Hungary’s national news agency MTI reported his death citing a statement director Bence Fliegauf made on behalf of the family.
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“It is with deep sorrow that we announce that film director Bela Tarr passed away early this morning after a long and serious illness” local news site Telex quoted the statement as saying.
Tarr was best known for the movie “Satantango” (1994), a seven-hour epic about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and its material and spiritual decline.
It was adopted from one of Nobel laureate writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s best known novels, with whom he frequently collaborated.
Tarr “created colours by making them disappear, because in his great films he tried to speak as the sinner who nevertheless, with all his sins, must still be loved” Krasznahorkai said last year in a speech after receiving his Nobel prize.
– ‘Done everything’ –
Bela Tarr was born in the southern Hungarian university town of Pecs in 1955.
He started filmmaking as an amateur at the age of 16 with a camera his father gifted to him.
Tarr then joined Hungary’s leading experimental film studio Bela Balazs Studio, which enabled him to make his first feature film, “Family Nest”, in 1977.
He made the first Hungarian independent feature film, “Damnation”, which was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988.
The film was co-written Krasznahorkai, marking the start of their long collaboration and friendship.
Tarr, who was often called “the Hungarian Tarkovsky”, also directed a version of “Macbeth” in 1982, “Werckmeister Harmonies” in 2000, and “The Man from London” in 2007.
After completing his last feature film, “The Turin Horse” in 2011, Tarr announced his retirement, although he still did two short movies, in 2017 and 2019.
In recent years, Tarr devoted himself to educating a new generation of directors, teaching at multiple film academies in Hungary, Germany and France.
“I had done everything I wanted to” he told Hungarian weekly HVG in a 2019 interview.
A passionate smoker, Tarr jokingly speculated in the interview whether the Hungarian state or a cigarette making company would pay for his funeral.
His last public appearance was smoking in a music video released last November.
– The ‘freest man’ –
Tarr was a well-known critic of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, calling the nationalist leader the “shame of Hungary” in a 2016 interview. He also criticised US President Donald Trump and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the same piece.
Last year, he read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the opening of LGBTQ Pride month in Budapest, following Orban’s efforts to ban the Pride march in the name of “child protection”.
Budapest mayor Gergely Karacsony paid tribute to Tarr in a Facebook post.
“The freest man I know died” he said, hailing the late director for his love of human dignity and focusing on what was essential.
“Thank you for everything, and all the best in the hereafter,” he added.