Béla Tarr, Patient and Often Pitiless Director of Hungarian Epics Like ‘Sátántangó,’ Dead at 70

Béla Tarr, the patient Hungarian filmmaker who captured often pitiless worlds in slow-cinema epics like the seismic, seven-hour-and-30-minute black-and-white “Sátántangó,” has died. He was 70 years old. According to Deadline, Tarr’s death was shared by Hungary’s national news agency MTI via Hungarian filmmaker Bence Fliegauf, with the European Film Academy sharing in an email that he died after “a long and serious illness.”

Tarr had not directed a feature film since 2011’s acclaimed “The Turin Horse,” a bleak and apocalyptic drama about the unraveling of a farming family, after which he relocated from Hungary to Sarajevo to start the international film school film.factory. Tarr had a reputation for mentoring younger generations of filmmakers throughout his career, from “Twilight” director György Fehér, who died in 2002, to “Lamb” director Valdimar Jóhannsson. Tarr shut down the school in 2016 but remained an academic in his post-filmmaking life; visiting teachers up until that time included the likes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose own style owes a great deal to Tarr’s), Carlos Reygadas, and Gus van Sant. His prior academic career had included launching the short-lived Társulás Filmstúdió in the 1980s.

Tarr’s accolades included a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes for 2007’s “The Man from London,” a crime drama starring Tilda Swinton and again in Tarr’s career-long black-and-white, languid style; a 2023 honorary European Film Award; and the 2011 Berlin Silver Bear prize for “The Turin Horse.” The crowning jewel of Tarr’s nine features, and the most internationally renowned and discovered and rediscovered by every generation of cinephile, is “Sátántangó.” It follows the denizens of a small Hungarian village grappling with the consequences of communism’s collapse; the László Krasznahorkai adaptation retains Tarr’s pessimistic, nihilistic style, directing everything from farm animals to drunk actors within Tarkovsky-like long takes.

“I’m just a big fucking maniac who believes in people,” Tarr told IndieWire on the eve of the 4K restoration of the film. Looking back on the film, he said, “I was just an ugly, poor filmmaker. I still am. I don’t have power. I don’t have anything — just a fucking camera.”

His other films include 2000’s “Werckmeister Harmonies,” which returned to theaters in 2023 with a 4K restoration from Janus Films; “Damnation”; “Almanac of Fall”; and his breakout debut “Family Nest,” from 1979.

The European Film Academy’s statement upon news of Tarr’s death, per Variety, said the community “mourns an outstanding director and a personality with a strong political voice, who is not only deeply respected by his colleagues but also celebrated by audiences worldwide. The grieving family asks for the understanding of the press and the public and that they not be sought for a statement during these difficult days.”