Three by Béla Tarr
In the 1980s, shortly after the death of Tarkovsky, this Hungarian chronicler of apartment-block life began his fateful collaboration with the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Their landmark run of films together brought out the existential depth and sardonic humor in the gloom, drinking, and hopeless scheming of their countrymen. This suite of three films treats the rainy desolation of the hinterlands as a cosmic canvas, fostering a new sense of cinematic time and immortalizing gray lives with virtuosic camera movements and black-and-white cinematography.
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Damnation
Directed by Béla Tarr | 116 mins | 1987
Tarr’s first collaboration with writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai produces a quintessential Eastern bloc brew of voluptuous gloom and romantic doom that became the filmmaker’s defining style. The story of a hard-drinking man, the wicked cabaret singer he loves, a... -
The Turin Horse
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky | 155 mins | 2011
Tarr’s final feature distills the essence of his cinema with the potency of farmer’s moonshine: a cart driver and his daughter survive harsh lives amid the stark beauty of desolation. With a nearly mood-altering dilation of time, this pr... -
Sátántangó
Directed by Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Creating a rich te...
