Béla Tarr, Hungarian Filmmaker, Dies at 70

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has died after a long and serious illness, according to a statement from the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association. He was 70.

Tarr was born in 1955 in the city of Pécs and lived most of his life in the Budapest. More recently he had moved from Hungary to Sarajevo to start the international film school film.factory. (The school was shut down in 2016.)

Tarr’s filmography is comprised of nine feature films, a TV movie and several documentaries and short films. His first film, 1979’s “Family Nest,” was completed when he was just 23. His last film was 2011’s “The Turin Horse,” about the whipping of a horse in the titular Italian city that supposedly led to Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown. It won the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it premiered. He was nominated for Palme d’Or at Cannes for 2007’s “The Man from London” and a 2023 honorary European Film Award.

His magnum opus was 1994’s “Sátántangó,” based on the postmodern novel by frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, which runs a whopping 439 minutes and was widely acclaimed. It appeared on the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound’s top 50 films of all time list and again on the 2022 list.

In 2006 Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times that “Mr. Tarr has built a reputation among dedicated cinephiles, particularly those lucky enough to travel the international festival circuit, where for the last few decades he has been a favorite if irregular fixture. Among his champions was Susan Sontag, who included him in her short 1995 lament about the state of the art, ‘A Century of Cinema.’ As the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, Mr. Tarr’s name was not included in a later version of this essay published in The New York Times Magazine. The omission not only further marginalized an already commercially marginalized artist, but also strengthened Sontag’s pessimistic argument that cinema was a ‘decadent’ art in the midst of an ‘ignominious, irreversible decline.’”

Tarr, known for his sumptuous use of black-and-white and affinity for long, unbroken takes, was also recently canonized by the Criterion Collection, with his 2000 film “Werckmeister Harmonies,” released in a deluxe home video edition. “In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, auteur Béla Tarr and codirector-editor Ágnes Hranitzky conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty,” Criterion’s official synopsis reads.

The filmmaker mentored and inspired countless other directors, including Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and “Lamb” director Valdimar Jóhannsson.

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