The death of a titanic artist is a terrible shock. In the case of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr, who died after a long illness at the age of seventy, I admit that I expected – although not necessarily hoped for – a faint sense of foreboding, perhaps a dark tingling in our collective cinephile sixth sense. Tarr, unique among his contemporaries in European art cinema, was an almost oracular figure. The greatest of the nine features he directed, among them Satantango (1994) and Werkmeister Harmonies (2001), seemed divinely sent, bearing the ominous weight of prophecy. But what exactly did Tarr predict? The end of the world, of course. To watch his dark, brooding explorations of social collapse, most of them shot in long, jumpy black-and-white takes, is to take a strangely lush descent into Purgatory. His work is impressive and captivating, earthy and commanding, dark and hauntingly beautiful, imbued with an apocalyptic grandeur.
Tarr knew when the end was near, including the end of his own career: after presenting his film The Turin Horse in 2011, he declared that it would be his last film. So it was said and so it was done; not for him the post-retirement chatter of Hayao Miyazaki or Steven Soderbergh. Tarr's admirers mourned his early departure, but no one who saw The Turin Horse could doubt the wisdom of the decision. The film begins with an anecdotal reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, and the subsequent cold, insular story of a woman and her elderly father wandering through a dimly lit cottage on a remote, windswept steppe may have been based on Nietzsche's principle of eternal recurrence. Set to the frantic churning of composer Mihai Vig and shot in huge real-time blocks by cinematographer Fred Kelemen (both regular Tarr collaborators), it's a declaration of human futility and despair as haunting in its finality as anything I've seen in the theater. Where could the director go from there?
In Sarajevo, of course. In 2012, Tarr, fed up with the authoritarian policies of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, moved to the Bosnian capital and founded an international film school called film.factory, where he developed a mentoring program that was both practical and innovative. He closed the program in 2016, citing funding issues, but not before the roster of visiting faculty had been expanded to include directors Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa and Gus Van Sant (whose films Jerry and Elephant bear the acknowledged influence of Tarr). For several glorious years, the school worked to instill in a new generation of filmmakers an intellectually rigorous and formally adventurous understanding of cinema.
Tarr received no such training. He was born in 1955 in Pécs, southern Hungary, into a family involved in the theater and film industry in Budapest. I confess that I never saw Tarr's acting debut when he was a child in the television adaptation of Tolstoy's story.Death of Ivan Ilyich“” in 1965, and few can claim to have seen Tarr's first short film, “Guest Workers” (1971), a now lost 8mm documentary he made when he was still a teenager. From the very beginning, his filmmaking was inextricably linked to political activism: “Guest Workers” centered on local gypsy workers seeking permission to go to Austria to work, and attracted the scrutiny and ire of Hungarian communists. The irony is great, and not only because Tarr can plausibly be called one of the true philosophers of cinema (he would laugh at this idea, but that doesn’t matter).
Tarr's first works were naturalistic domestic dramas with a socialist realist basis, complete but prosaic compared to his later works. In the tense, rough-hewn film The Family Nest (1979), he criticized Hungary's housing shortage by dramatizing the dissolution of a marriage in unbearably cramped quarters. The film, with its extended shots and extreme close-ups, seems conceived under the spell of Cassavetes. After directing The Outsider (1981) and The Prefabricated Men (1982), as well as the 1982 television adaptation of Macbeth, which unfolded in just two continuous shots, Tarr created a fascinating transition work with The Autumn Almanac (1984). It was a rare splash of color in his mostly black-and-white filmography—and what color! The film, a claustrophobic chamber drama, sees several bitterly hapless characters viewed through a greenhouse-like palette of aquarium blues and reds in a dark room. Conversations and actions shudder with brutality, but the camera moved through each scene with the rapturous, languid intensity that Tarr perfected in his later work, even as he abandoned the warm hues and indulged in a cold, monochromatic austerity.
Such was the case in his superb, bleak black-and-white noir The Grudge (1988), which set a James M. Cain-style triangle in a coal-mining town that literally sinks in stormy weather. The film was made shortly before Hungary's communist era gave way to democratic reforms, in 1989, and marked an important new phase for Tarr. “The Grudge” was the director’s first successful collaboration with a Hungarian writer. Laszlo Krasznahorkaireceived the Nobel Prize for Literature in October. Krasznahorkai's dense, flowing sentences, sometimes chapter-length, found an imperfect, hypnotically arresting visual equivalent in Tarr's meandering long takes. The director worked with Krasznagorkai on all of his remaining films, most notably two small-town parables adapted from Krasznagorkai's novels: Satantango, a dense allegory of the collapse of communism, and Werkmeister's Harmony, a scathing indictment of the invasion of fascism. These are what we call Béla Tarr's classic films, although he directed three of them with his longtime partner Agnes Granicki. (She also edited eight of his nine feature films, starting with The Outsider.) In these films, the weather is terrible, the mood is deeply unsettling. Several passages of narration disrupt the everyday atmosphere. The camera wanders around the area for several minutes with a stubborn, dark deliberateness. The air is thick with metaphysical omens and caustic humor.
