Béla Tarr, the legendary Hungarian filmmaker renowned for his long takes, monochromatic films, and stark depictions of desolate landscapes, has died at the age of 70. Hungary's national news agency MTI reported his death, citing a statement from director Bence Fliegauf on behalf of the family.
Local news site Telex quoted the statement as saying: 'It is with deep sorrow that we announce that film director Béla Tarr passed away early this morning after a long and serious illness.' Tarr was born in the southern Hungarian university town of Pécs in 1955 and began filmmaking as an amateur at 16 with a camera gifted by his father.
He joined Hungary's leading experimental film studio, Balázs Béla Studio, which enabled him to make his first feature film, Family Nest, in 1977. His 1988 film Damnation, co-written with Nobel Prize-winning author László Krasznahorkai, was the first Hungarian independent feature film and screened at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Tarr was best known for Sátántangó (1994), a seven-hour epic about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, adapted from a Krasznahorkai novel. After completing his last feature film, The Turin Horse in 2011, he announced his retirement, though he made two short films in 2017 and 2019. In recent years, he devoted himself to teaching at film academies in Hungary, Germany, and France.
