THE FILMMAKER’S SOCIAL REALISM WAS ALWAYS SUSPICIOUS OF ESTABLISHED POWER ~ Bleart Thaçi ~ Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr died on 6 January at the age of 70, after a long illness. His body of work stands among the most severe and distinctive in late twentieth century European cinema, ranging from the early social dramas Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People, Almanac of Fall and Damnation to the later landmark films Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse. Discussion of Tarr has often centred on style and form, on duration, repetition or bleakness, yet his films were shaped just as much by a political outlook formed early and articulated consistently throughout his life. Tarr described himself, without hesitation, as an anarchist. In interviews late in life, Tarr spoke openly about his political formation during his final years of high school. He said that he identified with the far left, recalling that he no longer carried a school-bag, since Mao’s Little Red Book in his pocket was enough. He described himself as a committed communist until around the age of sixteen. What followed was a break rather than a conversion. He came to believe that the leaders he had been taught to admire were false communists, concerned with authority and control rather than emancipation. From that point, he distanced himself from communism as it was practised and presented to him. This suspicion of established power remained a constant. Tarr did not move towards liberalism, nor did he align himself with nationalist opposition. His comments suggest a settled distrust of political systems that claim moral authority while reproducing hierarchy. In later public appearances, he spoke sharply about the historical record of communism, at one point remarking that he had never seen a good communist. His political views were shaped as much by circumstance as by ideology, and when plans to study philosophy fell through he went to work at the Óbuda shipyards. Living and working among industrial labourers informed what he later called his social cinema. His earliest films emerged from the Budapest School and the Béla Balázs Studio, an experimental and semi-underground environment that favoured small budgets, amateur equipment and non professional actors. These films focused on housing shortages, unstable employment, the pressure of economic conditions on personal relationships or the wear of poverty on everyday relations. Tarr spoke of being close to working class people and of wanting to record daily life as it was, rather than impose symbolic narratives. Frame from Satantango He often explained that his turn to filmmaking came from frustration with cinema itself. Films, he said, were full of false stories that bore little resemblance to lived experience. Making films became a way of showing conditions as they were, without embellishment or instruction. This approach extended to his working methods. He avoided professional polish, relied on non actors, and resisted narrative forms that dictated meaning from above. These choices reflected a broader opposition to authority rather than an attempt to promote a fixed political programme. As his career developed, Tarr became more outspoken about contemporary politics. He was an atheist and a consistent critic of nationalism. In a 2016 interview, he described Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen as national shames, framing his criticism in explicitly moral terms. His denunciation of nationalism was especially pointed in the Hungarian context (under the aforementioned prime minister), where he became an outspoken critic of the state’s handling of migration and asylum. During the European migration crisis, Tarr wrote a statement that was displayed near a pro-migration exhibition in front of the Hungarian Parliament. “We have brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe with our greediness and our unlimited ignorance… Now, we are confronted with the victims of our acts.” In it, he argued that Europe had helped bring about global catastrophe through greed, ignorance and wars waged for exploitation. He then asked what kind of morality was being defended when fences were built to keep out people displaced by those same actions. In his final years, Tarr continued to speak out publicly, even as his health declined. In December 2023, he was among a group of filmmakers who signed an open letter (alongside Pedro Costa, Aki Kaurismäki, Claire Denis, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Christian Petzold, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, etc.) calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the killing of civilians, the establishment of humanitarian corridors, and the release of Israeli hostages. To remember Béla Tarr is to remember a filmmaker for whom politics was neither decorative nor secondary. His anarchism was not a posture but an orientation that shaped how he lived, how he worked and how he spoke. It remains present in his films as a cinema that refuses obedience, legitimacy, or consolation in the face of power. The post Béla Tarr (1955-2026) appeared first on Freedom News.