Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has died at 70 : NPR

Béla Tarr, the Hungarian arthouse director finest recognized for his bleak, existential and difficult movies, together with Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, has died on the age of 70. The Hungarian Filmmakers’ Affiliation shared an announcement on Tuesday asserting Tarr’s passing after a critical sickness, however didn’t specify additional particulars.

Tarr was born in communist-era Hungary in 1955 and made his filmmaking debut in 1979 with Household Nest, the primary of 9 function movies that may culminate in his 2011 movie The Turin Horse. Damnation, launched in 1988 on the Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition, was his first movie to attract world acclaim, and launched Tarr from a little-known director of social dramas to a fixture on the worldwide movie competition circuit.

Tarr’s popularity for movies tinged with distress and hard-heartedness, distinguished by black-and-white cinematography and unusually lengthy sequences, solely grew all through the Nineties and 2000s, significantly after his 1994 movie Sátántangó. The epic drama, following a Hungarian village dealing with the fallout of communism, is finest recognized for its size, clocking in at seven-and-a-half hours.

Based mostly on the novel by Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature final yr and ceaselessly collaborated with Tarr, the movie turned a touchstone for the “sluggish cinema” motion, with Tarr becoming a member of the ranks of administrators similar to Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman and Theo Angelopoulos. Author and critic Susan Sontag hailed Sátántangó as “devastating, enthralling for each minute of its seven hours.”

Tarr’s subsequent breakthrough got here in 2000 along with his movie Werckmeister Harmonies, the primary of three films co-directed by his associate, the editor Ágnes Hranitzky. One other free adaptation of a Krasznahorkai novel, the movie depicts the unusual arrival of a circus in a small city in Hungary. With solely 39 pictures making up the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Tarr’s penchant for lengthy takes was on full show.

Like Sátántangó, it was a significant success with each critics and the arthouse crowd. Each movies popularized Tarr’s model and drew the admiration of unbiased administrators similar to Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, the latter of which cited Tarr as a direct affect on his movies: “They get a lot nearer to the true rhythms of life that it’s like seeing the delivery of a brand new cinema. He is likely one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.”

The actress Tilda Swinton is one other admirer of Tarr’s, and starred within the filmmaker’s 2007 movie The Man from London. On the premiere, Tarr introduced that his subsequent movie could be his final. That 2011 movie, The Turin Horse, was usually bleak however with an apocalyptic twist, following a person and his daughter as they face the tip of the world. The movie received the Grand Jury Prize on the Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition.

After the discharge of The Turin Horse, Tarr opened a world movie program in 2013 referred to as movie.manufacturing unit as a part of the Sarajevo Movie Academy. He led and taught within the college for 4 years, inviting varied filmmakers and actors to show workshops and mentor college students, together with Swinton, Van Sant, Jarmusch, Juliette Binoche and Gael García Bernal.

Within the final years of his life, he labored on numerous inventive initiatives, together with an exhibition at a movie museum in Amsterdam. He remained politically outspoken all through his life, condemning the rise of nationalism and criticizing the federal government of Hungarian chief Viktor Orbán.