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The Kossuth and Béla Balázs Award-winning film director, creator of films such as The Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, passed away on Tuesday at the age of seventy, his colleague and friend Bence Fliegauf announced on behalf of the family.
"We are deeply saddened to announce that film director Béla Tarr passed away at dawn today, after a long and serious illness," the Hungarian Film Artists' Association wrote in a statement sent to MTI on Tuesday.
First successes
Béla Tarr was born in Pécs in 1955. He began his career as an amateur filmmaker at the age of sixteen. Later, he worked at the Béla Balázs Studio, the most important workshop of Hungarian experimental film, where he made his first feature film, The Family Fire Nest, in 1977.
His film has been compared to the works of American director John Cassavetes due to its fast shooting, partial improvisation, acting freedom, but most of all due to the key issue of space and distance. After the film won the Grand Prize at the Mannheim Film Festival, he was admitted to the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, where he graduated in directing in 1981. That same year, he was one of the founders of the Társulás Film Studio.
His documentary work Free Walk (1981) showed the hopelessness of human relationships, as did Panelkapcsolat a year later, which received recognition at the Locarno Film Festival, and whose main characters are a couple in crisis living in a housing estate. In 1982, he made a TV adaptation of Macbeth, including a one-hour recording.
He turned from sociographic films to psychological analysis with slow dramaturgy, and the first film of his new era was Autumn Almanac in 1984. The close-up camera shots were replaced by long cuts, and the oppressive realism by a more metaphysical perspective, which is why the director, who was originally a philosopher, was also likened to Antonioni and Tarkovsky.
Permanent collaboration with László Krasznahorkai
From the mid-eighties, the writer László Krasznahorkai became his permanent collaborator, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. Their first joint work, Kárhozat, is a unique treatment of loneliness, hopelessness, and falling into damnation; the oppressive feeling is only increased by the long cuts, the black-and-white tone, and the constant rain.
The Satantango, filmed over three years and completed in 1994, is the longest Hungarian film to date, at seven and a half hours. Based on Krasznahorkai's novel, the film depicts the collapse of a small community and the seductive and coercive power of the devil. The film, which exudes an apocalyptic atmosphere, forces the viewer to experience the most disturbing experiences.
Also based on Krasznahorkai's work, The Melancholy of Resistance, Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) won the Grand Prize at the Hungarian Film Festival. The 17th-century German organist in the title wanted to create harmony in music that was in keeping with divine order, and thus in the human soul. At the same time, the film presents a small town with a timeless, almost post-apocalyptic, oppressive atmosphere, where the order that cannot be called peaceful is overthrown, murderous passions are unleashed, and everything and everyone falls victim to hellish chaos.
He shot his next film, based on a screenplay by Georges Simenon, abroad, with considerable difficulty. The London Man, which took three years to make, was invited to the competition program of the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 - the first Hungarian film in 19 years - as the first Hungarian film to be invited to the competition program of the Cannes Film Festival. Its protagonist is a lonely switchman working at a port station who, as an accidental witness to a murder, is confronted with fundamental moral problems. The director was more concerned with the basic questions of existence, the problem of human dignity and loneliness in the novel than with the crime story.
"The unbearable difficulty of existence"
He intended the film The Turin Horse to be the final piece of his life's work. The work, based on Krasznahorkai's writings, received the Grand Prix of the International Jury, the Silver Bear, and the Grand Prix of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) at the Berlinale in 2011, and was nominated for the European Film Award in three categories (Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Composer). The director wanted to depict the unbearable difficulty of existence in the story, the title of which refers to the scene in the main square of Turin when the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche comes to the defense of a horse brutally beaten by its coachman.
He has won numerous awards: the Béla Balázs Prize in 1983, the Kossuth Prize in 2003, and the Middle Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 2005. In 2010, he was awarded the title of Ambassador of Hungarian Culture, and in 2012, the B. László Nagy Award of the Hungarian Film Critics. From 2011 to 2023, he was the president of the Hungarian Film Artists' Association, and was then elected honorary president.
His art has been recognized with several foreign awards, including the Konrad Wolf Prize of the German Academy of Arts and the Knighthood of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and lifetime achievement awards from numerous international film festivals. In 2023, he received the honorary European Film Award. Last February, he was honored with the lifetime achievement award at the 44th Hungarian Film Festival and most recently at the Transilvania International Film Festival.
In 2003, he founded a joint production office with Gábor Téni under the name T.T. Film Workshop, and in 2013, he launched a film academy in Sarajevo. In 2017, an exhibition on human dignity titled Until the End of the World was opened in Amsterdam under his direction. In 2018, the American Film Academy invited him to become a member as both a director and a writer. In 2022, he was elected president of the Freeszfe Association. Several of his films have been featured prominently in the compilations of prestigious professional magazines.
Source: MTI.hu
Photo: MTI/Illyés Tibor
