Hungary’s perhaps most internationally renowned film director, Béla Tarr, has died at the age of 70.
Renowned film director Béla Tarr died on Tuesday, fellow filmmaker Bence Fliegauf told MTI on behalf of Tarr’s family.
Biography
Béla Tarr was born in 1955 in Pécs, Hungary. He began his career as an amateur filmmaker at the age of sixteen. Later, he worked at the Béla Balázs Studio, the most important workshop of Hungarian experimental cinema, where he made his first feature film, Family Nest (Családi tűzfészek), in 1977.
He directed the first Hungarian independent feature film, Damnation (Kárhozat), which was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988 and achieved significant international success. Between 1989 and 1990, Tarr lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, and later began teaching as a guest professor at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), where he continued to teach until 2011.
In 1997, he was elected a member of the European Film Academy. In 2003, he founded the TT Filmműhely (TT Film Workshop), which he led until 2011. The workshop produced his films, while Tarr also worked as a producer on several important projects by other filmmakers.
After announcing The Turin Horse (A torinói ló, 2011) as his final feature film, Tarr considered his oeuvre complete and dedicated the next phase of his career to education, focusing on developing new forms of filmmaking.
His Top 5 Films
In light of his death, I reflected on which Béla Tarr films I consider the best, which one is worth starting with, and which pose the greatest challenge for viewers.
5. The Man from London (2007 – 139 minutes)
If you haven’t seen any Béla Tarr films yet but are curious about his work, this is a good place to start. Its visual language is unmistakably Tarr, yet it remains relatively accessible for viewers. Based on Georges Simenon’s novel The Man from London, the film is a crime noir—but, of course, much more than that.
4. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000 – 145 minutes)
Based on László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance, this black-and-white film is about as far from Hollywood cinema as one can imagine. The story takes place in a small provincial town in communist-era Hungary, where bleak everyday life is infused with aesthetic and moral questions, and where surrealism becomes part of reality. This may be Tarr’s only film in which hopelessness faces a challenger.
3. Damnation (1988 – 116 minutes)
This is the first “true” Béla Tarr film—one in which all the elements that later made him famous come together. The stark black-and-white imagery, the distinctive camera movements, the music by Mihály Víg, the moral perspective, and the deeply pessimistic view of humanity are all present. Although the setting is a decaying rural Hungary, the film’s message reaches far beyond it.
2. Satan’s Tango (1994 – 439 minutes)
By far Tarr’s most famous film, partly due to its extraordinary length. It is based on László Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel of the same title (Sátántangó). The complex, symbol-laden story is set in post-socialist Hungary. While countless interpretations are possible, it helps to remember that by this time it had become clear that the new political system was very different from what many had once imagined—and that the masses were disturbingly easy to manipulate. The film is extremely long (seven and a half hours), but if you appreciate Tarr’s atmosphere, storytelling, and visual world, the time passes far more quickly than one might expect.
1. The Turin Horse (2011 – 156 minutes)
“This may be too much. It crosses a line—one shouldn’t test the audience’s patience like this. This must be Béla Tarr’s weakest film.” That was my honest reaction halfway through my first viewing.
Yet the next day, I couldn’t get the story out of my head. The images and scenes lingered, refusing to let go. A few days later, I was certain: this is Béla Tarr’s greatest film.
The setting is likely the Hungarian Great Plain sometime in the 19th century, and the story is extremely sparse. It depicts six days in the life of a coachman, his daughter, and their horse. As a storm rages outside, everything slowly but inexorably begins to deteriorate. I say no more.
A.J.
