On January 6, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, the director of Satantango and The Turin Horse, died at the age of 70. In one interview, Tarr described the “Bela Tarr brand” as the work of four people: his co-director, editor, and wife Agnes Hranitzky, writer and screenwriter Laszlo Krasznahorkai, composer Mihaly Vig, and himself.
The director released his last fiction feature in 2011. That film was The Turin Horse, in which, against the howl of the wind and Vig’s music, Tarr depicted seven days of the world’s slow extinction in the life of a peasant and his daughter. After that, he no longer made narrative feature films, focusing only on documentary projects.
Tarr was born in 1955 in Pecs and grew up in Budapest in a family of theater workers. He turned to cinema after receiving an 8mm camera from his father at age 14. One of his early amateur films, about Romani workers asking permission to leave for Austria because they could not earn a living at home, led to the future director being blacklisted by the Communist Party and shut out of Hungarian universities.
After working at a river shipyard, Tarr joined the Bela Balazs Studio, where documentaries were made in the style of cinema verite. His debut feature, Family Nest, was released in 1977 and drew attention beyond Hungary. In his early films, he explored the lives of people living under the constraints of late socialism, later shifting toward broader ontological themes.
A turning point came with his collaboration with Krasznahorkai. Together they created the screenplay for Damnation (1987), and later Satantango, which runs for 7 hours and 19 minutes. Writer Susan Sontag said she would gladly watch the film every year for the rest of her life. Tarr’s longtime actor Janos Derzsi later recalled that during the making of Satantango the team still believed people could influence history, but by the time of The Turin Horse that belief had disappeared.
Although Tarr rarely received major awards, his later films became a significant part of cinema history. The Man from London screened in the main competition at Cannes in 2007, while The Turin Horse won the Silver Bear for directing at the Berlinale. His final project was the documentary Missing People, devoted to people who had lost their homes and the structure of their former lives.