A Béla Tarr Retrospective: Will Heaven Fall Upon Us?

A Retrospective season on Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr is coming to the BFI this summer!

Across a small but essential body of work, Béla Tarr established himself as one of the major voices in world cinema.

‘I’ve long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There’s no sense or meaning in anything. It’s nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures.’
– Béla Tarr

Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr, who has a reputation as the dark magus of European ‘slow cinema’, has been hailed by Susan Sontag as a torchbearer for cinema’s future. Tarr is best known for his visionary latterday films, from Damnation, through the legendary Satantango, to the film he decided would be his last, The Turin Horse; their style is unmistakeable – with its use of darkness, hazy light and slow, searching camera movements that make time and space warp before our eyes. But as this season shows, Tarr has his roots in the social realism of Hungary’s Communist era. As his cinema evolved – building on the influence of an earlier Hungarian long-take master, Miklós Jancsó – it retained many concerns of his early work, including compassion for outsiders and the oppressed, an awareness of the destructive power of violence and venality, and unshakeable faith in the intense power of drama – sometimes hypnotic, sometimes incendiary.

season curator: Jonathan Romney
With thanks to Charlotte Saluard and Jamie Mendonça at Curzon Film