Béla Tarr, the Hungarian film-maker renowned for lengthy, challenging and beautifully shot films including Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies and The Man from London, has died aged 70. The Hungarian Film Artists Association said in a statement that Tarr died on Tuesday “after a long and serious illness” and that “the grieving family asks for the understanding of the press and the public, and that they not be contacted for a statement during these difficult days”.
As his films were shown more widely, Tarr became renowned internationally in the 90s and 00s – partly because of their inordinate length (including the seven-and-a-half-hour Sátántangó), and partly because of what appeared to be their definitive expression of middle-European black and white miserablism. But in an interview with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw in 2024, well after Tarr had retired from active film directing in 2011, he said his films had been misunderstood: “My opinion is that we were doing comedies. You can laugh a lot.” He added that they were not pessimistic. “I only ask this – how did you feel when you came out of the movie theatre after watching my film? Did you feel stronger or weaker? That’s the main question. I want you to be stronger.”
Tarr influenced film-makers as diverse as Gus Van Sant (whose 2002 film Gerry was a direct homage) and fellow Hungarian László Nemes, who acted as assistant director on Tarr’s 2008 Georges Simenon adaptation The Man from London, which starred Tilda Swinton. Many of his films were made in collaboration with his partner Ágnes Hranitzky – initially editor on his features, and credited as co-director from Werckmeister Harmonies onwards.
Mike Downey, producer and outgoing chair of the European Film Academy said: “Cinema has lost one of its real heroes. One of the most exceptional voices of our times has left us. In a time that seems to have forgotten about basic human values, Tarr’s films still stand out magnificently. They remain incredibly relevant and outrageously potent. European cinema will miss him profoundly.”
Tarr was born in 1955 and grew up in Budapest; his father was a scene painter and his mother a stage prompter. Initially a child actor (with a role in a TV adaptation of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich), Tarr began making 8mm short documentaries as a teenager and made his feature directing debut in 1979 with the realist drama Family Nest, about Hungary’s housing shortage. Tarr later told the Guardian: “We were coming with some fresh, new, true, real things. We just wanted to show the reality – anti-movies.”
Tarr’s style decisively changed with Damnation, a screenplay co-written with László Krasznahorkai, released in 1988; a fable of a loner in love with a singer that was described by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as “a fetish of gloom” and a “spellbinding arabesque around the dingiest of all possible industrial outposts”. Tarr followed it up seven years later with an adaptation of Krasznahorkai’s novel Sátántangó which critic Jonathan Romney called “a powerful, visionary piece of cinema that creates its own stark world and keeps the viewer compellingly locked in for its duration”.
With Hranitzky, Tarr made an international breakthrough in 2000 with another Krasznahorkai adaptation, Werckmeister Harmonies, a fable about the arrival of a “circus” containing a dead whale in a remote Hungarian town; it popularised Tarr’s key stylistic tropes including black-and-white photography, lengthy takes and a lugubrious, near-static pace. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “an eerie monochrome vision of power, group hysteria, cosmological breakdown and the end of the world”.
As a result of its impact, Tarr could attract actors of the calibre of Swinton for his next film, The Man from London; a black and white film noir adapted from Simenon, co-written by Krasznahorkai and co-directed by Hranitzky. The film secured a high-profile premiere at the Cannes film festival, though its characteristically gloomy atmosphere led to a mixed reception. Its follow-up, The Turin Horse, proved to be Tarr’s final film; an unforgiving fable about a father and daughter living in poverty, Tarr said the film was “about the heaviness of human existence … How it’s difficult to live your daily life, and the monotony of life”.
Tarr subsequently set up as a producer, but told the Guardian he found life difficult under Hungary’s rightwing leader Viktor Orbán, who started his second term as prime minister in 2010. In 2013 Tarr started the film.factory film school in Sarajevo and produced films by many of its students.
