Béla Tarr
Encyclopedia : B : BL : BLA : Béla Tarr
Béla Tarr (born July 21, 1955 in Pécs, Hungary) is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter widely considered as the most unique artist to rise from Hungary in the past 20 years. This article was based on and expanded from Jason Ankeny's biographical piece in All Movie Guide.
Early life and career
He began to realize his interests with film-making at the age of 16 by making amateur films and later working as a caretaker at a national House for Culture and Recreation. His amateur work brought him to the attention of the Bela Balazs Studios (named in honor of the Hungarian cinema theorist, Béla Balázs), which helped fund Tarr's 1979 feature debut Családi tűzfészek (Family Nest), a work of socialist realism clearly influenced by the work of John Cassavetes. The 1981 piece Szabadgyalog (The Outsider) and the following year's Panelkapcsolat (The Prefab People) continued in much the same vein, but with a 1982 television adaptation of Macbeth, his work began to change dramatically; comprised of only two shots, the first shot (before the main title) was five minutes long, with the second 67 minutes in length. Not only did Tarr's visual sensibility move from raw close-ups to more abstract mediums and long shots, but also his philosophical sensibility shifted from grim realism to a more metaphysical outlook similar to that of Andrei Tarkovsky.
Collaboration and international acclaim
After 1984's Őszi almanach (Almanac of Fall), Tarr (who had written his first four features alone) began collaborating with Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai for 1987's Kárhozat (Damnation). A planned adaptation of Krasznahorkai's epic novel Satantango took over seven years to realize. The film, a 415-minute masterpiece, finally appeared to international acclaim in 1994. After the epic he released a 35-minute film Journey on the Plain in 1995 and fell into silence until his most recent work to date, the 2000 film Werckmeister Harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies), occasionally shot in very intense circumstances. The film itself was very warmly welcomed by critics and the Festival circuit in general.
At the moment he is filming his first film in 5 years, The Man From London and it was scheduled to be released at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival in May, but production was shut down because of the suicide of producer Humbert Balsan on February 10, 2005 and disputes arose with the other producers over a possible change in the film's financing.[link]
For many years, none of his work was available on DVD. But recently, Werckmeister Harmonies and Damnation have been available on a two disc DVD in Europe coutesy of Artificial Eye and the Werckmeister Harmonies is available in North America. Tarr's early work, Family Nest, The Outsider, and The Prefab People are also available on DVD in the USA. Satantango is scheduled to be released on DVD on September 26th, 2006.
External links
- [brightlightsfilm.com Interview]
- [Kinoeye Essay]
- [Declaration of Solidarity for Béla Tarr], by Fred Kelemen, FIPRESCI website, March 2005, retrieved April 17, 2006
Reference
- ['MAN' OVERBOARD IN CORSICA], by Katja Hoffman and Steven Gaydos, Variety, March 21, 2005, retrieved April 12, 2006
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.