Hungarian filmmaker behind 'Sátántangó'

The celebrated Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, director of such works as “Sátántangó” and “The Turin Horse” and the recipient of numerous awards for his long and often darkly comic films, has died at 70.

- BY JUSTIN SPIKE

AWARD WINNER Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr wrote and directed nine feature films.

During a career spanning decades, Tarr wrote and directed nine feature films, starting with his debut, "Family Nest," in 1979 and ending in 2011 with "The Turin Horse," which won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival that year.

Tarr frequently collaborated with Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, who last year won the Nobel Prize in literature. Tarr's films, some of which were adaptations of Krasznahorkai's novels ("Sátántangó" and "Werckmeister Harmonies"), have been awarded prizes at festivals around Europe and Asia, and he received honorary professorships at universities in China.

In a statement Tuesday, the Hungarian Filmmakers' Assn. confirmed Tarr's death, writing that "with deep sorrow we announce that, after a long and serious illness, film director Béla Tarr passed away early this morning." Tarr was born in 1955 in the southern Hungarian city of Pécs, but lived most of his life in the capital, Budapest.

He completed his first feature film, "Family Nest," when he was only 23. That film won the Grand Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival that year.

His films, the longest of which, "Sátántangó," clocks in at 439 minutes or more than seven hours long, were widely praised as being beautifully shot while often using slow pacing and stark imagery to depict despair and social decay.