Bela Tarr, titan of slow-moving cinema, passes away at 70

Bela Tarr, a Hungarian filmmaker whose lengthy and grim movies including 'Satantango' and 'Werckmeister Harmonies' made him a hero of the art house cinema crowd, died Monday. He was 70.

The European Film Academy announced Tarr’s death in a news release. The academy did not specify a cause of death, but said Tarr had died after a long and serious illness.

Born in Hungary in 1955 when the country was under Communist rule, Tarr started his filmmaking career making domestic dramas such as his 1979 debut, “Family Nest.” But over eight subsequent movies, he developed a distinct style that made him a critics’ favorite and a regular on the international festival circuit.

Critic A.O. Scott, writing in The New York Times in 2012, said there was always “something ancient and ageless about his films.” Tarr appeared somewhat out of place in modern cinema, the writer added, and was more like “a medieval stone carver who happened to get his hands on a camera.”

Manohla Dargis, writing in the Times in 2006, called Tarr’s seven-hour “Satantango” “his masterpiece.” Featuring a bleak plot in which a Hungarian village falls under the spell of a dubious messiah, it showed Tarr’s ability to “find beauty in every miserable and mundane corner,” she said.

Rural communities in Hungary’s hinterlands were also the settings for Tarr’s movies “Damnation” (1988), which plays out in a mining settlement, and “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000), set in a cold and desolate town on the Great Hungarian Plain.

“Werckmeister Harmonies,” like “Satantango,” was based on a text by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature last year.

Krasznahorkai also collaborated with Tarr on the script for the director’s final film, “The Turin Horse,” about the bleak lives and grueling work of a horse cart driver and his daughter as the world comes to an end. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival, and Tarr, who was 56 at the time, surprised the audience in his acceptance speech by announcing that it would be his last movie.

But Krasznahorkai said in an interview with the Times that year that Tarr’s decision made sense, given that the movie was about the apocalypse.

“‘The Turin Horse’ is that kind of movie after which it is hard to make the next one,” Krasznahorkai said. “One more? About the apocalypse? There is only one of it.”