Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, renowned for radical works like Sátántangó and The Turin Horse, has died in Budapest at age 70 after a long illness. His death was confirmed by director Bence Fliegauf on behalf of the family to the MTI agency.
Béla Tarr, a key figure in auteur cinema over the last decades, directed 11 feature films during his four-decade career, from his 1979 debut Nido familiar to Missing People in 2019, a video installation commissioned for the Wiener Festwochen featuring images of the poor, migrants, and vagabonds in Vienna.
Born in Pécs but raised in Budapest in a working-class family, Tarr began as a child actor at age 10 in a 1965 TV adaptation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He aspired to be a philosopher but, after shooting a short on gypsy workers, studied at the Béla Balázs studios and later at the Hungarian Academy of Theatre and Film Arts. He frequently collaborated with his wife, director Ágnes Hranitzky, on several projects.
His most iconic work, Sátántangó (1994), a seven-and-a-half-hour black-and-white film, adapts László Krasznahorkai's novel and depicts the collapse of communism in a desolate Hungarian village. Tarr convinced the writer to collaborate after an anecdote in the 1980s: he showed up at his home, was rejected, but persisted by knocking on a window in the rain, saying: “Watch my films and you'll understand why I want to adapt your literature”.
Other collaborations include Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), based on The Melancholy of Resistance, and The Man from London (2007), adapting Georges Simenon. His final film, The Turin Horse (2011), won the Silver Bear at Berlin and features long sequences, such as a 10-minute silent potato-peeling scene.
Tarr influenced directors like Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Gus Van Sant, and László Nemes, who was his assistant. He taught at Sarajevo's Film Factory, from which filmmakers like Valdimar Jóhannsson and Pilar Palomero emerged.
In March 2023, during a tribute at Barcelona's D’A festival, Tarr reflected: “Cinema is there when something matters to you and you want to share it; that's very human.” He criticized the industry: “You're free! And fuck the film industry!”, and advised: “You must find your own language. Live life, study life. Cinema... will come.”
