I mean, he was one of the great directors of the modern era, so one would have thought his death would have been a little bit more widely discussed. I heard about it from a Criterion Closet video with Christoph Waltz. So, thank you Christoph.

Tarr is bit of an acquired taste. The two movies of his I remember the best start with a fifteen minute shot of cows wandering through a rural village (Satantango) and a ten minute close-up of a horse pulling a carriage (The Turin Horse). If you go into that blindly, that might seem overwhelming. However, somehow Tarr managed to make these mesmerizing. Yeah, indeed, one of the great directors of the modern era.

And of course, there’s the colors. He definitely had a style and black and white served that well. The bleakness of it all might have given us wrong ideas, though.

He was born in Hungary behind the Iron Curtain. Hungary is one of those countries that managed to build a wonderful and unique culture of weird movies. Yet, Tarr stood out even in that strong field. Sure, people are going to bring up Tarkovsky, but to me Tarr was the absolute master of slow-cinema. He just did not care about being commercial or pursuing lowest-common denominator audiences. Why else would his magnum opus be a seven hour examination of greed arriving in a small village after the fall of communism?

My personal favorite of his movies if The Turin Horse. It’s a very dark movie. An older man and his old-maid daughter live together on a farm and try to get by as the world around them is falling apart. It’s easy to find it repetitive when the pair live out their daily routines, but that is part of the beauty of the movie. What do you do when you know the end is coming, but there is nothing you can do about it? And all of this was inspired by a story about Nietzsche (recounted at the beginning of the movie) where he saw a man beating a horse and found it so traumatic he essentially died from it.

Tarr had other convictions as well. He did not see eye to eye with Orban, so he left Hungary to find a film school in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. While calling it a school, he did not want to teach. He just wanted to facilitate learning. A very progressive idea. As a teacher, I would love if we could do that, but instead I have to work more conservatively.

Turin Horse was Tarr’s last feature. He still worked, producing, making installations and forth, but he had made a conscious decision to leave the world of movies behind fifteen years before his death at 55. That’s very young considering that Martin Scorsese, for example, has nine projects listed as upcoming on IMDb in his mid-80s.