death of the Hungarian master<\/a> on Tuesday at age 70, that enduring humanity makes his work as essential as ever.<\/p>\n\u201cI despise stories,\u201d Tarr once explained to an interviewer, \u201cas they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. … There are only states of being \u2014 all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time.\u201d<\/p>\n
His films typically did not concern themselves with the plots of individual lives, which in reality are revealed in retrospect, if at all. They focused instead on human experience as it unfolds, moment by uncertain moment, capturing everyday foibles, errors and foolishness in the face of quotidian ruthlessness. As in Samuel Beckett\u2019s tragicomic theater and novels, Tarr\u2019s movies, by turns funny and heartbreaking, dignify human struggle with an uncommon tenacity of vision and empathy.<\/p>\n
Some of Tarr\u2019s most memorable scenes feature landscapes, often bleak and despairing settings of decaying Hungarian towns, punctuated with close-ups of characters\u2019 faces. Asked by film historian David Bordwell about this juxtaposition, Tarr replied: \u201cBut the face is the landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tarr arrived in the late 1970s declaring his intention to \u201ckick in the door\u201d of contemporary cinema. He did so, more than once.<\/p>\n
He announced himself with a trilogy of domestic dramas. \u201cFamily Nest,\u201d \u201cThe Outsider\u201d and \u201cThe Prefab People\u201d focused on couples and individuals trapped by commonplace struggles and social constraints, a thematic affront to late-communist Hungary. Featuring handheld camerawork and frequent close-ups, these early works evoke the quasi-improvisational style of John Cassavetes smothered in claustrophobia.<\/p>\n
Tarr followed with a TV adaptation of \u201cMacbeth\u201d (1982), filmed in two shots, the second lasting more than an hour. After a brief experimentation two years later with a wild palette of color in \u201cAlmanac of Fall,\u201d he returned to his discoveries in \u201cMacbeth,\u201d a stylistic transformation that would define the rest of his career.<\/p>\n
\u201cDamnation\u201d (1988) opens with an extended shot of a system of towers and cables transporting vast buckets of mining materials across a desolate plain. A harsh grinding of the elevated cable system is the only sound. (In Tarr films, sound features as evocatively as image.) Slowly the camera pulls back to reveal an interior window, and then the back of a man\u2019s head in silhouette, as our protagonist watches the monotonous procession.<\/p>\n
The audience experiences the scene of agonizing beauty as the man does. We remain with him throughout the movie, as we follow his futile pursuit of a married cabaret singer with whom he is irrevocably in love. The story does not unfold as a typical narrative, but in a series of scenes that feel distinct yet unified, like a collection of short stories.<\/p>\n
Tarr worked with a core team of filmmakers in nearly all his movies, including his longtime partner and editor, \u00c1gnes Hranitzky, cinematographer Fred Kelemen, composer Mih\u00e1ly V\u00edg and a core group of actors.<\/p>\n
\u201cDamnation\u201d marked Tarr\u2019s first collaboration with his friend L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian novelist and 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature winner. The pairing of literary and filmmaking masters, which spanned five features over a quarter of a century, recalled that of Graham Greene and Carol Reed, but nothing in movie history quite compares.<\/p>\n
Tarr\u2019s two greatest works, \u201cS\u00e1t\u00e1ntang\u00f3\u201d (1994) and \u201cWerckmeister Harmonies\u201d (2000), were based on Krasznahorkai\u2018s novels (the latter derived from his \u201cThe Melancholy of Resistance\u201d). The books are cornerstones of Krasznahorkai\u2019s Nobel-winning oeuvre, and the films are two of the defining movies of their era and established Tarr as a giant of cinema.<\/p>\n
\u201cS\u00e1t\u00e1ntang\u00f3\u201d is an epic equivalent in running time to some four feature films, which Susan Sontag called \u201cdevastating, enthralling for every minute of its [more than] seven hours.\u201d It often appears on critics\u2019 lists among the greatest movies ever made.<\/p>\n
The movie follows a group of petty cheats, liars and drunks who are duped by nefarious opportunists who visit their crumbling town. Tarr employs the extended take to even greater lengths, creating an exquisite manipulation of our sense of time, and some of the most memorable scenes in modern filmmaking.<\/p>\n
In \u201cWerckmeister Harmonies,\u201d another opportunist visits another desperate town, this time accompanying a traveling exhibit of a preserved whale. The depictions of mob violence are chilling evocations of the darkest moments of the 20th century. The culminating episode, as the mob smashes and ransacks a hospital and terrorizes its patients, ultimately reveals a frail elderly man, standing naked and alone in an empty bathtub as the club-wielding assailants approach. His appearance, stopping them in their tracks, is one of the most heartrending moments of any movie.<\/p>\n
Tarr followed with \u201cThe Man From London,\u201d which he and Krasznahorkai adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, about a seaside railway signalman who confronts a moral quandary involving a murder mystery.<\/p>\n
In 2012 came \u201cThe Turin Horse,\u201d in which director and novelist reimagined the story of the whipping of a horse in the Italian city that was said to have triggered philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche\u2019s mental breakdown. The movie follows the unfortunate horse as it is led away by its owner to his rural home he shares with his daughter. Their repetitive routines and the young woman\u2019s daily burdens are reminiscent of Chantal Akerman\u2019s classic \u201cJeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.\u201d <\/p>\n
After the release of the movie, among his most acclaimed, Tarr stunned the film world by announcing it would be his last feature. He was just 56 at the time.<\/p>\n
He went on to open an international film school in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, known as film.factory, which continued until 2017, and he produced a number of movies.<\/p>\n
Tarr was long outspoken in denouncing authoritarian governments, whether Hungary\u2019s old communist model or the current populist nationalism of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n, France\u2019s Marine Le Pen and President Trump. He supported students at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest \u2014 his former school \u2014 who had occupied their campus in 2020 in protest of Orb\u00e1n\u2019s policies. <\/p>\n
In 2019, Tarr embarked on one more film-related project, \u201cMissing People,\u201d an exhibition at the annual Vienna Festival. The film portion of the program, according to reports about the event, featured the faces of some 270 homeless people living in the Austrian capital.<\/p>\n
The project appeared a few months after Orb\u00e1n\u2019s adoption of a Hungarian law that essentially criminalized homelessness. A final act in the radical humanity that was the art of B\u00e9la Tarr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The contemplative cinema of B\u00e9la Tarr was as excruciatingly beautiful as it was brazenly original, often conjuring comparison…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[65294,65298,65297,9923,5592,1924,48299,48,52,51,47,50,49,1555,65295,4287,24261,65296,3044,315,1968],"class_list":{"0":"post-125693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-bela-tarr","9":"tag-close-up","10":"tag-core-group","11":"tag-face","12":"tag-feature","13":"tag-film","14":"tag-krasznahorkai","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-la-headlines","17":"tag-la-news","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","20":"tag-los-angeles-news","21":"tag-man","22":"tag-memorable-scene","23":"tag-movie","24":"tag-novel","25":"tag-radical-humanity","26":"tag-story","27":"tag-time","28":"tag-work"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}