“Béla Tarr is the ultimate auteurist’s auteur, an artist who ascended from a cult director little known outside of his native Hungary to one of the most revered figures in world cinema today, all the while stoking an enflamed cinephilia among his growing legion of passionate followers. His 1988 film Damnation offered the first full expression of the unique style defined by Tarr across the four extraordinary features he directed since then, all sharing brooding black and white cinematography, elaborately choreographed extended tracking shots, a hypnotic rhythm and enigmatic stories imbued with a sense of impending doom. In each film Tarr pushes these unmistakable qualities to a seemingly insurmountable extreme, giving way to the mesmerizing monumentality of his audacious seven-and-a-half-hour epic Sátántangó and the stark minimalism of his brilliant summary work The Turin Horse, Tarr’s latest and declared last film.

Tarr launched his career with a series of blistering and intense documentary-style films that quickly moved from the urgent engagement of contemporary social problems in Family Nest to the increasingly theatrical, abstract and claustrophobic study of avarice and depravation unfolded in Almanac of Fall – a film whose daring use of unconventional composition and unnatural dialogue points directly towards Tarr’s later work. The roots of Tarr’s cinema in the documentary leanings of the so-called Budapest School nevertheless remain legible in the richly mannered late work whose strange artifice and darkly fantastical (at times almost science-fiction) dimensions depend upon an exacting fidelity to space and time. In this way Tarr uses a remarkably mobile camera to exhaustively track the complete arc of actions, from the spinning drunkards in a dingy bar in Werkmeister Harmonies to the daily labour of the farmers in The Turin Horse. Like the great films of Tarkovsky and Ophuls, Tarr’s iconic work favours an assertively mobile camera that dynamically expands cinematic space and time while defining a foreboding yet graceful omnipotence, the roving camera seeming to embody the unknown forces that control the perpetually wintery and seemingly about to be extinguished worlds inhabited by Tarr’s films.

Despite their sense of dark menace, Tarr’s films are incomparably engaging and remarkably exhilarating to behold, their careful use of repetition seeming always about to crest and climax, creating a hypnotic suspension perfectly expressed in the serial soundtracks brilliantly designed by composer Mihály Vig. Fascinating for their ambiguity, Tarr’s films are legible as rich allegories for the collapse of Western civilization and the revenge of ravaged Nature. At the same time, the recurrent figures within them of men and women fighting with grim determination against an endless storm also offer poignant expressions of the paradoxical stubbornness, the strange insistence, of human desire and ambition. – Haden Guest

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Family Nest
Béla Tarr, 1977, 100 min

““We can understand; we can’t help,” the social services employee intones to a desperate mother in an unnervingly realistic episode that encapsulates the cycle of grief and torment experienced by those trapped in Hungary’s housing shortage of the 1970s. Made when he was only twenty-two, Béla Tarr’s first feature recalls both Frederick Wiseman and John Cassavetes in its mix of raw, up-close cinema verité style and imperceptible use of non-professional actors. Irén and her husband ache to escape the chaotic confines of a tiny flat where nine people live under the reign of an abrasive, abusive patriarch. Rife with all the ills of a demoralized society, the claustrophobic clamour of this “nest” stuns with its penetrating immediacy, occasionally interrupted by incongruous pop music interludes that only lengthen the distance between desire and reality.” – Harvard Film Archive

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The Outsider
Béla Tarr, 1981, 122 min

“Assuming the freeform structure of naturalistic, independent American cinema of the same period, The Outsider imparts a mutual theme: the hard barter of individual – usually male – freedom for a “normal” life of work and family. Played by a musician of the same name, easy-going András Szabó drifts along an aimless path – performing and drinking his central pleasures. Work, marriage and fatherhood only blur the edges of his desultory descent through the landscape of modern Budapest’s bohemian fringe. He joins the listless drug addicts, alcoholic philosophers and lost artists who seek the life of Beethoven or Haydn without the work ethic, the ambition or any support. In his second feature, Tarr continues his unpretentious reflections on the symbiotic, inarticulate relationships between personal dysfunction and social malady.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Autumn Almanac
Béla Tarr, 1983, 120 min

“Considered a turning point from Tarr’s early social realism to his later precisely formal work, Autumn Almanac elliptically discloses the shifting relationships between five inhabitants of a house through a chain of theatrical tête-à-têtes. Their philosophical quandaries and deferred dreams coil into bitter circles of duplicitous manipulations that fuel eruptions of violence and underhanded exit strategies. Lit by expressionistic, lurid colours and followed by the mysterious gaze of a meandering, equally conspiratorial camera, the cursed spirits seem destined to reenact their base desires and vengeful patterns in a disorienting purgatory of opulent decay.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Damnation
Béla Tarr, 1988, 116 min

“Tarr made a dramatic stylistic and critical breakthrough with this brooding and visually striking study of desolation and betrayal set in small town Hungary and tracing the cruel love triangle that emerges between a taciturn loner, a nightclub singer and her smuggler husband. The first of five films to date written with novelist László Krasznahorkai and structured around the haunting minimalist music of Mihály Vig, Damnation – with its decaying factories, dingy bars and bleak, expressionistic landscapes – introduced the dark, rainy and irretrievably melancholy realm that is arguably Tarr’s greatest creation.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Sátántangó
Béla Tarr, 1994, 432 min

“Béla Tarr’s seven-and-a-half-hour opus of melancholia was hailed as one of the most important films of the 1990s – and as a definitive statement on the end of communism, an interim report on the state of humanity, and a prayer call for a society on the edge of collapse. The members of a rural farm collective eke out their days through a series of failed hopes, unsuccessful relationships, and all-too-successful drinking binges, often helplessly sharing screen time (and importance) with the various dog packs, cow herds, and cats that wander through the rain-drenched landscape. The film is divided into twelve chapters, and each episode, its camerawork and score, mimics the hypnotic languor of a tango: a slow step forward, a slow step back, then repeated, merging image and sound into a visual chant. Tarr’s mesmerizing recreation of an entire world, complete with all of this world’s poetry, despair, horror, and humour (even amid the ennui, Sátántangó certainly boasts a gallows flair for the comedic), makes it not so much a film as a place to visit, or stay.” – Jason Sanders

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Werckmeister Harmonies
Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2000, 145 min

“This mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus – complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince – arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence. In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, auteur Béla Tarr and codirector-editor Ágnes Hranitzky conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.” – Janus Films

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The Man from London
Béla Tarr, 2007, 139 min

“Woefully misunderstood and obscured in the storm cloud of controversy that surrounded its difficult production, Tarr and Krasznahorkai’s George Simenon adaptation nevertheless occupies a central piece in his complex oeuvre. Tarr’s heightened attention to surface, textures and the organic details of environment take on new, almost metaphysical, dimensions in the context of the policier in which all places become potential crime scenes, all objects tinged with the aura of evidence. In its brilliantly choreographed and breathtaking extended opening shot, Tarr immediately challenges the viewer to become a detective observing an obscure crime that unfolds in a dockyard at night, under the watchful eye of a mysterious and potently cinematic lighthouse.” – Haden Guest

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The Turin Horse
Béla Tarr, 2011, 146 min

“Boldly proclaimed by Tarr to be his last film, The Turin Horse offers a masterful and melancholy summary of his unique visionary cinema. Embracing an extraordinary minimalism of story, setting and cast, The Turin Horse is structured around one week in the back-breaking lives of an aging farmer and his daughter, alone on a barren, windswept farm with a recalcitrant horse that suddenly refuses to work. Tarr’s sweeping black and white cinematography takes on new poignancy in the twilight of the photochemical age, rendering the tired horse a weary and obsolete ancestor of the Muybridgean stallion who inspired the cinema itself. A remarkably hypnotic and immersive film, The Turin Horse pushes Tarr’s interest in texture, sound and motion to an expressive extreme, giving way to a sensorial richness rare in cinema today.” – Harvard Film Archive