This January 6, the death of Béla Tarr, Hungarian filmmaker known for being one of the main representatives of slow cinema during the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, was announced.
Tarr has died at the age of 70 after a long illness, leaving behind a filmography of 11 films. The last one he published was in 2019, ‘Missing People’, a documentary commissioned by the Wiener Festwochen, the Viennese cultural festival.
Tarr’s work was recognized for its slow narrative and for the exploration of humble and marginal characters, often subjected to harsh life experiences. To tell his stories, he used contemplative sequence shots, extremely patient camera rhythms and a use of black and white. ‘Sátántangó’ (1994), considered his masterpiece, portrays the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe over seven and a half hours of footage. His films were inhabited by poor characters, migrants, vagabonds or peasants and, sometimes, as in ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ (2000), they took place in small towns.
Tarr, born in 1955 in Pécs although he grew up in Budapest, debuted in 1979 with ‘Family Nest’, but it was the drama ‘Damnation’ (1988) that definitively put him on the map of film criticism thanks to his slow formal style, which he would develop in his following works. Curiously, Tarr always rejected comparisons with the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky, icon of slow cinema, arguing that Tarkovsky’s films explored spiritual and religious themes, while his films focused on social and existential problems.
Although ‘Missing People’ was his last published work, the film considered his definitive closure as a filmmaker is ‘The Turin Horse’ (2011). After its release, Tarr announced that he would not direct feature films again.
