness and hangover at the same time

• Béla Tarr, Hungarian director of Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, dies aged 70

The semi-official genre of “slow cinema” has been around for decades: glacial pacing, unhurried and unbroken takes, static shooting positions, characters who appear to be looking – often wordlessly and unsmilingly – at people or things off camera or into the lens itself, mimicking the camera’s own calmly relentless gaze, the immobile silence accumulating into a transcendental simplicity. Robert Bresson, Theo Angelopoulos, Joe Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz, Lisandro Alonso; these are all great slow cinema practitioners. But surely no film-maker ever got the speedometer needle further back to the left than the tragicomic master Béla Tarr; his pace was less than zero, a kind of intense and monolithic slowness, an uber-slowness, in films that moved, often almost infinitesimally, like vast gothic aircraft-carrier-sized ships across dark seas.

Audience reactions were often a kind of delirium or incredulity at just how punishing the anti-pace was, but – given sufficient investment of attention – you found yourself responding with awe, but also laughing along to the macabre dark comedy, the parable and the satire. A Béla Tarr movie gave you drunkenness and hangover at the same time. And people were often to be found getting despairingly drunk in his films.

Young women drawn to ‘morally grey characters’ are driving a boom sparked by TikTok, Instagram and online friendships

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In a packed room in Sydney, an excited crowd riffles through stacks of stickers and bookmarks searching for their favourite characters. Another group flicks through racks of clothing, pulling out T-shirts that say “romance readers club” and “probably reading about fairies”.

A poster on the wall, with tear-off tabs, invites visitors to take what they need: a love triangle, a love confession mid-dragon battle, a morally grey man or a cowboy.

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This quietly satirical speculative novel tells a story of metamorphosis, but feels insulated from real ecological crisis

In the book-length essay Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk gives a potted history of fiction in which humans turn into plants. There is Daphne, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is so afraid she will be raped by Apollo that she begs her father to transform her into a laurel tree. More recently, in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, brutalised Yeong-hye refuses food and takes root. Wilk argues that, in these stories and others, “a woman implants herself in despair, but also protest”.

Rhett Davis’s Arborescence – an even-tempered, quietly satirical speculative novel – tells a story of cross-species transformation at scale. The narrator is a man, Bren, who at the outset is dismissive of unverified reports of “people standing around believing they’re trees”. His partner, Caelyn, is curious and undaunted. She drags him out for a hike. “I’m not sure I like forests,” he complains. “I don’t like that part of The Lord of the Rings at all. It’s really terrifying.”