Béla Tarr (1955–2026)

“Passage from the social to the cosmic, the filmmaker willingly says. But this cosmic is not the world of pure contemplation. It is an absolutely realistic world, absolutely material, stripped of all that dulls pure sensation, as only cinema can offer it. For Béla Tarr’s problem is not that of sending a message about the end of illusions and, eventually, about the end of the world. No more than that of making ‘beautiful images.’ The beauty of images is never an end. It is only the reward for a fidelity to the reality that one wants to express and to the means that one employs in doing so.” – Jacques Rancière

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, born in 1955, passed away on 6 January. As one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation, he forged one of the most uncompromising filmographies in modern cinema. His debut Family Nest (1979), followed by The Outsider (1982) and The Prefab People (1982), emerged from socialist Hungary with an abrasive realism, shot largely with handheld cameras and focused on domestic conflict, economic precarity, and broken social promises. Already here, Tarr rejected conventional dramaturgy in favor of duration and attention to faces, gestures, and exhaustion. With Almanac of Fall (1984), his cinema darkened and stylized, preparing the radical turn of Damnation (1988), where rainy landscapes, tracking shots, and moral stagnation crystallized into a new form. This cinema reached its defining form with Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), vast black-and-white works in which long sequence shots abound. After retiring from feature filmmaking, he devoted himself to his Sarajevo film school, teaching a diverse group of students from around the world and inviting visiting filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Guy Maddin, Pedro Costa, and Gus Van Sant.

Read retrospectively, this filmography does not necessarily trace a passage from the social to the metaphysical. As French philosopher Jacques Rancière argues in his book Béla Tarr, the Time After, Tarr did not move from social realism to abstraction but deepened his engagement with reality itself: “Béla Tarr tells us time and again: there is not, in his oeuvre, a period of social films and a period of metaphysical and formalist works. It is always the same film that he makes, the same reality of which he speaks; he simply delves a little deeper into it each time. From the first film to the last, it is always the story of a broken promise, of a voyage that returns to its point of departure.” Tarr had a tendency to demystify his own work, insisting, “I am all the time just a filmmaker. A simple filmmaker.” In a 2016 interview with MUBI Notebook, he explained: “You know what, a film is just a film. What I want is for you to go to a cinema, sit in a darkness, watch it and when you leave: how are you? Are you better? Do you feel stronger? Did you get something? Or are you just the same as you were when entering the cinema? And that’s all.” He also tempered auteurist exaltation of his persona, emphasizing the collaborative nature of his films: “First of all, it's Ágnes Hranitzky, László Krasznahorkai, Mihály Vig and me. These four people were working together for thirty years and we were doing what we did. That’s why I prefer to reply in plural.” His cinema was indeed shaped by several enduring partnerships. Hranitzky, his longtime editor and later co‑director, worked with him from The Outsider onward and helped craft the formal rhythm of films like Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse (2011), his last film. The novelist László Krasznahorkai was another central figure: Tarr adapted several of his books, most famously Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, and co‑wrote The Turin Horse with him. Musician Mihály Víg, finally, provided the scores that became integral to his cinema.

On Sabzian, you can read more about Tarr’s cinema. Ruben Demasure notes in a text written in Dutch, that “despite a certain fetishism surrounding Béla Tarr’s cinema as an authentic experience, the world he creates is in fact artificial and highly constructed.” The viewer, he argues, is “like all the characters in Sátántangó, in a sense being deceived.” Moses May-Hobbes, observes that Tarr’s cinema is defined by its overwhelming materiality and the weight of repetition. In Sátántangó, the doctor “heaves and huffs his way through every painful movement,” and the camera lingers on every gesture, capturing the oppressive gravity of bodies, rain, and mud. The villagers’ movements and the return to the doctor’s window form a loop: “Everything remains in place,” crystallizing Tarr’s interest in the endurance and inertia of matter itself.