Satantango. (15.)
Directed by Bela Tarr. 1994.
Starring Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath, Laszlo Lugossy. In Hungarian with subtitles. Black and white. Available on Blu-ray/ DVD or streaming on Curzon Home Cinema. 419 mins.
If not now, then when? After months of lockdown those copies of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest remain undisturbed on the bookshelf, but if you still want to make use of this enforced leisure and complete one culturally worthwhile feat then maybe, just maybe, now is the time to tackle the seven and a half monochrome hours of Hungarian master Tarr Bela's Satantango.
There is only one way with Tarr, and it is the hard way: slow pace, long shots, black and white, mud, squalor, hard-drinking, barren flat countryside, nice weather for ducks. The money saved on colour film went on the wind and rain machines that get extensive use. The shots are long but not fancy. The camera moves are generally unobtrusive. A lot of them are shots of people striding along open roads or over fields, usually in heavy rainfall, though it's not all walking. There's lots of sitting,wheezing and wince drinking (a shot of the cheap stuff followed by a grimace.)
An opening shot of cows leaving a shed and wandering through a derelict village is there to get you down to speed. That's the first ten minutes gone. The plot is Godot Turning Up Out Of The Blue, and doing so after everyone thought he was dead. It's payday in a run-down collective farm, when the people get the money for the last year's work and everybody is scheming to rip off the others. Then word arrives that Irimias (Vig), who used to work there and is believed deceased, is heading back to the village.
The film is divided into twelve sections, each concerning a different character or a location in the village. The first six all take place on the day before Irimias's arrival, and often they interlock, with the same events being seen from different perspectives. Given the length and the slow detailed representation, you might reasonably expect to find out about them in some depth but the film shows you everything and nothing. Various political and religious interpretations offer themselves up but Tarr's films always give a partial view: nobody here knows what's going on, not even the viewer who has seen it from a variety of viewpoints. What Tarr can do like no other is show how tentative human society is, how loose are the ties that bind us together and that what keeps civilisation going is mainly apathy and laziness.
In the last Sight and Sound Asleep poll of the greatest films ever made Satantango ranked 35th (tied with Psycho amongst some others) but watching this time around and attempting to do it down-in-one I can't pretend that there weren't moments of irritation and frustration, a few rewinds from nod offs. I appreciate the aesthetics of the long takes, of making the passing of time a much stronger element than in most films, but my God some of those shots go on forever. I reckon you could trim an hour off of it without any noticeable difference to its rhythm or mood.
I'd also admit that if you really can't face it Tarr's later The Werckmeister Harmonies achieves everything this film does, and a bit more, and does so at a third of the length. But, if you are at all peaked by this, give it go because it really delivers; even if you hate it, you'll never be free of it. The day after seeing I felt euphoric, released but tempted to go back to it. Of all the blocks of seven hours and nineteen minutes of your life that you'll never get back, these you won't resent.
Directed by Bela Tarr. 1994.
Starring Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath, Laszlo Lugossy. In Hungarian with subtitles. Black and white. Available on Blu-ray/ DVD or streaming on Curzon Home Cinema. 419 mins.
If not now, then when? After months of lockdown those copies of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest remain undisturbed on the bookshelf, but if you still want to make use of this enforced leisure and complete one culturally worthwhile feat then maybe, just maybe, now is the time to tackle the seven and a half monochrome hours of Hungarian master Tarr Bela's Satantango.
There is only one way with Tarr, and it is the hard way: slow pace, long shots, black and white, mud, squalor, hard-drinking, barren flat countryside, nice weather for ducks. The money saved on colour film went on the wind and rain machines that get extensive use. The shots are long but not fancy. The camera moves are generally unobtrusive. A lot of them are shots of people striding along open roads or over fields, usually in heavy rainfall, though it's not all walking. There's lots of sitting,wheezing and wince drinking (a shot of the cheap stuff followed by a grimace.)
An opening shot of cows leaving a shed and wandering through a derelict village is there to get you down to speed. That's the first ten minutes gone. The plot is Godot Turning Up Out Of The Blue, and doing so after everyone thought he was dead. It's payday in a run-down collective farm, when the people get the money for the last year's work and everybody is scheming to rip off the others. Then word arrives that Irimias (Vig), who used to work there and is believed deceased, is heading back to the village.
The film is divided into twelve sections, each concerning a different character or a location in the village. The first six all take place on the day before Irimias's arrival, and often they interlock, with the same events being seen from different perspectives. Given the length and the slow detailed representation, you might reasonably expect to find out about them in some depth but the film shows you everything and nothing. Various political and religious interpretations offer themselves up but Tarr's films always give a partial view: nobody here knows what's going on, not even the viewer who has seen it from a variety of viewpoints. What Tarr can do like no other is show how tentative human society is, how loose are the ties that bind us together and that what keeps civilisation going is mainly apathy and laziness.
In the last Sight and Sound Asleep poll of the greatest films ever made Satantango ranked 35th (tied with Psycho amongst some others) but watching this time around and attempting to do it down-in-one I can't pretend that there weren't moments of irritation and frustration, a few rewinds from nod offs. I appreciate the aesthetics of the long takes, of making the passing of time a much stronger element than in most films, but my God some of those shots go on forever. I reckon you could trim an hour off of it without any noticeable difference to its rhythm or mood.
I'd also admit that if you really can't face it Tarr's later The Werckmeister Harmonies achieves everything this film does, and a bit more, and does so at a third of the length. But, if you are at all peaked by this, give it go because it really delivers; even if you hate it, you'll never be free of it. The day after seeing I felt euphoric, released but tempted to go back to it. Of all the blocks of seven hours and nineteen minutes of your life that you'll never get back, these you won't resent.
