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.

Tarr was like a cinematic Gogol, often working with co-director and editor Ágnes Hranitzky. And yet however bleak the vision, with all its squalor and wretchedness, in person Tarr was witty in an exuberant yet somehow deadpan way, droll and wisecracking, fiercely engaged with the world, unstinting in his criticism of the intellectual mediocrity of the far right in his native Hungary and elsewhere. When I interviewed him in 2024 on the occasion of a big retrospective of his work at London’s BFI Southbank, we talked about his new vocation of teaching at his Sarajevo film school after he stepped back from film-making in 2011; he said he was most energised by his enthusiasm for young film-makers. He said: “My slogan is very simple: no education, just liberation!”

Tarr’s death comes shortly after the Nobel prize for literature was awarded to novelist László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian author whose dark, demanding and uncompromising vision most clearly coincided with Tarr’s own, and with whom Tarr at one point occupied a kind of parallel creative path with his near-legendary 1994 adaptation of Krasznahorkai’s novel Sátántangó, or Satan’s Tango. It is a film about a rural village whose inhabitants abandon their lives to follow a charismatic cult leader who has returned from the dead, a super-slow monochrome epic of dreamlike strangeness lasting a staggering seven-and-a-half hours. For years, this mesmeric film was only fitfully available at festivals and those who saw it had a haunted expression, a kind of filmic PTSD.

Werckmeister Harmonies from 2000, adapted from Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance, was another vividly disquieting black-and-white journey; this was a mere two-and-a-half hours in length, but no less punishing and unforgiving. Again, it is a study of spiritual desolation, but also of the groupthink narcosis and inner stupor of fascism. In ways similar to Sátántangó, an entire community submits to the will of a sinister outsider, a “prince” who like a huckster or extremist leader arrives with a giant circus whose sole attraction is a giant dead whale – and the Melvillean echo is surely deliberate.

Before these, his 1988 film fiercely and accurately entitled Damnation was another Krasznahorkai collaboration, a black-and-white (and mostly grey) vision that bears comparison to Beckett and Tarkovsky. His final film, The Turin Horse from 2011 – co-written with Krasznahorkai – was a variation on Nietzsche, a speculation about what happened to the horse that Nietzsche embraced tearfully in the street in Turin because it was being whipped by a coach driver, the moment that triggered the great philosopher’s nervous collapse. Perhaps inevitably, Tarr and Krasznahorkai envisage the horse not staying in sunny, metropolitan Italy but somehow transplanted to the grim fields of central Europe where it is being worked terribly hard on a farm by the coach driver, and enduring almost as much hardship as caused Nietzsche to sob with pity in the first place.

But Tarr also loved thrillers and noirs (much of his conversation with me was taken up by his adoration of Hitchcock) and he directed The Man from London in 2007, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel which had in fact already been conventionally adapted as a thriller in 1947; characteristically it located the glacially paced spiritual horror beneath the ostensible excitement. A fugitive discovers a suitcase full of foreign cash but realises he can’t spend it without exchanging it and therefore fatally drawing attention to himself; it is a tantalus of longing, and a vivid symbol of our society, with its desire for money. A regular movie would make this the starting point for tension and jeopardy but for Tarr it was the moment to stare into that Nietzschean abyss that stares right back at you. I felt it bore comparison to the contemporary artist Douglas Gordon’s ultra slo-mo 24 Hour Psycho installation.

Perhaps uniquely in the “slow cinema” canon, Tarr’s movies always had an element of sulphurous, acrid, bleak comedy; he himself said it was similar to the comedy to be found in the saddest work of Chekhov. His work is something to be borne alongside Shaw’s dictum: “Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” For Tarr, it was laughter in the dark, but the darkness itself had endless texture and complexity.