The Cinema of Bela Tarr — The Circle Closes

The Cinema of Bela Tarr is a critical analysis of the work of Hungary's most prominent and internationally best known film director, written by a scholar who has followed Tarr's career through a close personal and professional relationship for more than twenty-five years. Andras Balint Kovacs traces the development of Tarr's themes, characters, and style, showing that almost all of his major stylistic and narrative innovations were already present in his early films and that through a conscious and meticulous recombination of and experimentation with these elements, Tarr arrived at his unique style. The significance of these films is that, beyond their aesthetic and historical value, they provide the most powerful vision of an entire region and its historical situation. Tarr's films express, in their universalistic language, the shared feelings of millions of Eastern Europeans.

Andras Balint Kovacs is professor of film studies at the ELTE University of Budapest. He has also lectured at La Sorbonne Nouvelle and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He has published primarily on modern European art cinema, and his most recent book is Screening Modernism.