Renowned Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr dies at 70 due to…, his most famous film Satantango ran for more than 7 hours
Bela Tarr’s 1994 feature film Satantango runs seven and a half hours and shows the struggle of a small Hungarian village after the fall of communism. Despite its length, the film became one of his most critically acclaimed works and is often included in lists of the best films ever made.
Master Hungarian director Bela Tarr has passed away. News of Bela Tarr’s death was announced Tuesday by the European Film Academy, of which Tarr had been a member since 1997. The European Film Academy announced that Tarr died “after a long and serious illness.”
The academy said in a statement that “we mourn the loss of an outstanding director with a strong political voice who was not only deeply respected by his colleagues but also celebrated by audiences around the world. The grieving family requests the understanding of the press and the public and asks that they not be required to issue a statement in these difficult times.”
Tarr was a pioneer of the “slow cinema” movement, characterized by black-and-white visuals, long uninterrupted takes, minimal dialogue, a rejection of traditional narrative plots, and often bleak, mundane depictions of everyday life in Eastern Europe.
This is perhaps best embodied in his 1994 feature film Satantango, which clocks in at seven and a half hours and shows the struggles of a small Hungarian village after the fall of communism. Despite its length, the film became one of Tarr’s most critically acclaimed works and is frequently included in lists of the best films ever made.
After The Turin Horse, Tarr shifted his focus to nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and devoted himself to teaching and mentoring. In 2012, he founded the Film Factory school in Sarajevo, where he served as a professor and headed the academic program until 2016.
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