Béla Tarr is the legendary Hungarian auteur whose filmography counts nine ‘slow’ features. In 2011, he bid a farewell to his filmmaking career at the age of 55 with the black-and-white philosophical drama The Turin Horse, a milestone for movie lovers. Tarr opened up to Screen Daily about the decision: “I was developing my own language, my film language. I went deeper and deeper…with The Turin Horse, I arrived at the point where the work is complete, the language is done. I don’t want to use my film language for repeating something. I can’t”.

Through a career spanning nearly four decades, Tarr ascended from an amateur, who started shooting documentary films about the life of poor people in Hungary at the age of 16, to one of cinema’s greatest directors, with films such as Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), and The Turin Horse (2011). Here are the essentials of his career.

6 The Prefab People

     Movies Inspired

Inspired by Dziga Vertov’s theory about cinematic truth and the French film movement Cinéma vérité, Tarr began his directorial career with a period defined by social themes and documentary style. Tarr’s early films, Family Nest (1979), The Outsider (1982), and The Prefab People (1982), each tell everyday stories about ordinary people.

The Prefab People is arguably the best of the director’s early works. Painful and raw, this black-and-white drama observes the progressive disintegration of a family unit. Also, the film shows what life was really like during the Communist era in Hungary.

5 Almanac of Fall

     Mokép

The second of only two features Tarr has done in color, 1984’s Almanac of Fall is the turning point for the director. This abstract and claustrophobic story about an aging woman and those who court her for her affluence was made between the social realism of the director’s early works and his latest poetic masterpieces. On Tarr’s first four features (Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People, and Almanac of Fall), BFI wrote: “If Tarr had only made those first four films, we would still be able to speak about him as a good filmmaker – but it’s thanks to the later work that we can speak about him as one of the greatest.”

Along the way, Tarr also made a 1982 television adaptation of Macbeth. Despite feeling amateurish, this Shakespeare’s play, filmed in one take, introduces the long shot technique that would come to define Tarr’s movies.

4 Damnation

     The Criterion Channel

“Damnation is the movie with which the great Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr fully became ‘Béla Tarr,’” wrote The New York Times. With this 1988 black-and-white film, the director began a frequent collaboration with novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai, once described by Susan Sontag as “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse.”

Melancholic, thoughtful, and beautiful in equal measure, Damnation follows Karrer (Miklós B. Székely), a depressed man who is slowly drinking himself to death and hopelessly in love with a married bar singer. This proper work of art owes something to Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpieces, and Damnation took Tarr’s career to a new level.

3 Werckmeister Harmonies

     Artificial Eye

Based on Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance, the 2000 elusive black-and-white drama Werckmeister Harmonies is set in the anonymous small, bleak Communist town going mad after the arrival of a dark circus and a giant whale. Through the eyes of János (Lars Rudolph), a young newspaper-delivery man, we see a glimpse of the storm. It is nightmarish poetry and a powerful allegory for powerlessness and tyranny. From its lengthy takes, gorgeously sad music, and hypnotic performances, it’s a viscerally great film.

After Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr made The Man from London, a film noir with Tilda Swinton which, while visually masterful, felt a bit incomplete.

2 The Turin Horse

     The Cinema Guild

The 2011 philosophical black-and-white drama The Turin Horse is directed by Tarr and his spouse Ágnes Hranitzky (she edited almost all of Tarr’s films and co-directed Werckmeister Harmonies, The Man from London, and The Turin Horse). Co-written by Tarr and Krasznahorkai, the director’s latest and (so he has suggested) final film references the legend saying that one of the world’s greatest philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, suffered a mental breakdown after witnessing the Turin horse being whipped. Shot in only 30 long takes, The Turin Horse focuses on what happened to the horse after this incident.

The dark film follows seven days in the life of the horse’s owners. Tarr opened up to Cineuropa about the theme of the movie, saying, “The Turin Horse is about the heaviness of human existence. We just wanted to see how difficult and terrible it is when every day you have to go to the well and bring the water, in summer, in winter… All the time”.

1 Sátántangó

​​​​​​​The 1994 seven-hour black-and-white drama Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango) is Tarr’s magnum opus. Based on Krasznahorkai’s novel of the same name and maintaining the book’s tango-inspired chronology (six moves forward, then six back), Sátántangó centers on the arrival of a man, believed to have been dead, in a failing collective farm. The quasi-Messianic leader changes everyone’s life. Sátántangó is described by many as one of the biggest cinematic experiences in history. If you accept its challenge, it is simply unforgettable.