Béla Tarr’s Unbroken Visions

A titanic artist’s death is a terrible shock. In the case of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who has died after a long illness, at the age of seventy, I confess that I’d expected—without necessarily hoping for—a faint premonition, perhaps a grim tingle in our collective cinephile sixth sense. Tarr, unique among his European art-film contemporaries, cut an almost oracular figure. The greatest of the nine features he directed, among them “Sátántangó” (1994) and “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2001), felt handed down from on high, bearing the ominous weight of a prophecy. But what, exactly, did Tarr foretell? The end of the world, surely. To watch his dank, brooding studies in social collapse, most of them filmed in long, loping black-and-white takes, is to embark on an oddly luxuriant descent into Purgatory. His work is imposing and thrilling, earthy and magisterial, bleak and mesmerizingly beautiful, and suffused with an apocalyptic grandeur.

Tarr knew when the end was nigh, including the end of his own career: after unveiling his film “The Turin Horse,” in 2011, he declared that it would be his last. So it was said, and so it was done; not for him the post-retirement waffling of a Hayao Miyazaki or a Steven Soderbergh. Tarr’s admirers bemoaned his early departure, but no one who saw “The Turin Horse” could have doubted the wisdom of the decision. The film begins with an anecdotal reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, and the cold, circular story that follows—about a woman and her elderly father, trudging about a dimly lit cottage on a remote, wind-lashed steppe—might have been founded on the Nietzschean principle of eternal recurrence. Set to the frenzied churnings of the composer Míhály Víg, and filmed in immense blocks of real time by the cinematographer Fred Kelemen (both among Tarr’s regular collaborators), it’s a declaration of human futility and despair, as haunting in its finality as anything I’ve beheld in a theatre. Where could a filmmaker have gone from there?

To Sarajevo, of course. In 2012, Tarr, fed up with the strongman politics of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, moved to the Bosnian capital and founded an international film school called film.factory, where he devised a mentorship program that was at once practical and innovative. He closed the program in 2016, citing funding issues, but not before the list of visiting faculty had grown to include the directors Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa, and Gus Van Sant (whose films “Gerry” and “Elephant” bear an acknowledged Tarr influence). For a few glorious years, the school worked to inculcate an intellectually rigorous and formally adventurous a grasp of the medium among a new generation of filmmakers.

Tarr received no such training. He was born in 1955, in Pecs, in southern Hungary, to parents who worked in Budapest’s theatre and film industries. I confess that I never saw Tarr’s acting début, when he was a child, in a TV adaptation of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” in 1965, and few can claim to have seen Tarr’s first short film, “Guest Workers” (1971), a now lost 8-mm. documentary that he shot when he was just a teen-ager. From the start, his filmmaking was inextricably tied to political activism: “Guest Workers” focussed on local Romani laborers seeking permission to travel to Austria for work, and drew the scrutiny and ire of Hungary’s Communist government, which blocked the young director from attending university, where he had hoped to study philosophy. The irony is rich, and not just because Tarr can be plausibly hailed as one of cinema’s truest philosophers. (A notion he would have scoffed at, but no matter.) In trying to punish him for his activism, the authorities effectively pushed Tarr even further into filmmaking, and thus handed him his most powerful tool of anti-authoritarian denunciation.

Tarr’s first few features were naturalistic domestic dramas with social-realist underpinnings, accomplished but prosaic in comparison with his later works. In the tense, rough-hewn “Family Nest” (1979), he critiqued Hungary’s housing shortages by dramatizing the dissolution of a marriage in unbearably cramped quarters. The film, with its extended takes and extreme closeups, feels conceived under the spell of Cassavetes. After directing “The Outsider” (1981) and “The Prefab People” (1982), plus a TV adaptation of “Macbeth,” in 1982, that unfolded in just two unbroken shots, Tarr made a fascinating transitional work with “Almanac of Fall” (1984). This was a rare jolt of color in his mostly black-and-white filmography—and what color! The film, a claustrophobic chamber drama, peered at several bitterly unhappy characters through a hothouse palette of aquarium blues and darkroom reds. The talk and the action shuddered with violence, but the camera glided through each scene with a rapt, languorous intensity that Tarr refined in his later works, even as he drained away the warm hues and committed himself to a chilly, monochrome austerity.

Such was the case with his gorgeously gloomy black-and-white noir “Damnation” (1988), which situates a James M. Cain-style triangle in a coal-mining town that’s positively drowning in stormy weather. The film was made shortly before Hungary’s Communist era gave way to democratic reform, in 1989, and for Tarr, it signalled a major new phase. “Damnation” was the first of the director’s career-crowning collaborations with the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in October. Krasznahorkai’s dense, flowing, sometimes chapter-length sentences found an imperfect, hypnotically immersive visual equivalent in Tarr’s sinuous long takes. The director worked with Krasznahorkai on all his remaining films, most notably on two small-town parables adapted from Krasznahorkai novels: “Sátántangó,” a dense allegory for the collapse of Communism, and “Werckmeister Harmonies,” a sharp indictment of encroaching fascism. These are what we think of as classically Béla Tarr movies, though he co-directed three of them with his longtime partner, Ágnes Hranitzky. (She also edited eight of his nine features, starting with “The Outsider.”) In these films, the weather is wretched, the mood deeply unsettled. A few dribbles of narrative break up the quotidian atmospherics. The camera prowls the terrain, for minutes at a time, with stubborn, sombre deliberation. The air is thick with metaphysical portent and mordant humor.