Béla Tarr

A switchman at a seaside railway witnesses a murder but does not report it after he finds a suitcase full of money at the scene of the crime.Read More »

Synopsis: A talented but irresponsible violinist ruins his marriage with his drinking and antisocial behaviour.Read More »

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An innocent young man witnesses violence breaks out after an isolated village is inflamed by the arrival of a circus and its peculiar attractions, a giant whale and a mysterious man named “The Prince”.Read More »

Diplomafilm is a short film that Béla Tarr made to graduate from Art School, in 1981. It is the predecessor of The Prefab People, with the same plot and the same actors, but with some changes in the plot.Read More »

A husband and wife, drifting apart, reflect on the events leading up to the worst argument of their marriage.

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“It’s the rawness of the film that makes us believe we are unquestionably seeing the truth.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A heavy going realistic slice of life domestic drama that is filmed in black and white. It’s a followup to Béla Tarr’s other domestic strife tales Family Nest and The Outsider. This one keys in on marital strife. It’s about a struggling young couple’s confrontations and their own inability to freely communicate with each other. Tarr was evidently influenced by the works of Ranier Werner Fassbinder and John Cassavettes.Read More »

A student film by Béla Tarr, from 1979.
Presumed lost until very recently.Read More »

In this powerful short film, the renowned William Shakespeare play is stripped down to the bare essentials, consisting of two lengthy shots.Read More »

PLOT: Béla Tarr’s first full length film is a bleak indictment of communist housing policy; A young couple and their daughter are forced to live with the husband’s family in a tiny flat in which tempers frequently flare. The close camera work and grainy documentary style capture the claustrophobia and indignity of life at close quarters with those you don’t like; the father-in-law is a malevolent Iago-esquire figure, forever whispering conspiracies to his son. The couple are desperate to leave, but, as their meetings with the government officials show, there is no prospect of escape for years to come; This is despite many usable flats standing empty, unused for bureaucratic reasons.. We learn more of the characters as the second half of the film effectively becomes a series of monologues, which further convey what a bleak place 1970’s Hungary was.Read More »

BrandonHabes on letterboxd wrote:
Raw, unpolished social realism preoccupied with loners on the margins of communist Hungary. Tarr returns to the documentary, free-floating style of FAMILY NEST (1979) to examine working class lives struggling to sustain employment, relationships, and economic stability. The family is once again centered as the object of disintegration. One man’s need for family, and his inability to locate it through personal, corporate and artistic spaces, reflects a fatalistic vision of the family, the individual, as well the society that groomed them.Read More »