by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear Reader,
Béla Tarr died yesterday.
The Hungarian filmmaker, who made slowness an art form and silence a character, passed away on January 6, 2026, after a prolonged illness. He was 70. The European Film Academy announced his death, describing him as “an outstanding director and a personality with a strong political voice”. Those who have seen his work would add: a man who understood despair the way a doctor understands disease—intimately, diagnostically, without flinching.
Tarr was born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1955 and began making films at 16. His early work documented the poverty and spiritual exhaustion of post-communist Eastern Europe with an unflinching eye that earned him both admirers and enemies. The Hungarian authorities shuttered his Társulás Filmstúdió in 1985 for political reasons; Tarr never softened his anarchist convictions. His 1988 film Damnation premiered at Berlin and established his signature: controlled camera movements that seemed to breathe, compositions that made you conscious of time as a physical object, a weight.
And then came Sátántangó. The Satan’s Tango.
Seven and a half hours of monochrome devastation, adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s novel, depicting a dying Hungarian village whose inhabitants follow a charismatic figure returned, supposedly, from the dead. Those who sat through it came out with what film critic Peter Bradshaw called “a kind of filmic PTSD”—transformed, somehow, by the experience of watching people trudge through mud, drink themselves into oblivion, and surrender their agency to a con man promising salvation (sounds familiar?).
I watched Sátántangó a decade ago. The experience defies description. Tarr’s long takes—some lasting 10, 12, 15 minutes without a cut—forced a tectonic shift in how attention functioned in me. You stopped waiting for something to happen and began noticing what was already there: the texture of rain on stone, the particular quality of light in a bar where hope had gone to die, the way a human face in extended close-up reveals not personality but something closer to geology. The silences were structural, load-bearing. In them, you heard the film thinking.
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