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Satantango

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The famous opening shot of Bela Tarr's "Satantango" is done in a single take lasting seven minutes. It is of a herd of cows walking across an empty landscape as the camera pans from right to left.

This is not exactly the kind of shot which would thrill most American audiences. And it may be for that reason Hungarian filmmaker Tarr has not quite gained fame in this country.

"Satantango" is a 7 hour film consisting of extreme long shots done in single takes lasting minutes on average. It was shot in black&white, as are most of Tarr's films.

Originally released in 1994 "Satantango" went on to achieve some fame on the international festival circuit. Only now has Facets released the film on DVD. It will be available next week in a three disc set. Since I use to intern at Facets, and this was one of the films I worked on, I received an advance copy. When the DVD is available to the public, it will become, in my opinion, the major DVD event of the year! Finally this masterpiece can now find a larger audience.

Going back to the first image in the film, many people are going to shake their heads, why? What does this mean? Why is Tarr showing us cows? I think this shot is important for many reasons. First of all it sets up the fact the film takes place in a small village. We are among the poor, working class. The land is deserted. No one takes care of it and no one seems to be watching those cows. And could the herd of cows represent the characters in this film? At one point we hear a character describe the others as a "herd". The characters may be wondering aimlessly just like the cows searching for meaning, a purpose. Of course these aren't answers, merely suggestions.

But "Satantango" is filled with images like this with shots which run just as long. Tarr leaves the camera on moments viewers will find boring, whether is it animals, landscapes or a character's face, Tarr's films are loaded with scenes other directors would throw out and leave on the cutting room floor. But Bela Tarr and "Satantango" represents a different kind of story-telling.

I think the reason Tarr has shot last so long is to put us in a trance, to lull us. I'm reminded of the story told about Werner Herzog. Supposedly he hypnotized his cast in the film "Heart of Glass" to get a dreamlike quality out of them. Tarr too wants to hypnotize us. He wants to viewer to feel uneasy. He wants to attempt to calm us down. When you look at most American films with their rapid edits, the films consist mainly of cuts and jump cuts. Images flash before our eyes so fast sometimes we can't even register what we saw. Tarr comes from a tradition of filmmaking similar to Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos and Antonioni. He takes his time setting up a shot and lets the story move at its own rhythm.

There is not much of a plot to "Satantango". If the film had been told in a more conventional manner it would not take 7 hours to tell. The film follows 8 people from a small community who have put their money together just to be conned by two men thought to be dead; Irimias (Mihaly Vig) and Petrina (Putyi Horvath). These men promise a new life for the people by moving them to a new village where better work can be found. But the villagers not only are suspicious of the two men but each other as several have planned to steal the money themselves. Tarr seems to be making a commentary of greed and capitalism. Many critics regard the film as a commentary on the end of communism. I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far, as Tarr claims he is not a political filmmaker, but there is an undertone of corruption and greed. One character even says people are afraid of freedom but there is nothing to be afraid of. Order though can be frightening. Is this the freedom of democracy and the order of communism?

Despite the simple plot what makes "Satantango" such a must see are the visuals. Tarr gets some truly beautiful shots. The very first time we see the two con men they are walking in the middle of the street as a strong wind storm blows garbage around on the sidewalks. The shot last for two minutes but it is amazing. Another scene does a 360 degree turn, in a close-up, on a woman's face. What's the point? Not a clue, but fun to look at.

One scene which bothers a lot of people is a sequence where a young girl, Estike (Erika Bok) kills her cat. A lot of people wonder why would she do it. Why would Tarr have such a scene? I think this is a reflection on the hierarchy of power. The girl's mother bullies her as does her friend. But who can she bully? She picks on the cat. It is similar to the way the two strangers bully the town into giving them their money. Those who feel they are strong pick on the powerless and defenseless. What match is the cat for the young girl? The girl incidentally is on the cover of this DVD.

"Satantango" also marks, at the time, the second collaboration between novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Tarr. The two had worked on "Karhozat (Damnation)" previously and continued their work in "Werckmeister harmoniak (Werckmeister Harmony)" and Tarr's most recent film "A londoni ferfi (The Man From London)". These films show a shift in style on Tarr's part, from his early films which were docu-dramas which made social commentaries on communist life. Now Tarr has become more psychological.

And what about the film's title? The movie is divided into twelve chapters. Six of them move the story forward, 6 are flashbacks. The structure is suppose to resemble a tango. But what about the "satan" part? Is Tarr showing us hell on Earth? Are these characters experiencing hell? Remember the film Tarr made before this was called "Damnation". The very last scene in the film seems to suggest the end is near. The screen fades to black as we hear a character's voice over. The last words heard are of an impending war.

If there is a valid point of criticism (not comments like, the movie is too long, or in black&white, or its in Hungarian) it is that at times you feel Tarr is making more of an experiment rather than a film. I also never seem to enjoy the last act of the movie. Or in this case, disc 3. Here the film shifts its focus from the townspeople to the con men. I love the first two disc and the way Tarr shows the village and the people and who everyone seems to fear the strangers. They have a mystic power over everyone. But once the film starts to focus more on them they seem harmless. Was this Tarr's point? People will fear are only human and should not be feared? Either way I lose interest in the film's final moments.

Facets has also included some special features including Tarr's rarely seen version of "Macbeth" which aired on Hungarian television in the early 80s. It was done in two shots.

Anyone who considers themself a film lover will be doing themself a great favor by buying this film. I know 7 hours is a long time to sit through. And I know it is in Hungarian. But after watching this film you will be seeing a master filmmaker at work. Anyone who thinks there is nothing interesting being done in cinema anymore has never seen a Bela Tarr film.

I'm not going to bore you with the details of the `story' because first of all nothing really happens and secondly it's not important. Mostly its just people looking in and out of windows, walking, or just being, yet that may be what we're doing also by sitting for 7 hours, watching other people by transcending the barrier of celluloid and sharing in their misery. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul and in these Breughelian faces we see the personality of characters shine through and understand their individual and personal agony. This is what elevates this film beyond cinema and art into something more personal like the experience of music. By the end of the film characters feel like real people that we may intimately know.

Parallels are inevitably drawn with the work other directors like Tarkovsky, most notably `Andrei Rublev' (1966) and `Stalker' (1979). Tarkovsky's films had a sense of religious hope whereas Bela Tarr's have none of that yet I felt a certain amount of elation at the end. Albert Camus said that struggling to the height may be enough to fill a man's heart. How true.

This is a film I've waited several years to see since I first saw `Werkmeister Harmonies' (2000) and `Damnation' (1988) on the Artificial Eye DVD release. Rumour circulated for a long time about this eventual release and finally we have it. It's a film more have heard about than actually seen and has always been highly revered among cineastes. Satantango is filled with some of the most remarkable cinematography I've ever seen. So was it worth the wait? Absolutely.

Bela Tarr may be the greatest living director working today.

Highly recommended viewing.

Living through Sátántángo is like being thrown into a dimension diametrically opposite that of our velocity-laden everyday media sensorium, with its its hyperbolic stimulation of the nervous system. Tarr's film, based on a novel by László Krasnahorkai, evokes with equal explicitness the experience of duration -- the "time-image" -- found in Tarkovsky's films. Tarr takes his time with each scene, with each chapter of the "Dance Order" in which the film is organized. The dance of death, with earth already hell, is the governing metaphor, joined by another powerful one: that of the spider's web, and the intrication in it of victims (both characters and spectators, undoubtedly). The Dance Order runs as follows:

Part One
I. The News That They are Coming
II. We are Resurrected
III. Knowing Something
IV. The Work of the Spider (1)
V. The Net Tears
VI. The Work of the Spider (2)
Part Two
VI. Irimiás Speaks
V. The Perspective, When from the Front
IV. Ascension, Feverdream?
III. The Perspective, When from Behind
II. Nothing but Worries, Nothing but Work
I. The Circle Closes

"History is not at an end, nothing is at an end, we can no longer deceive ourselves that anything with us has come to an end; something continues and is retained." -- Lászlo Krasznahorkai on Sátántángo

Sátántángo concerns a small town whose factory, its sole economy, has closed, where alcohol dominates everyone's lives, where everyone distrusts each other, where every material thing, building, piece of clothing, gives off the air of dilapidation and impending death, while pure existence and its unendurable duration continues on, and drags the relics of humans and objects with it. If that weren't enough, the rainy season has begun and will continue for months without a single letup.

Only two people hold on, however slightly, to semblance of distance and independence: the Doctor and Irimiás, a false prophet who returns, after declaring himself dead, to lead the human remnants into a new era. Both turn out to be informants, linked to the corrupt and capricious power of a state surveillance apparatus. Both practice the art of writing.

I'm afraid to say, that despite ALL of Facets' posturing, they've done a lackluster job on this truly important film. An unconverted PAL source with tons of ghosting and combing. NON-ANAMORPHIC and interlaced. But the Artificial Eye version. It's not super, but it's a lot better than this typically poor job.

It is an exhaustive experience watching Sátántangó (and I completed my
third viewing in only 6 months) because you feel like you have spent
your entire life with these people.

Despite the minimalism of the film, duly note that the minimalism is
illusory - there were many ordinary images and sounds (which we take
for granted but for the characters comprised their world) which are not
normally accentuated in regular films but are given gratuitous
attention by Tarr - the sounds you mentioned (coins on counter, clocks
ticking, raindrops ticking, etc) and muddy cows, boggy landscapes, bare
and broken tree limbs, benches, debris flowing forward in the wind,
sideboards and cabinets, wooden floors, shot glasses, curtains, average
faces, stormy skies, the blackness of night, etc.

Every single frame is indeed exquisitely and virtuously photographed,
the film is a visual Baroque Hymnal, a Baroque Requiem to fall of
Communism in Eastern Europe.

His flawless tracking shots, the film's plot structure, and the
sequence of events, are all serpentine, cyclical, sequences within the
film that begin at the ending and end at the beginning, sequences that
intersect geometrically, sequences that have equal-but-reversed
spatial, temporal, and narrational points of view.

There is also a plot thread (girl-cat) that serves as a cycle within
each half of the film (one cycle starts near the end and moves forward,
the other cycle starts at the beginning and leads into the end), both
sequences not only overlap, but act as mirrors to each other.

By creating micro and macro spatial and temporal arrangements (which
are based on the pattern if the tango) he literally founded the 4th
dimension of cinema, something that Tarkovsky was trying to do and gave
us glimpses of, he may have succeeded had he lived longer.

The film is a 10/10 profoundly challenging and lateral flight through
time and space during which no time passes and you are consumed by
exquisite photography of a drearily drenched cosmos filled with the
rhythms of ticking clocks and pattering rain and whirring fans and
clicking glasses, your skin feels rain-drenched, your shoes are all
muddy, you danced all night, your mind and body are trapped in a tango
pattern that walking on and on fails to escape, when you land, you miss
the artistry of the debris in flight and the cigarette smoke and the
light shining in during the most inactive empty moments and the
characters' sardonic wit and the clamourous rant of the drunk man and
the girl you want to smack for what she does to the cat, then you
realize you forgot the doctor and you want to hear the bells in the
steeple...

Sátántangó opens to a languid, insidiously ironic shot of cattle traversing the muddy field of a near desolate, neglected communal farm in rural Hungary, as the cows concurrently attempt to mate during the process of migration. The clumsy and awkward episode is reflected in the fluidly tracked, change of perspective shot of a disheveled, sparsely furnished room where Futaki (Miklós Székely B.) and Mrs. Schmidt (Éva Almássy Albert) conduct a meaningless, illicit affair - their relationship summarily encapsulated in the indelicate image of Mrs. Schmidt cleansing herself after the sexual encounter in her lover's presence. With her husband's unexpected return home, Futaki withdraws to an adjacent room and overhears an underhanded scheme hatched between Schmidt (László Lugossy) and Kráner (János Derzsi) to abscond with the communal farm's cattle money entrusted to them for delivery into town, with the dream of establishing his own farm. Feigning to arrive at the Schmidt home, Futaki confronts Schmidt with knowledge of their plot and is offered a share of the money in exchange for his silence. However, as Futaki and Schmidt settle their disreputable alliance, Mrs. Schmidt receives word from Mrs. Halics (Erzsébet Gaál) that the near-mythical Irimiás (Mihály Vig) and his omnipresent assistant Petrina (Putyi Horváth), both presumed to be dead, have been spotted on a road leading to the village, heading towards the local pub. The news of Irimiás's unexpected reappearance is received with equal amounts of anticipation and dread, and gradually, the villagers' plight unfolds as a series of point-of-view episodes that explore the root of their anxiety towards the return of the town's prodigal son.

Béla Tarr creates a visually sublime, darkly comic, and understatedly haunting film on complacency, ennui, betrayal, and greed in Sátántangó. A collaborative adaptation of László Krashnahorkai's first novel, Sátántangó is intricately structured in twelve narratively overlapping, discontinuous chapters, replicating the visual rhythm of the tango. The inherent nonlinearity of the film's forward and backward episodic movements, particularly evident in the circular, repeated narration of Futaki's perceived detection of the tolling of nonexistent bells at the beginning and end of the film, underscores the banality and empty, ritualistic existence of the communal farmers. Resigned to a life of aimlessness, despair, and passivity, the film serves as a metaphor for the nation's inertial resistance to change and inability to adapt to the unfamiliar landscape of liberation and autonomy in post-communist Hungary. Moreover, the themes of self-entrapment and zero displacement are manifested in the delirious, floating tracking shot above the sleeping villagers that echoes an earlier image of nocturnal spiders that emerge to spin their imperceptible web on the unconscious patrons after their meandering, discordant, intoxicated dance - the titular Sátántangó witnessed by the deeply troubled, seemingly deranged girl, Estike (Erika Bók) - a reminder of the psychologically entrenched, moribund lives of the villagers on the collective farm.

Through repeated allusions of the charismatic, mysterious Irimiás as a messianic figure, Tarr further illustrates the spiritual desolation, gullibility, and moral bankruptcy of the villagers: the static, close-up shots of the inexpressive Irimiás that emphasizes his abstracted, seemingly benevolent gaze (reminiscent of Johannes' framing in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet); his figurative return from the dead; his inexplicable compulsion to kneel before the ruins of an abandoned building as fog momentary rolls in and obscures the view; his redemptive speech that galvanizes the villagers into subscribing to his unrealized vision. Like the elusive Godot of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Irimiás represents the ephemeral: hope, redemption, sense of purpose, salvation. But inevitably, the model farm proves to be a barren reflection of the villagers' own existential limbo - a bleak, stagnant, and inert wasteland festering in a hopeless, meaningless, and soulless world.

The characters all live on an East European collective farm that is surrounded by bogs and therefore cut off from the rest of the world during the rainy season (and for much of the film it is raining).
I grew up on a farm and so the wandering livestock, the run down barns, the old houses with peeling wallpaper, and the sense of being isolated from the outside world didn't strike me as being particularly depressing or dreary. In fact I found the atmospheres of this film (both geographic and psychic) to be quite familiar.
The people, however, were not familiar. Those who occupy this collective farm are not the friendly country people I remember growing up around; they possess none of the charm and character and voluntary simplicity of rural folk. Rather the characters on this farm appear to be more like stranded exiles from some film noir universe (perhaps from one of Jim Thompson's gritty novels) and to them farm living holds all of the rustic charm of a gulag on the Siberian steppe. To a person they would all rather be elsewhere. The characters discuss leaving and venturing out toward that imagined elsewhere beyond the bogs but perhaps because it is the only reality that they have ever known nothing ever comes of the talk. Its also possible that they are all nihilists who have simply accepted spiritual and material defeat as inevitable. Either way the ideal of communal living--of working for a common good-- has long been abandoned. The individual members are not particularly friendly with or trusting of their neighbors; in fact everyone seems to be scheming against everyone else. The backstabbing competitiveness on display in Tarr's films has led some to conclude that Bela Tarr is making some kind of anti-capitalist statement and I think that there is probably some truth in that observation but its not the whole truth; what pains these characters is not just that the economic collectivity of the communist era has been replaced by the economic competitiveness of the new capitalist Hungary but the feeling that there is nothing else besides money (or petty bureaucratic rationalism) holding the world together any longer. Perhaps this feeling was always there but simply remained unspoken during the communist era. I think that this is also likely. What pains these characters (under any economic system, under any material conditions) is the radical sense of uncertainty and emptiness that marks human life. And this uncertainty and emptiness is psychically debilitating. Though each character reacts to this state of things in a different way, each is overwhelmed by the utter meaninglessness, the inconsequence, of doing anything. It is not merely an economic sickness but the existential sickness of modernity that plagues every character in this film. Nature itself is no longer seen as an escape from the ills of modernity, in fact nature is no longer idealized at all; rather "nature" ( both physical environment and human essence) is something that these characters have been reduced to. Art exists on this collective farm but the creation of art, like everything else, is simply a mechanical activity without redemptive or transformative power or purpose.

Intellectuals will be quick to see this film as following in a long line of existential philosophers, novelists, poets, and filmakers: Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, Frost, Camus, Beckett, Bresson, Bergman, Fellini, Polanski, Tarkovsky, Fassbender, Wenders, Lynch...

Its not at all surprising that the late Susan Sontag praised this film (although the earlier Damnation, 1988, was her favorite from this director) as she long expressed an interest in austere and difficult art that could also be construed as spiritual (or at least art that searched for some remnant of the spiritual even amid the ruin of modern or postmodern life). It was of course Sontag who staged Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993 while the city was under siege by Serb forces. Tarr's Satantango (completed in 1994) is a product of the same historical moment; like Sontag, Tarr created a work of art about a society that had crumbled and left its inhabitants without the support of a civilization. Like the characters in Beckett's plays, Tarr's characters maintain a sense of order only by repeating the same activities over and over again, but they are ultimately powerless to cover up the void that is left within them.

This is compelling cinema. Though the characters may be rather "grubby" (as Jonathan Rosenbaum said in his review of the film) the slow pacing of the film and the austerity of the black and white cinematography has an undeniable spellbinding effect. Its as if Tarr has slowed everything down and cast the entire world in black and white so that we can see more clearly what is at stake as these characters struggle to resist the paralyzing ennui of unredemptive time.

Bela Tarr's magnum opus, Satantango, is one of those "legendary" films you hear so much about. It's a monumental work lasting a full 7 1/2 hours when screened in its entirety (which is the only way it should be shown). Does it live up to its reputation? Is it worth investing one third of an entire day to sit in a theater watching this film? Yes. In fact, when one watches it and completely surrenders to the mood and look of the film, one wishes that Bela had made his film longer. It is a deep, meditative, spellbinding work, a work of a great film artist that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Kubrick and Tarkovsky.

I saw this in a theater in January 2006 after wanting to see it for ages. The plot, if you can call it that, of this film is it's the story of a failing collective farm in Hungary. Most of the residents want to take their money and split, but the 2 men in charge of the collective are returning after missing for 2 years. They're also police informers, but they don't seem to take it as seriously as they should. That's pretty much it. Recounting a plot for a film of this magnitude is rather pointless, as it is how Bela Tarr tells the story, not just the story.

It has a non-linear structure, with many things told from different points of view. Many people made a lot of hay about Pulp Fiction and it's non-linear structure, and how innovative it was. This film was released the same year (it had started in 1991 but Bela ran out of money, eventually completing it in 1994), and this is a far more complex, artistic film than Pulp Fiction ever can be. Cinematically, the film is a masterpiece. The black and white cinematography is fantastic, and the film has roughly 150 shots in the entire film. Many music videos have over 500 cuts in them, and they run a few minutes. Here Tarr shows his mastery of the long take. The opening shot, which is very well known to those who have seen the film, runs nearly 9 minutes. It's a shot of a herd of cows roaming around the countryside. The camera doesn't even move for 3 minutes until the cows come together and start to roam. It sets the tone for the rest of the film. Quite often, films with long takes have short ones to offset them. This film doesn't. It's very meditative, bleak, sad, disturbing, and yet, there are hilarious (yes, hilarious) moments in it as well. Most people talk about this film in such somber tones. They don't realise that it's OK to have a little humour in an art film. The sadly late Susan Sontag, a cultural critic who I deeply admire, said about this film "devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I'd be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life." She had similar accolades for another 7 1/2 hour film, Hitler: A Film from Germany (aka Our Hitler). Both times she was right. These films are worth every second of your time, and then some. They would make an excellent double featuer. She also mentioned this film in a scathing essay on the decline of serious film culture in the 1990's, and that Satantango was an unapologetic slap in the face to "foreign friendly" films of companies like Miramax. Many foreign films distributed in the 1990's were designed for crossover appeal. They were foreign, but had the commercialisation of Hollywood in them. Tarr's film doesn't. This is old school auteurism at its finest. This is a work of art, not a pseudo-intellectual film pretending to be art. One holds a deep admiration for Bela Tarr for making his film the way he wanted it. It is one of my all time favorite films.

Facets's DVD is, as some have said here, not particularly good. The transfer is just average, which is unforgivable in this day and age (go to DVD Beaver for a more detailed analysis of the transfer). But Facets has added some fascinating extras here, something they didn't do on Werckmeister Harmonies and Damnation, two other Tarr masterpieces. There's are two short films, Journey on the Plain and Visions of Europe: Prologue, included here, and Tarr's TV film of the scottish play by Shakespeare. The two shorts are fascinating (Visions is one long take), and the scottish play film is excellent. It runs 67 minutes long, and is filmed in two takes. The first take is five minutes, then the credits, then the rest of the film (62 minutes) is all one long take. It's fascinating to see how Tarr plays it out, but he does superlatively, and makes one of the most memorable adaptations of the scottish play ever made. So while the transfer is average, the extras are very good, and maybe, just maybe, Facets will take some more pride in their future work and do good transfers.

This is one of the greatest films ever made in my opinion. It's absolutely fascinating from beginning to end.

You don't see cinema until you see "Satantango". An astonishing piece of art, in wich you can find the composition and sensibility of an artist in every single take.

Take your time (it's run is seven hours) and find yourself in the movie.

In 1994, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr released a seven hour black and white film called Satantango (Satan's Tango in English) that presented a conundrum for both the purveyors of plot-driven, character-empty Lowest Common Denominator blockbuster action summer movies and those who favor the cerebral, pretentious, film school fawning indulgences of Eurotrash (aka World Cinema) film-making. The conundrum was how can time be manipulated by the artist (filmmaker) so that the viewer (percipient) is removed from its passage? No, that theme is never directly stated nor implied in the film's frames, but it is there, and Satantango is a film that, like Chris Marker's La Jetee, will stand as a milestone in cinema history. Like Marker's film, Satantango is a great film, and I will detail and argue such in this essay. But, I believe that it could well be the sort of film that, decades hence, serves as the template for what remains of modern cinema culture.

Critics are often the worst judges of what is original and important when an art form seeks out new means- an online scan of film reviews of old classics often shows how off the mark old line critics were. On a soft tangent, an often abused term crops up far too often in reviews of Satantango, and that is the word 'epic.' In fact, epic is something this film most definitely is not. Epic implies huge spectacle and grand consequences, whereas this film, despite its length, is anything but that. It is intimate and, if anything, anti-epical. In fact, it is almost like a Beckett play on steroids, and one that tests the very premises Beckett based his whole career upon, pushing them to the very limits of their own dictates, and then into something even better, for it has a richness, depth, and humanity that no Beckett play has. Yet, while not epic, the film is very much a visionary work. Many people confuse the two ideals, as if they both connote a grandness, whereas only epic does. Vision, on the other hand, can be small. Quality of her verse aside, much can be stated in favor of the argument that Emily Dickinson was a visionary poet. Her 'vision,' though, was exceedingly small, and this is true of Satantango. The very smallness which makes it an anti-epic also makes it visionary for its vision is that of the microscope, not the telescope, where epics are writ so large. But large things often diffuse, whereas Satantango's length does naught but clarify, even in its depths. And the use of macguffins acts almost as leukocytes to defend the film's narrative from its own length's possible excesses.This defense system is one of the many reasons Satantango is not only a great film, but an important and historic one.