Béla Tarr Retrospective

Our four film retrospective on the films of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr kicks off with a new restoration of his 2001 masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies. One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, this mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus, complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince, arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens, which builds inexorably toward violence and destruction. In thirty-nine of his signature long takes, engraved in ghostly black and white, Tarr conjures an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.

A mid-career masterwork by legendary Hungarian art house auteur Béla Tarr and the first of his internationally acclaimed trilogy of films written in collaboration with author László Krasznahorkai (including the legendary Sátántangó), Damnation is the second film in our Béla Tarr Retrospective. The film chronicles the doomed affair between bar Titanik regular Karrer (Sátántangó’s Miklós B. Székely) and the cruel cabaret singer (Vali Kerekes) he pines for while scheming to displace her brutish husband (György Cserhalmi). A poignant Communism allegory that solidified Tarr’s unique aesthetic, Damnation is photographed in an exquisitely black & white palette underscored by the mesmerizing long takes that would come to be his trademark.  Damnation has been restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by the Hungarian National Film Institute Film Archive under the supervision of Béla Tarr himself.

One of the greatest achievements in recent art house cinema and a seminal work of “slow cinema,” Sátántangó, based on the book by László Krasznahorkai is the third film in our Béla Tarr Retrospective. The film follows members of a small, defunct agricultural collective living in a post-apocalyptic landscape after the fall of Communism who, on the heels of a large financial windfall, set out to leave their village. As a few of the villagers secretly conspire to take off with all of the earnings for themselves, a mysterious character, long thought dead, returns to the village, altering the course of everyone’s lives forever. Shot in stunning black-and-white by Gábor Medvigy and filled with exquisitely composed and lyrical long takes, Sátántangó unfolds in twelve distinct movements, alternating forwards and backwards in time, echoing the structure of a tango dance. Tarr’s vision, aided by longtime partner and collaborator Ágnes Hranitzky, is enthralling and his portrayal of a rural Hungary beset by boozy dance parties, treachery, and near-perpetual rainfall is both transfixing and uncompromising.  Sátántangó has been justly lauded by critics and audiences as a masterpiece and inspired none other than Susan Sontag to proclaim that she would be “glad to see it every year for the rest of [her] life”. Sátántangó has been restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by Arbelos in collaboration with The Hungarian Filmlab.

The final film in our Béla Tarr Retrospective is The Turin Horse, his 2011 swan song. Inspired by the legendary 1889 incident where philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a cab driver whipping a stubborn horse in Turin, Italy, and collapsed after embracing the animal. The film tracks the bleak, repetitive daily survival of the aging driver, his daughter, and their horse amid a relentless windstorm. Declared by Tarr as his final feature film, it is celebrated as a masterpiece of modern minimalist cinema and long-take cinematography. Don't miss this new restoration on the big screen!