Farewell to Béla Tarr, the extraordinary filmmaker who narrated the Apocalypse
The author of masterpieces such as 'Satantango' and 'Werckmeister's Harmonies' has passed away at the age of 70
He was undoubtedly one of the greatest auteurs of contemporary cinema: Hungarian director Béla Tarr, beloved by film buffs the world over and able to challenge the public gaze with his torrential masterpieces, has passed away at the age of seventy after a long illness.
Little known to the general public, Tarr has created extremely symbolic films, often depicting the Apocalypse in metaphorical form and in various guises: an author who has always considered cinema as an art capable of "sculpting time" (to quote Andrej Tarkovskij, an author with whom one can certainly draw parallels) and has often collaborated with László Krasznahorkai, the writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025.
He was born in Pécs in 1955
Born in Pécs in 1955, Tarr became interested in directing during his teenage years, making amateur short films that brought him to the attention of Béla Balasz Studios, studios that helped him with a grant to make his feature film debut in 1979 with 'Family Nest'.
This was followed by "The Outsider" (1981), "Prefabricated Relationships" (1982) and the more refined "Autumn Almanac" (1984), films that define the first phase of a career marked by a style very different from that which would mark his later feature films: in these early works, Tarr makes extensive use of the hand-held camera and colour, elements that would essentially disappear as his career progressed. The style in these films is strongly realist and focuses on the story of characters struggling to survive in the Hungary of the period. One exception is his television adaptation of 'Macbeth' (1982), which has a more symbolic scope and in which Tarr begins to show his greatness in the use of the piano-sequence, a technical choice that will become extremely representative of his entire subsequent filmography.
