Béla Tarr, the Hungarian arthouse director whose work, distinguished by long, elaborately choreographed takes, languid pacing, and stark black-and-white visuals, shaped a generation of arthouse filmmakers, including Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, has died. He was 70.
Hungarian filmmaker Bence Fliegauf (Womb), confirmed the news of Tarr’s death to Hungary’s national news agency MTI, speaking on behalf of the Tarr family. In a memoriam to the director, posted on its website early Tuesday afternoon, the European Film Academy said Tarr died “after a long and serious illness.”
Tarr directed nine feature films over the course of a relatively short career, beginning with Family Nest in 1979 and ending with The Turin Horse in 2011. In his films, he perfected his radical formal style, which prioritizes the direct experience of time, space, and atmosphere over conventional narrative storytelling. A Tarr film typically features long, complex single-take shots, often lasting several minutes, giving the audience an immersive sense of unmanipulated experience and physical space, what some critics termed “temporal realism”. Largely eschewing traditional plots, they explore existential themes of human existence, focusing on the lives of the marginalized and desperate, usually living in bleak or dystopian, post-communist Hungarian landscapes.
While never commercially successful, his films had a tremendous impact on arthouse cinema. His 1994 feature Sátántangó, a 450-minute adaptation of the novel by László Krasznahorkai, is considered one of the founding films of the contemporary slow cinema movement. Gus Van Sant has cited Tarr as a major influence on his “Death Trilogy”, Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, which feature Tarr-like pacing and camerawork. The cinema of Jim Jarmusch, with its detached observation and contemplative pace, also shares much of Tarr’s cinematic DNA.
Born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1955, Tarr began his career at 16, working at Balázs Béla Stúdió, a seminal studio for Hungarian experimental cinema. Family Nest (1977), his directorial debut, won the Grand Prix at the Mannheim Film Festival, after which he enrolled in the Academy of Theatre and Film in Budapest. Graduating in 1982, Tarr set up his own studio, Társulás Filmstúdió, which he ran until it was shut down for political reasons in 1985. His second feature, Damnation, was made independently. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for best young film at the 1988 European Film Awards.
Politically outspoken, Tarr considered himself a “leftist anarchist” and was a consistent critic of nationalism and right-wing populism, publicly condemning the likes of Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán and French populist Marine Le Pen, as well as Donald Trump. In 2023, the director joined dozens of fellow filmmakers in signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, the protection of civilians, humanitarian access and the release of hostages.
After finishing The Turin Horse, which premiered at the Berlin film festival, winning the Grand Jury Prize, Tarr declared his oeuvre complete. “I don’t want to be a stupid filmmaker who is just repeating himself and doing the same s— just to bore the people,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
He dedicated the rest of his career to developing new ways of filmmaking through educational programs for young filmmakers. He founded the international film school film.factory in Sarajevo in 2012, recruiting such arthouse luminaries, as Van Sant, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Carlos Reygadas, and actors like Tilda Swinton and Juliette Binoche, to work as teachers in an unconventional, open study format. He also worked as a visiting professor at several international film academies and ran workshops and masterclasses for young filmmakers all over the world.
In 2023 he was honored by the European Film Academy for his contributions to cinema.
