In celebration of László Krasznahorkai, awardee of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Harvard Film Archive offers four of the writer’s undertakings with compatriot Béla Tarr. Beginning with 1988’s Damnation, the Hungarian duo forged a symbiotic collaboration that intensified and distilled their shared (anti-)humanist themes: existential dread, apocalypse as a fact of life, the misery (and poetry) of fog, mud and endless rain. If Krasznahorkai’s films with Tarr are, as many have argued, dystopian, this is not a result of aesthetic chicanery or exaggerated style, but of the dismal world the artists and we all inhabit. Featuring two stunning prints from the HFA collection, the series crescendos with a screening of the all-too-rarely projected seven-hour Sátántangó, in which redemption arrives as a whisper, fleetingly, only to once again evaporate into the black haze of despair. – Nace Zavrl

This series was programmed well in advance of Béla Tarr’s sudden death on January 6, 2026. With Tarr's passing, these screenings are also offered as a tribute to one of the great visionary filmmakers of our time.