"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."
Béla Tarr, a Hungarian filmmaker, died at seventy after a long illness. He directed nine features including Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turin Horse. His cinema monumentalized the process of decay and the passage of time through long, loping black-and-white takes and brooding studies of social collapse. The Turin Horse was declared his final film after its 2011 unveiling. That film frames a cold, circular story about a woman and her elderly father in a dim cottage on a remote, wind-lashed steppe and evokes Nietzschean ideas of eternal recurrence. Tarr’s work is imposing, earthy, magisterial, bleak, and suffused with apocalyptic grandeur.
Read at The New Yorker
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