The cinematic world is mourning the loss of one of its most singular and uncompromising voices. Béla Tarr, the Hungarian auteur whose monumental, glacially paced films defined a strand of 'slow cinema' and explored profound spiritual desolation, has died at the age of 70.
The Architect of Cinematic Time
While 'slow cinema' boasts practitioners like Robert Bresson and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tarr pushed the form to its extreme limits. His films, often made with co-director and editor Ágnes Hranitzky, moved with an almost geological sense of time. Critics described them as vast, gothic ships drifting across dark seas, their pacing so deliberate it could induce a state of mesmerised delirium in audiences. This was not mere slowness for its own sake, but an über-slowness designed to immerse the viewer completely in his bleak, yet strangely comic, worlds.
Watching a Tarr film was a unique sensory experience, often described as feeling both drunk and hungover simultaneously. Within his frames, characters frequently succumbed to despair and alcohol, mirroring the viewer's own disorienting journey. Yet, beneath the punishing runtime and monochrome squalor, there always pulsed a vein of sulphurous, acrid, and bleak comedy, akin to the tragicomic spirit of Chekhov.
A Legendary Collaboration and Defining Works
Tarr's vision found its perfect literary counterpart in the novelist László Krasznahorkai. Their collaboration produced some of the most significant works in contemporary European cinema. The seven-and-a-half-hour Sátántangó (1994), adapted from Krasznahorkai's novel, achieved near-mythic status. This monochrome epic about a rural community seduced by a fraudulent messiah was a festival sensation, leaving those who endured its length with a haunted, transformative cinematic memory.
This was followed by Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), a comparatively concise two-and-a-half-hour parable. It depicted a town gripped by a mysterious fever, incited by the arrival of a circus featuring a giant dead whale—a potent symbol of hollow spectacle. The film served as a chilling study of the groupthink and inner stupor that facilitates the rise of fascism.
His final feature, The Turin Horse (2011), co-written with Krasznahorkai, was a stark, wind-blasted variation on a story about Friedrich Nietzsche. It focused on the relentless hardship endured by the horse the philosopher famously embraced, transplanting the tale to a grim farm in central Europe.
Wit and Principle Behind the Camera
Despite the profound bleakness of his films, Tarr in person was known for his wit, deadpan humour, and fierce engagement with the world. In a 2024 interview during a retrospective of his work in London, he spoke energetically about his post-2011 vocation: teaching at his film school in Sarajevo. His pedagogical motto was telling: "No education, just liberation!" He was also an outspoken critic of the far-right's intellectual mediocrity in Hungary and beyond.
His filmography, though focused on existential dread, revealed eclectic influences. He adored Hitchcock and film noir, which informed his 2007 adaptation of Simenon's The Man from London. Here, Tarr subverted the thriller genre, excavating the glacial spiritual horror beneath a plot about stolen cash, creating a tantalising symbol of futile desire.
The death of Béla Tarr, coming soon after Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize win, marks the end of an era. He leaves behind a body of work that is demanding, unforgiving, and utterly unique—a monumental testament to the power of cinema to stare, unblinkingly, into the abyss, and find within it a strange, complex, and enduring poetry.
