Born on July 21, 1955, Tarr grew up in Budapest, raised by his mother and father, who worked in film and theater. But despite a role in the Hungarian National Television’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, Tarr’s future lay behind the camera, not in front of it. After receiving an 8mm camera for his 14th birthday, Tarr made a film called Guest Workers. His early work grabbed the eyes of Béla Balázs Studios, which helped fund his first film, Family Nest, in 1977.
A social film that reflected his experience as a marginalized working-class shipworker, the Family Nest set the foundation for the principles of Tarr’s cinema, focusing on the everyday struggles of ordinary people through long, improvised takes and patient black-and-white photography. Using non-professional actors, Family Nest‘s brand of cinema verite led Tarr to the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. Over the next few years, he would make several films: The Outsider, Prefab People, Almanac Of Fall, and a TV adaptation of Macbeth. A sign of things to come, the hour-long Shakespeare tragedy consisted of two shots. The first shot was five minutes long, and the second was 57 minutes.
Tarr’s early exploration of contemplative, controlled camera movements culminated in 1988’s Damnation, which he wrote with frequent collaborator László Krasznahorkai. Damnation follows the doomed romance between a married cabaret singer and one of her depressed regulars. The film received international acclaim and began the seven-year journey of adapting Krasznahorkai’s novel Sátántangó. The seven-and-a-half-hour epic dirge about a collapsing collective farm was a landmark in his career. Despite allegations of cat torture, which Tarr vehemently denied, the film would go on to be considered one of the greatest ever made in Sight & Sound‘s 2012 and 2022 rankings. He would make only three more feature-length narrative films: 2000’s Werckmeister Harmonies, 2007’s The Man From London, and 2011’s The Turin Horse. His final film was the 2019 documentary Missing People.
“I was in the elementary school when I went to the cinema, I saw all the bad stories, fake acting, bad colors. It was so ugly, and life is not like this.”Tarr said in an interview with Criterion in 2024. “In my films, I’m not knocking on the door. I kick the door. I just wanted punch you, shake you, move you.”
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