Homage

A towering figure of international film culture, the Hungarian film director, screenwriter, and producer Béla Tarr (1955–2026) is widely regarded as one of the major auteurs of world cinema. His films, from the early, raw social dramas to the later monumental works such as Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, are known for long takes, stark black‑and‑white images, and a compassionate yet unsparing gaze at human fragility and moral decline.

Béla Tarr began his career in the late 1970s with socially engaged, quasi‑documentary films like Family Nest, focusing on working‑class lives in socialist Hungary. Over the following decades, he developed a unique cinematic language characterised by hypnotic, slow camera movements and existential stories, culminating in various internationally acclaimed films, for which he received numerous major European and Hungarian awards.

The Liszt Institute – Hungarian Cultural Centre London pays tribute to this visionary filmmaker with an evening dedicated to Tarr, inviting audiences to revisit three key works from across his oeuvre. The programme highlights both his early “social cinema” roots and the later, more metaphysical and apocalyptic style that made him one of the most influential filmmakers of the past forty years.

The event is moderated by Associate Professor of Film at the University of Lincoln and the chair of the British Association of Film Television and Screen Studies, Gábor GERGELY.

The evening is designed to give our audience a chance to immerse themselves in Tarr’s unique world. The screenings will be accompanied by a brief introduction situating Tarr’s work within Hungarian and European film history, and reflecting on his legacy after his passing earlier this year. We encourage you to spend all 392 minutes with us, but if you can only make it to one or two of the films, we are happy to accommodate that, too. Please try to arrive around the scheduled time of each film, so as not to disturb the flow of the screening.

Programme

2.00 pm - 2.15 pm Introduction to Béla Tarr and Family Nest by Gábor Gergely

2.15 pm - 4.05 pm

Family Nest (1979) 108 mins

Tarr’s debut feature, shot in a raw, cinéma‑vérité style, portrays a young couple forced to live with relatives in overcrowded conditions, exposing the tensions, humiliations, and emotional pressure of housing shortages in late‑socialist Hungary. The film’s immediacy and non‑professional cast already reveal Tarr’s deep interest in ordinary people pushed to the edge of endurance.

4.05 pm - 4.20 pm Short break and introduction to Werckmeister Harmonies by Gábor Gergely

4.20 pm - 6.45 pm

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) 145 minsSet in a fog‑shrouded provincial town visited by a mysterious circus, this film unfolds in a series of extended, choreographed shots that trace the gradual descent into chaos and violence. Working with writer László Krasznahorkai, Tarr crafts a haunting meditation on cosmic order, political manipulation, and the fragility of community.

6.45 pm - 7.00 pm Short break and introduction to The Man from London by Gábor Gergely

7.00 pm - 9.20 pm

The Man from London (2007) 139 minsAdapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, this nocturnal thriller follows a railway worker who witnesses a crime and becomes entangled in a moral and criminal labyrinth. Shot in high‑contrast black and white and featuring a European cast including Tilda Swinton, the film transposes Tarr’s trademark slow, immersive style into the realm of crime and guilt.

9.30 pm End of event

Gábor GERGELY is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Lincoln. He is the chair of the British Association of Film Television and Screen Studies. In 2012-2015 he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester. He has a PhD in Film from the University of Exeter. 

He works on twentieth-century Hungarian film and film regulation, trans/national film theory, European cinema and film stardom and migration in Hollywood. He has published the monographs Foreign Devils (2012), Hungarian Film 1929-1947 (2017) and Schwarzenegger (2022), and the edited collection The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (with Susan Hayward). Challenging the Canon: Women Filmmakers in Interwar Eastern Europe, co-edited with Denise Youngblood, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. He has published essays on the films of István Szőts, Géza Radványi, Ferenc Török, Luis Buñuel, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard.

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