Béla Tarr, winner of the Kossuth and Béla Balázs Awards and director of films including Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango) and Werckmeister Harmonies, died on Tuesday at the age of 71, director Bence Fliegauf announced on behalf of the family.
It is with deep sorrow that we announce that film director Béla Tarr passed away early this morning after a long and serious illness, the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
Béla Tarr was born in Pécs in 1955. After graduating from high school, he worked as a shipyard assistant and hotel porter, and came into contact with the Béla Balázs Studio (BBS) as an amateur documentary filmmaker.
In 1977, he made his film Family Nest in just four days. The documentary-feature film dealt with the tragic housing situation of a family, and its characters were amateurs who had experienced similar fates in real life.
His film was compared to the works of American director John Cassavetes because of its fast shooting, partial improvisation, and acting freedom, but most of all because of the key issue of space and distance. After the film won the grand prize at the Mannheim Film Festival, he was accepted into the College of Theater and Film Arts, where he graduated with a degree in directing in 1981. That same year, he was one of the founders of the Társulás Filmstúdió (Association Film Studio).
His documentary film Szabadgyalog (The Outsider) (1981) depicted the hopelessness of human relationships, as did Panelkapcsolat (The Prefab People) (1982), which won recognition at the Locarno Film Festival a year later and featured a couple in crisis living in a housing estate. In 1982, he made a television adaptation of Macbeth, including an hour-long recording.
He turned from sociographic films to slow-paced psychological analysis, and the first piece of his new era was Őszi almanach (Autumn Almanac) in 1984. Close-up shots and long takes were replaced by a more metaphysical vision, which is why the director, who originally wanted to be a philosopher, was compared to Antonioni and Tarkovsky.
Fact
From the mid-1980s, he worked regularly with writer László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025. Their first joint work, Damnation, is a unique treatment of loneliness, hopelessness, and falling into damnation, with the oppressive feeling only heightened by long takes, black-and-white tones, and constant rain.
Filmed over three years and completed in 1994, Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango) is the longest Hungarian film to date, at seven and a half hours. Based on Krasznahorkai’s novel, it depicts the disintegration of a small community and the seductive and coercive power of the devil. The film, which radiates an apocalyptic atmosphere, forces the viewer to experience the most disturbing of emotions.
Also based on a work by Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), winner of the Grand Prize at the Hungarian Film Week, was based on The Melancholy of Resistance. The 17th-century German organist in the title wanted to create harmony in music and thus in the human soul in accordance with the divine order. At the same time, the film depicts a timeless, almost post-apocalyptic small town where the already precarious peace is disrupted, murderous passions are unleashed, and everything and everyone falls victim to hellish chaos.
He shot his next film, based on a novel by Georges Simenon and a screenplay by Krasznahorkai, abroad, at no small cost. The Man from London, which took three years to make, was invited to compete at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, the first Hungarian film to do so in 19 years.
Its protagonist is a lonely signalman working at a port railway station who, as an accidental witness to a murder, is confronted with fundamental moral problems. The director was more interested in the novel’s fundamental questions of existence, human dignity, and loneliness than in the crime plot.
He intended the film The Turin Horse to be the final piece in his oeuvre. Based on the writings of Krasznahorkai, the film won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Berlinale, as well as the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Grand Prize, and was nominated for the European Film Award in three categories (Best Director, Best Cinematographer, Best Composer).
The director wanted to portray the unbearable difficulty of existence in the story, whose title refers to the scene in which the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche defends a horse being brutally beaten by its coachman in the main square of Turin.
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, he received the B. Nagy László Award from Hungarian film critics. From 2011 to 2023, he was president of the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association, and was then elected honorary president.
His artistry has been recognized with several international awards, including the Konrad Wolf Prize from the German Academy of Arts and the French Order of Arts and Letters, as well as numerous lifetime achievement awards from international film festivals. In 2023, he received the Honorary European Film Award. Last February, he was honored with a lifetime achievement award at the 44th Hungarian Film Week, and most recently at the Transilvania International Film Festival.
In 2003, he founded a joint production company with Gábor Téni called T.T. Filmműhely, and in 2013, he launched a film academy in Sarajevo. In 2017, he directed an exhibition on human dignity entitled Until the End of the World in Amsterdam. In 2018, the American Film Academy invited him to become a member as a director and writer. In 2022, he was elected president of the Freeszfe Association. Several of his films have been ranked highly in prestigious professional publications.
Via MTI; Featured image: MTI/Illyés Tibor
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