Hungarian director Béla Tarr at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011.
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
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Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
Béla Tarr, the Hungarian arthouse director best known for his bleak, existential and challenging films, including Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, has passed away at the age of 70. The Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association shared a statement on Tuesday announcing Tarr’s death after a serious illness, but did not provide further details.
Tarr was born in communist-era Hungary in 1955 and made his directorial debut in 1979 with Family Nest, the first of nine feature films that would culminate in his 2011 film The Turin Horse. Damnation, released in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival, was his first film to garner global acclaim, propelling Tarr from a relatively unknown director of social dramas to a prominent figure in the international film festival circuit.
Tarr’s reputation for films characterized by misery and harshness, featuring black-and-white cinematography and extended sequences, only grew throughout the 1990s and 2000s, particularly after his 1994 film Sátántangó. The epic drama, depicting a Hungarian village grappling with the aftermath of communism, is most known for its lengthy runtime of seven-and-a-half hours.
Based on the novel by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last year and frequently collaborated with Tarr, the film became a cornerstone of the “slow cinema” movement, with Tarr being placed alongside directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, and Theo Angelopoulos. Writer and critic Susan Sontag praised Sátántangó as “devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours.”
Tarr’s next breakthrough came in 2000 with his film Werckmeister Harmonies, the first of three movies co-directed by his partner, the editor Ágnes Hranitzky. Another loose adaptation of a Krasznahorkai novel, the film portrays the peculiar arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. With only 39 shots comprising the film’s two-and-a-half-hour duration, Tarr’s penchant for extended takes was prominently showcased.
Like Sátántangó, it resonated strongly with both critics and the arthouse audience. Both films popularized Tarr’s style and gained the admiration of independent filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, the latter of whom acknowledged Tarr as a direct influencer on his works: “They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like witnessing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few truly visionary filmmakers.”
Actress Tilda Swinton is another admirer of Tarr’s work and starred in the filmmaker’s 2007 film The Man from London. During the premiere, Tarr announced that his next project would be his final one. That 2011 film, The Turin Horse, was characteristically bleak but with an apocalyptic twist, tracing the journey of a man and his daughter as they confront the end of the world. The film secured the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Following the release of The Turin Horse, Tarr established an international film program in 2013 called film.factory as part of the Sarajevo Film Academy. Over four years, he led and instructed at the school, inviting various filmmakers and actors to conduct workshops and guide students, including Swinton, Van Sant, Jarmusch, Juliette Binoche, and Gael García Bernal.
In his final years, he engaged in numerous artistic endeavors, including an exhibition at a film museum in Amsterdam. He maintained his political activism throughout his life, denouncing the surge of nationalism and criticizing the government of Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán.
