Béla Tarr
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Alberto. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, 'Mutter, ich bin dumm!' ['Mother, I am stupid!' in German] and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse." --Béla Tarr’s introductory words to The Turin Horse |
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Béla Tarr (born 21 July 1955) is a Hungarian filmmaker.
Debuting with the film Family Nest (1977), Tarr began his directorial career with a brief period of what he refers to as "social cinema", aimed at telling mundane stories about ordinary people, often in the style of cinema vérité. Over the next decade, the cinematic style and thematic elements of his films changed. Tarr has been interpreted as having a pessimistic view of humanity; the characters in his works are often cynical, and have tumultuous relationships with one another in ways critics have found to be darkly comic. Autumn Almanac (1984) follows the inhabitants of a run-down apartment as they struggle to live together while sharing their hostilities. The drama Damnation (1988) was lauded for its languid and controlled camera movement, which Tarr would become known for internationally. Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) continued his bleak and desolate representations of reality, while incorporating apocalyptic overtones; the former sometimes appears in scholarly polls of the greatest films ever made, and the latter received wide acclaim from critics. Tarr would later compete at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival with his film The Man from London, which opened to moderately positive reviews.
Frequent collaborators with Tarr include novelist László Krasznahorkai, film composer Mihály Víg, cinematographer Fred Kelemen, actress Erika Bók, and Tarr's wife Ágnes Hranitzky, who is sometimes credited as a co-director of his last three works. After the release of his film The Turin Horse (2011), which made many year-end "best-of" critics' lists, Tarr announced his definitive retirement from feature-length film direction. In February 2013 he started a film school in Sarajevo, known as film.factory, leaving in 2016. He has since created an installation that features newly shot film sequences, in a 2017 Amsterdam exhibition called Till the End of the World.
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Filmography
Feature films
- Családi tűzfészek / Family Nest (1979)
- Szabadgyalog / The Outsider (1981)
- Panelkapcsolat / The Prefab People (1982)
- Őszi almanach / Almanac of Fall (1984)
- Kárhozat / Damnation (1988)
- Sátántangó / Satan's Tango (1994)
- Werckmeister harmóniák / Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
- A londoni férfi / The Man from London (2007)
- A torinói ló / The Turin Horse (2011)
Television films
- Macbeth (1982)
Short films
- Hotel Magnezit (1978)
- Utazás az alföldön / Journey on the Plain (1995)
- Visions of Europe (film) (2004)
- segment: Prologue
Documentary films
- Az utolsó hajó / The Last Boat (1990, 31 min), segment from City Life
- Muhamed (2017, 10 min)
- Missing People (2019, 95 min)
