Béla Tarr obituary: Hungary’s slow-cinema visionary

Few filmmakers genuinely merit the epithet ‘visionary’; among those who do, even fewer have the courage to pursue their vision to its extremes, challenging their viewers to revise their conceptions of what cinema could be. Béla Tarr, who has died aged 70, is one of those rare exceptions. His cinema evolved from a stark form of social realism to become something entirely different, a radical adventure in exploring sound and image, space and duration. Often considered as epitomising what came to be known as ‘slow cinema’ – an attitude, a sensibility rather than a movement or a style – his cinema had its precursors in Antonioni, Tarkovsky and an earlier Hungarian master of the long take, Miklós Jancsó, an avowed influence. But his oeuvre also stood in the lineage of Dostoevsky and Kafka in terms of its determination to gaze implacably into the face, or the abyss, of the human condition.

Tarr was born in Pécs, Hungary in 1955, to parents who both worked in theatre. When he started his directing studies at the Budapest Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, he had already made a first feature at the age of 22, Family Nest (1979), with resources provided by supporters at the Balázs Béla Filmstudio. Set against Hungary’s housing crisis of the time, Family Nest is about a factory worker forced to live with her child in the cramped apartment of her husband’s squabbling family. Tarr switched from black and white to colour for The Outsider (1981), about a young violinist finding precarious solace in Hungary’s post-hippie subculture and drinking scene. The Prefab People (1982) mapped out a couple’s marital tensions against the social pressures of Communist-era Hungary. Tarr regarded these realist dramas as protest against Hungary’s cinema at the time: in 2001, he told me, “There were a lot of shit things in the cinema, a lot of lies. We weren’t knocking at the door, we just beat it down. … We just wanted to show the reality – anti-movies.”

Tarr made his first foray into a more experimental mode in a 1982 television version of Macbeth, compressing the play into two takes, one nearly an hour long. Then came the claustrophobic, highly theatrical chamber drama Almanac of Fall (1984); photographed in strikingly anti-realist colour, it remains an anomaly in his career, vaguely comparable to Bergman, Fassbinder or Raul Ruiz. 

But the films generally recognised as quintessential Tarr were those he made in close collaboration with editor Ágnes Hranitzky, his partner at the time, and screenwriter/novelist László Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature. The first, Damnation (1988), recycled film noir tropes – doomed loner, nightclub chanteuse, neon, rain – giving them a bleak existential spin against an industrial landscape resembling an earthly hell; another regular collaborator, musician Mihaly Vig, contributed a brooding score. Then came an out-and-out masterpiece, 1994’s seven-hour plus adaptation of Krasznahorkai’s novel Sátántangó, about the travails of a disillusioned community when their quasi-messianic leader returns from exile. Reflecting the novel’s structure, based on the backwards-forwards steps of a tango, the film made both time and space elastic, weaving incantatory dialogue, hypnotic music and obsessive, drunken dance sequences into a vision as intricate as the spiderwebs that are a key motif. Sátántangó could authentically be said to have reinvented cinematic time.

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) – based on Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance – was another vision of earthly hell, this time politically inflected. The arrival in a small town of a fairground attraction, a massive stuffed whale, sparks a terrifying social apocalypse; given the advent in Hungary of Victor Orbán’s far-right government, the film can be seen as a bleak parable of populist manipulation, even while maintaining its enigmatic metaphysical resonances.

Less successful was the Georges Simenon adaptation The Man from London (2007), released in Hungarian, French and English versions, with a cast including Tilda Swinton. The film showed the signs of its troubled production process, but at the very least, its opening sequence, a nightscape centred on a ship in port, is a marvel of near-abstract mapping of space through long-take camerawork.

Tárr made the decision to bow out of feature films with the austere, rigorously pared-down The Turin Horse (2011), inspired by an anecdote about Nietzsche. By his latterday standards a miniature, it is effectively a fable. A farmer and his daughter live in a windblown landscape; one day, their horse refuses to cooperate with them, transforming their existence irreversibly. Apart from a torrent of invective from a monologuing visitor, this is a film very much about silence. Before its premiere in Berlin, where it won the Jury Grand Prize, Tarr announced that when people saw The Turin Horse, they would understand why it would be his swansong – and its conclusion, a truly Beckettian descent of darkness, makes that clear.

At odds with the political and cultural environment in Orban’s Hungary, Tarr moved operations to Sarajevo, where he founded an international film school, Film.Factory – although its principles could hardly have been less industrial. He once told me that the school neither sought to teach its students, nor to change them – propositions he clearly found offensive. He was also producer and executive producer on numerous shorts and several features, including Kornel Mondruzco’s Johanna (2005) and Valdimar Johansson’s Lamb (2021).

However, he did not entirely stop directing. In 2017, he made a short for an exhibition devoted to him by the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam: shot in Sarajevo, it showed a young immigrant musician, Muhammed, whose isolation in a shopping mall became emblematic of exclusion in the new Europe. In Vienna, showing a similar spirit of solidarity with outsiders, Tarr staged a mesmerisingly powerful site-specific piece entitled Missing People (2019). This work comprised footage shot by his long-term collaborator, the German cinematographer and director Fred Kelemen, shown in tandem with a ceremonially-styled live performance by members of the city’s homeless population.

No one quite made films like Tarr’s, although he was hugely influential. Other filmmakers identified with ‘slow cinema’ only really shared his commitment to extended takes and slow camera moves; the overwhelmingly, oppressively intense atmospherics were entirely his. One filmmaker who openly acknowledged Tarr as sparking a Damascene conversion in his practice – albeit a short-lived one – was Gus Van Sant, whose Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) mark a striking parenthesis in his oeuvre. Tarr’s work also had repercussions in the intellectual world, not least for French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who devoted a short book to him, while in a famous 1996 article Susan Sontag hailed him as one of a handful of figures representing hope for the future of film culture. 

The Turin Horse prompted critic James Quandt to declare, “Of all contemporary filmmakers, the Hungarian director is the one most acquainted with the night, the cosmic desolation he infers from the vileness of humanity.” That is a fair assessment, but for all the emphasis on the stygian aspect of Tarr’s work, it is worth remembering how much comedy, how much beauty and how much music – literal and figurative – it contains. Listen to Mihaly Vig’s hypnotic scores, blending folk themes and minimalist repetition; and watch the complex weavings of a dancing group of barroom drunks in Sátántangó, a scene shot with the entire cast genuinely off their faces. The bacchanalian chaos of such scenes contains as much joy as it does abjection.

We should also be cautious about waxing mystical in commentaries on Tarr’s work. He took a far more pragmatic view. He once told me, “When we are making a movie, we only talk about concrete situations – where the camera is, what will be the first and the last shot. We never talk about art or God.”

• Béla Tarr, 21 July 1955 to 6 January 2025