In this personal tribute by Sharad Raj, the author reflects on Béla Tarr’s cinematic legacy, his mastery of time and long take aesthetics, and how his fearless artistic vision reshaped slow cinema and influenced generations of filmmakers worldwide.

Béla Tarr, the Hungarian filmmaker celebrated as one of the greatest figures in slow cinema, died on January 6, 2026, at age 70 after a long illness. Known for defining modern arthouse aesthetics with extended long takes, stark black-and-white imagery, and deeply philosophical narratives, Tarr’s films such as Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turin Horse reshaped global cinematic language and inspired generations of filmmakers. His work transcended conventional narrative form, emphasizing time, space, and experiential immersion over plot-driven storytelling, securing his legacy as a visionary auteur whose influence endures across world cinema. 

As someone who both teaches and practices the “cinema of long take” and is an ardent admirer of Andrie Tarkovsky, Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, Nuri Bilge Ceylon and Tsai Ming-Liang, affinity towards the Hungarian master Béla Tarr was both natural and obvious. 

Béla Tarr’s Damnation (1987) was the first film I saw and as the camera tracked out from the ropeway carrying industrial material into a room, the film had got me engaged. Now engagement is an idea one normally associates with narrative cinema that thrives on empathy and dramatic tension. But that is not the end all of it. Dramatization is not the only prerequisite for engagement. It can also be temporal, with life as it happens, unfolds as the camera rolls.

Tarkovsky said that there are two kinds of filmmakers, one who recreate or mirror the world they live in and the other who create their own worlds. They are the poets said Tarkovsky. It cannot be disputed by anyone that Béla Tarr was a poet par excellence and a great modernist of cinema, whose engagement with cinematic form that is time and space was both intense and uncompromising.

Tarr was not interested in “what happens next” but how, when and where. As he said he too follows the “information-cut, information-cut” route just that for him information is not just in the day and age of shorts, reels, capitalist invasion of art, consumption and wokeism, Tarr stood tall by putting to use cinematic form for both aesthetic and political purposes.

There has been this idea amongst the so-called socially committed filmmakers that pure aesthetic approach is apolitical, but they cannot be further from truth. For the sheer formal choice of the artist is not just an aesthetic position but also a political one.

Tarr’s subjects were working class, the peasantry of Hungary and his cinema of long take as is true for other long take masters is a political choice that prioritizes experiential art over “consumptive content” as patronized by global capitalism. There cannot be anything more political than that, where time and space dedramatize the narrative completely, uprooting it from linear cause and effect progression and making it a temporal experience. Béla Tarr was not interested in linearity, he completely displaced the narrative from its linear timeline.

Film scholar Emre Cağlayan in his very important book Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism and Boredom says that the long take of Béla Tarr evokes the nostalgia of realism as practiced by Italian masters like Vittorio D’ Sica and Roberto Rosellini and theorized by the one and only Andre Bazin but it also transcends at the same time. In Realism the attempt is to recreate real time or create an illusion of real time while in “slow cinema” as practiced by artists like Béla Tarr time is transcendental.

As we watch the 6 minutes opening shot/scene of his 2012 masterpiece The Turin Horse, Tarr’s last film, we lose the sense of time. The shot outlives its narrative purpose and makes a durational demand on the viewer who then must disengage herself from the story to observe, question and actively respond to the image on the screen, thereby enriching one’s experience beyond the story. Something sensorial than cerebral. Timelessness is both political and spiritual, after all don’t we all strive for a state of transcendence in our metaphysical pursuits. 

My own, personal window to Béla Tarr’s films has had a very limited impact for my long take is fraught with fear of incomprehensibility, hence I still tend to merge information with experience as opposed to a genius like Tarr who transformed information into experience completely. There in is where lies my mediocrity and it is this fearlessness that makes Béla Tarr the master he was. Gone too soon.