Above: UK re-release poster for Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1994). Designer unknown.
Béla Tarr, who died last month at the age of 70, was one of my very favorite filmmakers, but like a number of my favorite filmmakers—Yasujiro Ozu, Mike Leigh, and Fred Wiseman come to mind—Tarr was never all that well-served by his posters. Perhaps his monumental, muddy, visceral, philosophical films didn't lend themselves to exquisite graphic design, but I don't really see why they shouldn’t. Maybe it was more the result of the vagaries of film distribution: fifteen years into his career, Tarr broke out internationally with a film that was seven and a half hours long and nearly impossible to distribute. Only by the time of his final film seventeen years later had distributors really caught on to his appeal and special brand of genius.
I think the first time I became aware of Béla Tarr was in the March 8, 1994, issue of The Village Voice where J. Hoberman’s report from the Berlin Film Festival was headed by a full page-width image of six Hungarian peasants in a bleakly empty room staring unsmilingly at the camera. Midway through the article, burying the lede, Hoberman writes, “Snow in New York kept me from the 200-minute first-person doc on Croatian fascism shown in the experimental International Forum of Young Cinema, but I did devote a day to the Forum’s most extravagant presentation—Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s seven-and-a-half-hour Sátántangó.” He went on to say, “Sátántangó has fewer shots than the average 90-minute feature and two hour-long chunks would be remarkable movies in their own right… This film is its own festival.” And right then, Sátántangó became the film I most wanted to see in the world.
Six months later, I was among the first lucky people in the US to see Sátántangó at its daylong New York Film Festival press screening. A few days later, I wrote to a friend in London about it, ending with this: “The film is scored with three sounds: accordions, church bells and incessant rain. It is a film full of recounted nightmares and mad speeches. And each episode ends with a beautifully poetic and unsettling voice-over. It is a film full of drinking and pissing, and walking and screwing, and dancing. And it is the best film of the festival, the best film of the year.”
And then a week later, because my future wife worked at the NYFF, I tagged along to a dinner honoring Ken Loach, who was there with Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), and...Béla Tarr. There were about twenty of us in all at the Upper West Side restaurant Gabriel’s, and by chance, we ended up at a table for six with Tarr and his partner, editor, and later codirector Ágnes Hranitzky. I was sat next to Béla, who I remember seeming much older than his 39 years, and after some discussion of Sátántangó (he helpfully told us that the steps of the tango are the key to the film), I asked him how it was that there were so many great Hungarian cinematographers in Hollywood. I was referring to Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács, of course, but when Béla asked, “Like who?”, I completely blanked on their names, and, since it was 1994, did not have a phone in my pocket where I could quickly look them up. So we continued to chat about other things (he seemed much happier talking about single malt whisky than about cinema) until I suddenly remembered Zsigmond’s name, which I excitedly told him, and Béla responded, “Please do not talk to me about this Hollywood anymore. This is a shit city, this Los Angeles.” He went on a rant about how you can’t eat or drink in LA, how all the food is sweetened, and all the bars close early. I tried to make amends by saying that I was only asking him about Zsigmond et al because I thought they brought something beautiful and spiritual and essentially Eastern European to Hollywood, and he exclaimed, “Enough of this Hollywood bullshit!” Words which still ring in my ears to this day. I had wanted to bond with Tarr over a shared love of Miklós Jancsó and Andrei Tarkovsky, and instead I was becoming Joe Hollywood.
Later on, however, I did manage to talk to him about Jancsó (he said he’d grown up in awe of him and now they were friends) and Tarkovsky (he didn't like The Sacrifice [1996], only liked bits of Nostalghia [1983], but nodded appreciatively about the Russian films). I told him that Hoberman had called him “the spiritual heir of Tarkovsky,” which Tarr shrugged off, saying, “Well, that is Jim Hoberman”—but when I told him that Hoberman was the best film critic in America, he seemed pleased.
We have a Sátántangó poster from that year, and it is what we Brits would call, quite aptly in this case, bog-standard. Just a black-and-white photo of an empty road in a box against a white background with the most basic serif type beneath. There is a similar international poster for his previous film, Damnation (1988). But as basic as they are also perfect in their way: stark, utilitarian, no-nonsense. No bullshit.
Tarr discovered the slow-cinema style that made him a legend with Damnation. His four films prior to that had a more social-realist, verité bent. They are more Ken Loach than Tarkovsky. And the posters for those films, all Hungarian since I don’t think any of them were exported outside of Hungary, are much more interesting. In fact, the one sheet for The Prefab People (1982), seen below, may be my favorite of all his posters with its orange-tinted image of a looming, gray, brutalist housing block. Terrific designs also exist for Family Nest (1979), The Outsider (1981) and Autumn Almanac (1984).
Hungarian poster for Family Nest (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1979). Designer unknown.
Alternative Hungarian poster for Family Nest (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1979). Designer unknown.
Hungarian poster for The Outsider (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1981). Designer unknown.
Hungarian poster for The Prefab People (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1982). Designer unknown.
Hungarian poster for Autumn Almanac (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1984). Designer unknown.
With Damnation in 1988, when he started collaborating with the novelist László Krasznahorkai, Tarr abandoned the more freewheeling, claustrophobic, Cassavetesian camerawork of his early films and found his lane: a long, muddy road constructed from glacial tracking shots and the grinding elements of the outdoors. The original French poster for the film lacks some finesse in its type layout, but its image and its vibe is unmistakably Tarr.
French poster for Damnation (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1988). Designer unknown.
Thirty years later, Arbelos’s rerelease poster for the 4K restoration of Tarr’s first masterpiece has a very similar image (a man in a raincoat seen from the back), but the type work from Dylan Haley is beautiful, all finesse without distracting from the essential Tarr-ness of it all.
2023 US rerelease poster for Damnation (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1988). Design by Dylan Haley.
The same thing happened with Sátántangó. The world took three decades to properly catch up to its greatness, and its 4K rerelease posters are much more interesting than that original design.
2019 US rerelease poster for Sátántango (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1994). Design by Dylan Haley.
Japanese 2019 rerelease chirashi for Sátántango (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1994). Designer unknown.
Japanese rerelease poster for Sátántango (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 1994). Designer unknown.
Tarr followed up his magnum opus with a more succint masterpiece in Werckmeister Harmonies in 2000. There is an original Hungarian poster for the film that is no frills and didn’t make the film look all that different from the two that preceded it. And there is a French poster, which at least gives us a hint of the behemoth at its center. But then there is a Japanese design for that film that is probably my favorite Tarr poster of all.
Hungarian poster for Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2000). Designer unknown.
French poster for Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2000). Designer unknown.
Japanese poster for Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2000). Designer unknown.
2023 US 4K rerelease poster for Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2000). Designer unknown.
There are a couple of striking posters, one British and one French, for Tarr’s penultimate feature The Man from London (2007), while barely deviating from the dimly lit monochrome of most of his promotional material.
UK quad poster for The Man from London (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2007). Designer unknown.
French poster for The Man from London (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2007). Designer unknown.
And finally, there were many fine posters for his final masterpiece The Turin Horse (2011), all delivering their own take on the same iconic image, but all beautifully realized.
US poster for The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2011). Design by Scott Meola.
Spanish poster for The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2011). Designer unknown.
Japanese B2 poster for The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2011). Designer unknown.
Above: UK quad poster for The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2011). Design by Sam Ashby.
After The Turin Horse, Tarr announced his retirement at the age of 55 and, apart from a couple of museum installation pieces and some short contributions to portmanteau films, there was to be no Soderbergh-esque reversal of that decision as he devoted himself to running his own film school in Sarajevo.
One last, but surely not final, graphic tribute to Béla Tarr came recently with the 2024 Curzon Blu-ray box set of his work: a gorgeous, somber piece of design and illustration (with stunning charcoal drawings by Paul West) that honors the great man and perfectly reflects the visceral, elemental style of his work.
