The Prefab People's young married couple (Robert Koltai, left, and Judit Pogany) are but two of Bela Tarr's flawed yet spirited characters.

Before passing away in late 2004 at age 71, longtime novelist, critic and sometime filmmaker Susan Sontag wrote about the end of serious cinema and its dedicated admirers. Granted, she was one of many writers lamenting the end of adult cinema at its centenary celebration, but Sontag's words continue to make an impact.

Like other film buffs, she watched as fewer foreign language films made their way into U.S. theaters. Word-of-mouth, the one surefire way a small film has of reaching an audience, completely died as theater owners demanded immediate box office returns from all films.

One of the filmmakers who gave Sontag hope about the future of serious cinema and newfound fans for such fare is Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, who has made seven films over the past 28 years.

The Chicago-based film arts organization Facets Multimedia recently released three of Tarr's early films (The Prefab People, The Outsider and Family Nest) on DVD.

Their timing is perfect. In multiplex cinemas, Tom Cruise is saving the world from alien invasion courtesy of the big budget War of the Worlds. Batman watches over fictional Gotham City in the equally gigantic adventure Batman Begins. Meanwhile, commercial art houses offer few surprises.

Watching a Bela Tarr film is a chance for welcome silence in a landscape rife with explosions, constant whirls and shrieks. It is the cinematic equivalent of a sunny afternoon at an isolated beach: contemplative, refreshing, necessary.

Tarr's 1977 film Family Nest is an intimate family drama about a young couple forced to live with the husband's parents in a one-room apartment because of Budapest's housing shortage. The film is intentionally claustrophobic, bringing to life the growing tensions of the family members. To say things work out best for the couple is to cheapen the realism and complexity of Tarr's story.

The Outsider, from 1981, is about an aimless violin player named Andras (Andras Szabo) who quits his job at a nursing home and drifts into factory work. He marries a woman he does not love after fathering a child with another. Andras, part of a cast of non-actors, avoids responsibilities by drinking and dancing at the local tavern until he's called for military service. Don't expect a life-boosting epiphany -- Tarr is too serious-minded for feel-good clichés.

The Prefab People, filmed in 1982, continues Tarr's trend of intimate social-realist dramas, with its story of a young married couple (Judit Pogany and Robert Koltai) under duress. The husband is a heavy drinker. Worse yet, he plans to leave his wife with their two children and take a two-year job assignment in Romania.

Tarr's stories are often labeled bleak, but such harsh descriptions overlook the emotional richness of his sad characters and their daily life dramas. His characters, while seldom upstanding, are always spirited, although their severe conditions of gloom and despair often overwhelm the films' few welcome moments of subtle comedy.

Tarr's seven-hour epic Sátántangó, released in 1994 six years after his previous film, Damnation, is about a group of greedy villagers who get drunk and cheat each other while waiting for a Messiah figure. Rightly so, Sátántangó is a cinematic legend, an opus from a filmmaker free of the artistic restraints of commercial filmmakers.

The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum -- a film critic who truly matters and a longtime Tarr advocate -- compares Family Nest, The Outsider and The Prefab People to American independent pioneer John Cassavetes, although I would first connect Tarr with the work of Britain's Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, other skilled practitioners of sociopolitical dramas.

Tarr's early films are examinations of post-Communist Central and Eastern European life and a sensitive examination of fading old-world mores and the newfound, capitalist-tinged vales replacing them. They are X-rays of human lives unknown in other parts of the world. Regarding modern-day Hungary, Tarr has become its main storyteller.

Tarr, 50, started making films in his teens. He joined the Bela Balazs Studio where he became influenced by Hungary's avant-garde filmmakers of the 1960s.

The realism of his early films shifted to a more dreamlike visual style with Almanac of Fall (1985), and continues through his most recent film, Werckmeister Harmonies, about a circus that arrives in a small European town with a truck containing a whale.

A recent American survey shows that 83 percent of moviegoers now prefer to see their movies on DVD, and disc sales generated $21.2 billion last year, twice the amount spent at multiplexes. Clearly, Tarr films don't benefit from a home cinema system per se. The top videos this week are Coach Carter, Hitch, Miss Congeniality II and Hostage, all forgettable movies at best.

Tarr remains a film artist to seek out by audiences intrigued by his dour reputation. Once you understand that Sontag was a big Tarr fan, it makes sense that she would write a bold statement like this: "The great achievements of 20th century art have been hard, demanding a certain kind of commitment piety and investment of attention."

Great films are complex and challenging, and all of Tarr's films meet those demands; it's what helps makes them timeless. Watching Family Nest, The Outsider and The Prefab People leaves you with one impression: Bela Tarr is remarkable. ©