Susan Sontag once claimed she would be “glad to see” Béla Tarr’s 1994 masterpiece Sátántangó “every year for the rest of my life”. No small compliment given that the film is more than seven hours long.
Tarr, who has died aged 70, earned the reverence of cinephiles on the basis of a handful of austere, poetic and painstakingly slow black-and-white films including Damnation (1987), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and his swansong The Turin Horse (2011).
Simple narratives set in remote Hungarian communities were rendered knotty with psychological depth, a sensitivity to loss and desolation, and a near-constant air of foreboding. An acute, multilayered use of sound contributed to his skill at locating the epic and nightmarish in the quotidian. The White Review magazine compared him to Bruegel in his fêting of everyday life.
Tarr was known chiefly for his preference for long unbroken takes; Sátántangó, for instance, begins with an eight-minute shot of cows trudging through mud. It might have lasted even longer if only film stock was not capped at around 11 minutes per reel – “The worst form of censorship,” he lamented.
In an age of accelerated editing and enfeebled attention spans, he was unfashionable to say the least. The average length of a shot in Sátántangó is two-and-a-half minutes; even The Turin Horse, a mere foal at 146 minutes, contains only 30 shots.
His films followed “the logic of life”, with all the repetition, frustration and even boredom this implied. In Sátántangó, which tells of isolated villagers hatching a criminal plan while maddeningly unable to escape their miserable surroundings, recurring scenes of dismal revelry create a powerful sense of oppression and futility.
Tarr insisted that he thought only of the film in hand while he was working, rather than any wider political or theoretical resonances. His goal, he said, was “to talk about a kind of eternity … That’s why you never see any cars or anything in my movies … I understand you have to pay your bills today, but your life – it has to be a little bit cosmic, not this kind of bang bang bang.”
He conceded, though, that there were warnings about populism ingrained in pictures such as Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, which both concern the spell cast over villagers by a sinister figure. A fierce opponent of the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Tarr labelled the Hungarian regime “the shame of our country” and accused it of “a political war against intellectuals”.
Spotty distribution and an off-putting but undeserved reputation for inordinate length (aside from Sátántangó, none of his films exceeded three hours) were among the obstacles that stood between Tarr and the sort of art-film royalty status enjoyed by many of his favourite directors, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Rainer Werner Fassbinder or his own countryman Miklós Jancsó.
Unlike those auteurs, he achieved no crossover successes, failed to penetrate the cultural consciousness, and influenced only the occasional film-maker, such as Gus Van Sant, whose experimental odyssey Gerry (2002), starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as friends lost in Death Valley, included a thank you to Tarr in its end credits.
Tarr’s reputation for dourness and solemnity was far from the whole story. “My opinion is that we were doing comedies,” he said. “You can laugh a lot.”
That went some way toward explaining the arch dialogue in his 2007 film The Man from London. (“May I go up to my room?” “As you wish. But your overcoat stays here.”) Or the picture’s bar scene, which ends, for no apparent reason, with an elderly man perching a snooker ball on the bridge of his nose while a fellow drinker balances a chair precariously over the first man’s head.
Tarr was born in Pécs, Hungary, and raised in Budapest by parents who both worked in theatre: his father, also called Béla, designed sets, while his mother, Mari, was a prompter. He was briefly a child actor before beginning at the age of 16 to shoot socially attuned documentary shorts. One of these, about a family living in a squat, landed the emerging film-maker in trouble with the police, who evicted the family and arrested him.
He worked as a labourer, a caretaker and a receptionist, then fell into the orbit of the Béla Belázs studio, which funded his debut feature, Family Nest (1979), made when he was 22. Boasting non-professional actors, vérité-style camerawork and a blunt critique of communist policies, this slice of social realism gave little indication of the formidable style that would characterise his later work. His next two films, The Outsider (1981) and The Prefab People (1982), continued in this vein.
A 1982 TV version of Macbeth hinted that formalist concerns were increasingly on his mind. Shot on video and running for just over an hour in total, the adaptation was split into two shots. The first lasted five minutes, the second 57.
Though Almanac of Fall (1984) was filmed in colour and trafficked partly in realism and domesticity (it was compared by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum to Strindberg and Cassavetes), it showed the aesthetic fastidiousness of this self-confessed perfectionist and autocrat beginning to exert itself.
It was with Damnation, his film about a recluse besotted with a cabaret singer, that the vital elements of the mature Tarr first aligned: black-and-white cinematography, a screenplay by the Nobel prize-winning writer László Krasznahorkai (who wrote the novels from which Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies were adapted), extended takes and inclement weather.
His arthouse reputation was so exalted after Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies that it was only a matter of time before he worked with Tilda Swinton. She starred in The Man from London, adapted from Georges Simenon’s crime novel. Production was interrupted by the death of its producer, Humbert Balsan, which sent Tarr into a depression. The resulting film seemed less assured, and was received rather more coolly than usual.
He returned to form with the Nietzsche-inspired The Turin Horse, which charts the declining fortunes of a farmer and his adult daughter after their horse refuses to budge from its stable. Their solitude intensifies until they are staring into a barren well, or facing each other silently across a dark room. The picture was steeped in rustic, ageless imagery. I Used to Be a Filmmaker, a 2013 documentary about its making, amusingly revealed that dramatic visual effects were achieved by positioning a wind machine and a helicopter just out of frame.
That documentary also included testimony by collaborators, one of whom noted Tarr’s ability to inspire loyalty in his cast and crew – “to gather people with very different personalities and march them together down the path of his crazy monomania”.
Many of his films were made with his editor and first wife Ágnes Hranitzsky (sometimes credited as co-director); the cinematographer Fred Kelemen, who later established his own directing career; and the composer Míhaly Víg, who also starred in Sátántangó as the charlatan and con-man Irimiás.
After retiring from directing, he made shorts, produced other people’s features, including the Icelandic folk horror Lamb (2021) and the forthcoming queer drama Places Half Empty (2026), and ran film.factory, a Sarajevo film school.
Interviewed by the Guardian in 2024, he described film-making as a “drug” and confessed he was “still a junkie”. He also sounded an unsentimental note about his decision to retire. “The work is done,” he said, “and you can take it or leave it.”
A new generation of cinephiles, craving more serious and exacting pleasures than those offered by the instant gratification of scrolling, binge-watching and multi-screening, seem increasingly to be choosing to take it. In Sight & Sound magazine’s 2022 poll of critics and film-makers to find the greatest films of all time, Sátántangó was placed at No 78, level with work by Charlie Chaplin and Jean-Luc Godard.
Tarr’s marriage to Hranitzsky ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, the art curator Amila Ramovic.
• Béla Tarr, film director, born 21 July 1955; died 6 January 2026
