The world of cinema has lost one of its most singular and uncompromising voices. Béla Tarr, the Hungarian director renowned for his monumental, glacially paced films exploring spiritual desolation, has died at the age of 70.
The Architect of Cinematic Time
While the term "slow cinema" encompasses masters like Robert Bresson and Theo Angelopoulos, Béla Tarr pushed the form to its extreme limits. His films, often co-directed with editor Ágnes Hranitzky, possessed an uber-slowness—a deliberate, intense pacing that felt less like zero and more like a profound negative space. They moved with the imperceptible, monumental grace of vast ships crossing a dark sea, demanding a unique investment of attention from the viewer.
Audiences often met this punishing anti-pace with initial delirium. Yet, for those who persevered, the reward was a transformative experience—awe mixed with laughter at the sulphurous, acrid, and bleak comedy that permeated his work. A Tarr film was a unique sensation: it delivered the intoxication of drunkenness and the grim reality of a hangover simultaneously, a feeling mirrored by the frequently inebriated characters within his frames.
A Legacy Forged in Collaboration and Darkness
Tarr's vision found its perfect literary counterpart in the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. Their creative partnership yielded some of the most significant works in contemporary film. The seven-and-a-half-hour monochrome epic Sátántangó (1994), adapted from Krasznahorkai's novel, achieved near-legendary status. This study of a village seduced by a fraudulent messiah was a staggering feat of dreamlike strangeness, leaving those who saw it with a haunted, indelible impression.
This was followed by Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), a comparatively concise two-and-a-half-hour journey into the groupthink and inner stupor of fascism, as a town falls under the spell of a mysterious circus featuring a giant dead whale. Earlier, Damnation (1988) established his grey, Beckettian landscape, and his final film, The Turin Horse (2011), co-written with Krasznahorkai, offered a stark, Nietzschean parable of relentless hardship.
Wit, Wisdom, and a Warning
Despite the profound bleakness of his cinematic worlds, Tarr in person was known for his exuberant yet deadpan wit and fierce engagement. In a 2024 interview, he spoke energetically about teaching at his Sarajevo film school, proclaiming his slogan: "no education, just liberation!" He was also an unstinting critic of the rising far-right, lamenting the intellectual mediocrity he saw in Hungary and beyond.
His work, while often categorised as slow cinema, defied simple genre. He adored thrillers and noir, citing Hitchcock as an influence. His 2007 film The Man from London, adapted from Simenon, used glacial pacing to unearth the spiritual horror beneath a conventional thriller plot, transforming a suitcase of cash into a symbol of tantalising, impossible desire.
Béla Tarr's cinema was a monumental inquiry into the human condition—a laughter in the profound dark, where the darkness itself revealed endless texture and complexity. His passing, coming shortly after Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize win, marks the end of a monumental artistic partnership and a uniquely challenging chapter in film history.
