A titanic artist’s death is a terrible shock. In the case of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who has died after a long illness, at the age of seventy, I confess that I’d expected—without necessarily hoping for—a faint premonition, perhaps a grim tingle in our collective cinephile sixth sense. Tarr, unique among his European art-film contemporaries, cut an almost oracular figure. The greatest of the nine features he directed, among them “Sátántangó” (1994) and “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2001), felt handed down from on high, bearing the ominous weight of a prophecy. But what, exactly, did Tarr foretell? The end of the world, surely. To watch his dank, brooding studies in social collapse, most of them filmed in long, loping black-and-white takes, is to embark on an oddly luxuriant descent into Purgatory. His work is imposing and thrilling, earthy and magisterial, bleak and mesmerizingly beautiful, and suffused with an apocalyptic grandeur.
Tarr knew when the end was nigh, including the end of his own career: after unveiling his film “The Turin Horse,” in 2011, he declared that it would be his last. So it was said, and so it was done; not for him the post-retirement waffling of a Hayao Miyazaki or a Steven Soderbergh. Tarr’s admirers bemoaned his early departure, but no one who saw “The Turin Horse” could have doubted the wisdom of the decision. The film begins with an anecdotal reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, and the cold, circular story that follows—about a woman and her elderly father, trudging about a dimly lit cottage on a remote, wind-lashed steppe—might have been founded on the Nietzschean principle of eternal recurrence. Set to the frenzied churnings of the composer Míhály Víg, and filmed in immense blocks of real time by the cinematographer Fred Kelemen (both among Tarr’s regular collaborators), it’s a declaration of human futility and despair, as haunting in its finality as anything I’ve beheld in a theatre. Where could a filmmaker have gone from there?
To Sarajevo, of course. In 2012, Tarr, fed up with the strongman politics of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, moved to the Bosnian capital and founded an international film school called film.factory, where he devised a mentorship program that was at once practical and innovative. He closed the program in 2016, citing funding issues, but not before the list of visiting faculty had grown to include the directors Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa, and Gus Van Sant (whose films “Gerry” and “Elephant” bear an acknowledged Tarr influence). For a few glorious years, the school worked to inculcate an intellectually rigorous and formally adventurous a grasp of the medium among a new generation of filmmakers.
Tarr received no such training. He was born in 1955, in Pecs, in southern Hungary, to parents who worked in Budapest’s theatre and film industries. I confess that I never saw Tarr’s acting début, when he was a child, in a TV adaptation of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” in 1965, and few can claim to have seen Tarr’s first short film, “Guest Workers” (1971), a now lost 8-mm. documentary that he shot when he was just a teen-ager. From the start, his filmmaking was inextricably tied to political activism: “Guest Workers” focussed on local Romani laborers seeking permission to travel to Austria for work, and drew the scrutiny and ire of Hungary’s Communist government, which blocked the young director from attending university, where he had hoped to study philosophy. The irony is rich, and not just because Tarr can be plausibly hailed as one of cinema’s truest philosophers. (A notion he would have scoffed at, but no matter.) In trying to punish him for his activism, the authorities effectively pushed Tarr even further into filmmaking, and thus handed him his most powerful tool of anti-authoritarian denunciation.
Tarr’s first few features were naturalistic domestic dramas with social-realist underpinnings, accomplished but prosaic in comparison with his later works. In the tense, rough-hewn “Family Nest” (1979), he critiqued Hungary’s housing shortages by dramatizing the dissolution of a marriage in unbearably cramped quarters. The film, with its extended takes and extreme closeups, feels conceived under the spell of Cassavetes. After directing “The Outsider” (1981) and “The Prefab People” (1982), plus a TV adaptation of “Macbeth,” in 1982, that unfolded in just two unbroken shots, Tarr made a fascinating transitional work with “Almanac of Fall” (1984). This was a rare jolt of color in his mostly black-and-white filmography—and what color! The film, a claustrophobic chamber drama, peered at several bitterly unhappy characters through a hothouse palette of aquarium blues and darkroom reds. The talk and the action shuddered with violence, but the camera glided through each scene with a rapt, languorous intensity that Tarr refined in his later works, even as he drained away the warm hues and committed himself to a chilly, monochrome austerity.
Such was the case with his gorgeously gloomy black-and-white noir “Damnation” (1988), which situates a James M. Cain-style triangle in a coal-mining town that’s positively drowning in stormy weather. The film was made shortly before Hungary’s Communist era gave way to democratic reform, in 1989, and for Tarr, it signalled a major new phase. “Damnation” was the first of the director’s career-crowning collaborations with the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in October. Krasznahorkai’s dense, flowing, sometimes chapter-length sentences found an imperfect, hypnotically immersive visual equivalent in Tarr’s sinuous long takes. The director worked with Krasznahorkai on all his remaining films, most notably on two small-town parables adapted from Krasznahorkai novels: “Sátántangó,” a dense allegory for the collapse of Communism, and “Werckmeister Harmonies,” a sharp indictment of encroaching fascism. These are what we think of as classically Béla Tarr movies, though he co-directed three of them with his longtime partner, Ágnes Hranitzky. (She also edited eight of his nine features, starting with “The Outsider.”) In these films, the weather is wretched, the mood deeply unsettled. A few dribbles of narrative break up the quotidian atmospherics. The camera prowls the terrain, for minutes at a time, with stubborn, sombre deliberation. The air is thick with metaphysical portent and mordant humor.
Tarr was an avowed atheist, but he was far too keen an observer of human nature not to allow for the beliefs of others, and for attendant hints of the irrational to seep into his work. His stories, largely devoid of what you’d call plotting, can nonetheless swell to biblical proportions. At the heart of “Werckmeister Harmonies” is a large stuffed whale, the centerpiece spectacle of a travelling circus that has arrived in a remote village. Janós (Lars Rudolph), a local mail carrier, peers for several unforgettable moments into the whale’s enormous, wide-open, yet unseeing eye, and marvels, “How mysterious is the Lord, that he amuses Himself with such strange creatures.” His sincerity can make you weep.
Tarr may not have shared his character’s religious awe, but his films nonetheless believe, to an almost metaphysical degree, in the existence of evil—in signs of creeping nativism and mounting social apathy, and in more individualized instances of depravity. Witness a young girl’s shocking act of animal cruelty in “Sátántangó,” or the chilling sight of a zombified mob marching toward destruction in “Werckmeister Harmonies.” In a 2001 interview with the film journal Senses of Cinema, Tarr acknowledged the thematic and aesthetic shift in these later works, their pivot away from social realism and toward a moody, magisterial formalism. Or, in his own words: “We knew better that there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos.”

It’s impossible for me to think about Tarr’s three most cosmic shitstorms—“Sátántangó,” “Werckmeister Harmonies,” and “The Turin Horse”—without remembering the venues in Los Angeles where I first encountered them. The reasons are more than purely nostalgic. These films, when surrendered to properly, in the enveloping darkness of a theatre, take on an almost physical, elemental weight. (The sound design proves as crucial to this effect as the imagery: “Sátántangó,” with its muck and rain, and “The Turin Horse,” with its howling gales, become meteorological experiences.) It’s the peculiar nature of Tarr’s spell that, even as you sit there, transfixed, you become strangely more aware, not less, of the spaces and the people around you. The misery that floods the screen is transfigured—through the fact and flesh of the audience’s presence—into an experience of highest exhilaration.
I still recall seeing “The Turin Horse” at a late-night screening at the A.F.I. Fest in 2011, at what was then Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and feeling a subversive thrill at the very idea of Tarr briefly commandeering this iconic Hollywood palace. (Introducing the film that was about to play on the enormous screen behind him, the director seemed a touch bemused himself.) I was moved to tears at a revival screening of “Werckmeister Harmonies,” sometime in the mid-two-thousands, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s historic Leo S. Bing Center. (Years later, long after the demolition of the Bing, in 2020, the memory prompts a different kind of sadness.) I spent a day at the Egyptian Theatre, in Hollywood, to see all seven-plus hours of “Sátántangó,” Tarr’s longest work and his greatest succès d’estime, famously championed by Susan Sontag in a 1995 essay, “A Century of Cinema.” By the end of the film, I felt permanently bonded to viewing companions whose names I didn’t and will never know. Once the lights dimmed, I saw no one move from their seat—not during an animal-abuse scene, and not even during a long, pitilessly observed sequence in which revellers dance around and around, their frenzied, exhausted bodies manipulated by forces seemingly beyond their control. This isn’t the “Satan’s tango” referenced by the title, but it feels no less like a dance with the devil.
Tarr’s films, unapologetic in the demands they make of our time and attention, are often grouped under the handy yet reductive rubric of “slow cinema”—alongside the work of filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chantal Akerman, Lisandro Alonso, and Lav Diaz. The more derisive term is “endurance test,” which isn’t half the insult some think it is (to the extent that they are thinking at all). Existence, too, is an endurance test, and, even for those of us with no experience of rural Hungarian customs and limited knowledge of Eastern European politics, Tarr’s granular moment-to-moment realism feels astonishingly true to life. I suspect that, at the revival screenings that justly await, the visionary force of Tarr’s cinema will cut through the dreck and noise of our culture more forcefully, and to greater illuminative effect, than ever before. Tarr’s prescience grasped the looming threat of far-right demagoguery in Europe and beyond. His camera, though duly transfixed by buildings and landscapes, beheld humanity with a shattering clarity—in all its cruelty, indifference, foolishness, violence, and, on occasion, grace. Now he is gone, but I can’t shake the sense that his consciousness lives on, Leviathan-like, in the monumental body of work that he leaves behind. His is the wide-open whale’s eye that watches us. ♦













