Béla Tarr in Bristol and London

The program features a rare screening of William Worthington’s The Dragon Painter (1919), and in the Guardian, Pamela Hutchinson writes about the movie’s producer and star, Sessue Hayakawa, “one of the film industry’s first sex symbols, with a legion of female fans and a complex star persona that reflected America’s deep-seated prejudices about, and fascination with, Japanese culture.” Screening for the first time in the UK will be new restorations of J. Lee Thompson’s The Weak and the Wicked (1954) and No Trees in the Street (1959), José Mojica Marins’s At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964), Luis Armando Roche’s El cine soy yo (1977), Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), Nancy Savoca’s True Love (1989), John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996), Edward Yang’s Mahjong (1996), Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish (1999), and Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

Werckmeister is “a concrete manifestation of free-floating millenarian dread,” writes Dennis Lim. “Tarr’s career, which began during the final stretch of Communist rule in Hungary, has coincided with the toppling of various regimes and ideologies, as well as sundry pronouncements about the end of history, the decline of faith, and the death of cinema. His sardonic, luxuriantly bleak laments are nothing if not movies for an apocalyptic age, and Werckmeister Harmonies, a mesmerizing chronicle of collapse, is his most nightmarish vision of how things fall apart.”

Friday’s screening of Werckmeister is a preview of Will Heaven Fall Upon Us?, a Tarr retrospective opening on August 2 at Watershed in Bristol and BFI Southbank in London. For Peter Bradshaw, who talks with Tarr for the Guardian, this retrospective “suggests something new: a parable of power worship, group hysteria, and suggestibility, uniquely intuiting both the personality-cult politics of the Soviet era and the world of nationalism, fascism, and Viktor Orbán still to come. Werckmeister Harmonies is surely a film that remembers the pain of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the collaborationist Nazi rule of Ferenc Szálasi from 1944 until the end of the Second World War, and feels it all circling around again.”

In 2011, Tarr announced that The Turin Horse would be the last film he’d direct, and he’s stayed true to his word. But at sixty-nine, he’s still producing and teaching at his film school in Sarajevo. “Human life is meaningful, rich, beautiful, and filthy!” he declares. “If you are really pessimistic, you go up to the roof and hang yourself, not wake up at four in the morning and go into the countryside to film!”

When he was directing, Tarr often worked with his wife, editor and director Ágnes Hranitzky, and with composer Mihály Víg and novelist László Krasznahorkai. For the BFI, Alex Barrett talks with Tarr about his first collaboration with Krasznahorkai, Sátántangó (1994), an adaptation of the 1985 novel about a con man who poses as a savior in order to take advantage of the inhabitants of an isolated and dying Hungarian village.

Susan Sontag famously championed Sátántangó as one of the greatest films of the 1990s: “Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I’d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life.” Tarr tells Barrett that making the film was “emotionally, intellectually, physically a big challenge, a real adventure. Everybody who was part of this project, we were together for 120 shooting days plus two years before for pre-production. It wasn’t a film shoot . . . we were flying.”