Some filmmakers influence cinema, and then some filmmakers seem to alter its rhythm entirely. Béla Tarr belonged to the second category. The late Hungarian director’s bleak, rain-soaked epics stretched time, despair, and human endurance into something elemental, and now Film at Lincoln Center is paying tribute with “Farewell To Béla Tarr,” a seven-film retrospective running March 27 through April 2.
What this announcement now has—and what makes it more than a standard repertory-calendar item—is an exclusive trailer for the retrospective, giving the series a fittingly stark visual sendoff. It is a smart way to frame the program: not just as a memorial gesture, but as a reminder of how overwhelming Tarr’s work can still feel when returned to the scale for which it was made.
The lineup spans both the filmmaker’s early social realism and the monumental late-period works that made him one of the defining figures of slow cinema. The series includes “Family Nest,” “The Outsider,” “Damnation,” “Sátántangó,” “Werckmeister Harmonies,” “The Man from London,” and “The Turin Horse,” with several titles screening in restorations and others presented on 35mm. “Sátántangó,” Tarr’s seven-and-a-half-hour landmark, will screen in multiple parts—exactly the punishing, immersive experience his cinema has always demanded.
That body of work did not emerge in isolation. Across his career, Tarr collaborated closely with editor and co-director Ágnes Hranitzky, writer László Krasznahorkai, and composer Mihály Víg, building a filmography defined by repetition, collapse, mud, wind, and spiritual exhaustion. His films were never built around plot in the conventional sense; they were built around duration, atmosphere, and the feeling of a world slowly grinding itself down.
That is what makes this retrospective worth more than simple canon maintenance. On a large screen, Tarr’s films do not just play differently—they press in on you differently. Whether it is the apocalyptic drift of “Werckmeister Harmonies,” the drunken circularity of “Sátántangó,” or the finality of “The Turin Horse,” these are works that still feel less like stories than hypnotic weather systems.
Film at Lincoln Center will host “Farewell To Béla Tarr” from March 27 through April 2. Watch the exclusive trailer below.
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
