By Ryland Walker Knight
Time is relevant, yes? Art is a distillation of a moment or series of moments. Film art is a capture: the camera takes in light and stores it for future projection—the captured light is time. Film, as an art, is a means to represent the relative passage of time. The filmmaker's job, then, is to assemble a work from the most essential building blocks of story/life/events; or to whittle it down, eliminating the excess. This is the crux of Andrei Tarkovsky's film theory, which he famously defined in his book "Sculpting in Time". The filmmaker is a sculptor, wielding his camera as a chisel. It's a convincing study, and an appealing set of guidelines & edicts to follow in any art. Form must always reflect content, as conscientiously as possible: if the content is hollow, the form is irrelevant. If ever there was a brand of cinema that academia was meant to swallow whole, this is it.
Béla Tarr's seven and a half hour opus Sátántangó (1994) practices many "Sculpting" maxims, first and foremost in the way it represents the slow and subjective passing of time. Despite their virtuoso control of image-music-text, both of these directors seek to understand our terrestrial conundrum through an aesthetic purity, rejecting—via a superficial minimalism—montage, standard coverage, a modern/typical score, etc. However, where Tarkovsky's world is a blend of agnostic mysticism & honest self-doubt, Tarr's world is a complex mix of sardonic humor and compassionate atheism.
What separates them further is how they move through their frames: Tarkovsky moves laterally, always panning or tracking from side to side, face to face, a kind of sideways stagnation. Tarr does something similar, but instead of focusing on his characters in a tracking shot, he pushes in and pulls out of scenes as a serpent, ever circling—his is a more active passivity of regard, searching around corners. The centerpiece to Sátántangó's only eruptive montage (mentioned below) is an endless dolly shot coiling around a woman. You never doubt, in Tarkovsky's films, that what is in front of you is exactly what needs to be seen at that specific moment, but in Sátántangó the viewer is tempted to scour the corners. And it works. Sátántangó is a skeptic's diatribe, angry and unrelenting, whereas something like Mirror, Tarkovsky's most active (& convoluted) film, is a precise distillation of memory, as if snatched straight from the brain and planted importunate—yet plaintive—onscreen.
About five hours into Sátántangó the screen splinters as we bear witness to what is, in essence, the film's first and only montage. A baroque hymnal/dirge underscores several close-ups of the rain-weary peasants whom we've followed from a mud-caked commune to a decrepit, empty mansion. Like many sequences in the film, it's an unfulfilled promise—the villagers were expecting a bountiful, hope-filled new life led by their "resurrected" neighbor and appointed leader, Irimias (Mihály Vig)—yet Tarr nonetheless exalts in and celebrates the faithful's naïve devotion. Despite the interminable length of the takes that comprise this four-shot montage, the moment (which concludes with a sideswipe lateral track to a man pissing into a bare concrete corner) feels a brief respite. 
After experiencing these villagers' lives, roughly and tangentially, through almost 300 minutes of parallel storytelling, we in the audience feel a part of their community. We've felt the incessant rain. We've danced all night on a bender. We've buried our youngest too early. Thus, we understand the hope illuminated by the tracking shot across their ravaged faces. Their illegitimate messiah has not met them at journey's end, but for this moment vigilance rules out and hope springs eternal. For a time, we are allowed to bask in the film's holy gaze at these wrecked, aimless people. But then they try to bed down and they can't shut up: they're too busy complaining. While they bicker and skeptically prognosticate off screen, we track down an endless hallway to a close-up of an owl who is neither impressed nor fazed by these simple humans. The owl is one of the many uninterested animals that populate the story; it shows a wide-ranging indifference for this ensemble that shrinks them inside the film's Petri dish. The commune's eventual demise and dispersal may be interpreted as a cautionary parable, but it remains in its own vacuum-tight space, imprisoned in a world prone to ignorance, myopia, greed, blind faith, alcoholism, rain and wind, and sealed off (as a tomb) by a hermit physician's chilling final gesture.
Satantango's iconic sequence, which features a possibly feebleminded—and definitely neglected—blank-faced girl named Estike (Erika Bók) torturing her cat, is a brutal piece of filmmaking, likely to make you wince, but the chapter-ending payoff is well worth the investment. Its repercussions ripple back on themselves and unwrap outwards to envelop—and color—the entire community (& the film (& you)). As the girl lays down one last time next to her poisoned cat, she imagines an angel watching over her, guiding her through to the beyond. Dramatically, the sequence works equally as a climax and an inciting incident, and given its placement at the heart of the narrative, just before the midway intermission, it's hard not to see it as both. The film's cyclical structure, within both halves, works as a mirror, much like the twelve-step tango itself: six steps forward mimicked and recast as six steps back. Thus, the audience is off kilter, reeling from either the repetitions of shot movements at crucial narrative intersections or the retelling of key interactions from oppositional points of view. It's a risky strategy that tests the audience’s patience and ability to keep up, but it is this rigor that pays the richest dividends and keeps us coming back to the wellspring.
The first chapter post-intermission is entitled "Irimias Delivers a Speech." Irimias was rumored dead for years and has now appeared (perhaps reborn?) to chastise his former neighbors, forcing them into submission. Irimias's undercutting admonition at Estike's wake is typical of Tarr's subversive set-up & pay off strategy. Another memorable and hilarious example (aside from the pissing-in-a-corner capper mentioned above) comes when Irimias, awed by a fog hanging over the ruins where Estike's dead body was found, drops reverently to his knees. After the cloud lifts and drifts away, as crumbling buildings reappear on the landscape, Irimias casually stands up to continue along the path. A few steps later his partner Petrina (Putyi Horváth) asks, "What? You've never seen fog before?", effectively deflating Irimias and the audience's reverie. It likewise reminds us of Estike's devastating, naïve epiphany: the question implied, Is her guardian angel indeed gazing down from on high?
Sátántangó's gloomy milieu may remind one of Underground, Emir Kusturica's ludicrous/fantastic travelogue through Yugoslavian history. Both films follow a troupe of holy fools who blindly accept the spoon-fed empty promises of an unreliable communist messiah, a false prophet who exploits their faith in the system for dubious gains. To an extent, both films doubt and look down on this devotion, but they hardly fault their characters, whose shortcomings endear them to us, much like a wayward child inspires sympathy. (If only they knew better.) However, Kusturica's film is the near-opposite of Sátántangó: instead of a decades-long three-ring circus satire, Tarr's film is an ugly and indolent three-day hell ride. Underground is a zoo while Sátántangó is a prison.
So why in the world would we need to endure seven and a half hours of this? Well, for one, Tarr shares with Kusturica a cutting sense of humor; for another, like an epic tale rich in nuance and motivational back story (the film is, in fact, based on a lengthy Hungarian novel by its co-screenwriter, and Tarr's frequent collaborator, Lázsló Krasznahorkai) Sátántangó uses its totemic length to better specify and explore its world. On the surface its foreignness appears impenetrable: as stated above, Tarr rejects many cinematic conventions, montage chief among them. David Bordwell has exhaustively detailed the film's editing—there are only 172 cuts in 434 minutes for an average shot length of roughly two-and-a-half minutes. As Bordwell has noted, however, this is somewhat misleading, as certain scenes are played in one uninterrupted shot while others employ standard visual logic (e.g.: Estike is seen watching something through a window, then we cut to her view of a bar full of drunken adults). Yet, despite its endless dolly shots and cramped compositions—practically a narcoleptic claustrophobe's worst nightmare—the film endures (& thrives) within its rigid framework. There are laughs in nearly every scene, even in the most dire, will-this-end? situations such as the Sisyphean sojourn of the heavyset, voyeuristic, alcoholic doctor (Peter Berling) to replenish his liquor supply, or the slowest marathon accordion dance sequence ever filmed.
American audiences are routinely berated for not embracing films identified as slow or dense or oblique or a tough nut to crack. The Reader’s Digest critical opinion is that popular homeland tastes veer towards earnest follies like Amélie or the snap-crackle-pop of Pedro Almodóvar's primary color palate. This ignores, though, that ardent art-house fandom still exists, however minor the hold on the market. Contemplative, deliberate filmmaking has an audience in America—even outside New York or Los Angeles. Patience is a virtue... With the right marketing support, Army of Shadows became a bona-fide art house hit despite its surgical pace and bleak conceit. 
On the flip side, Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu enjoyed no support outside the glowing reviews it received and only made $80,000 in US theaters. More recently, David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE has broken house records at Manhattan’s IFC Theatre; but a lot of that can be attributed to the marquee American auteur—it was bound to make some dough. Sátántangó is far from broadly marketable, but its powers appeal to a bigger niche than any distributor would project. It won't rival INLAND EMPIRE's gross (it's more than twice as long, limiting the number of possible screenings), but with relatively little rally spirit, the Northwest Film Forum sold over half the house when I saw it in Seattle last December. UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive has recently purchased a new 35mm print struck from the original negative, straight from Hungary, and has programmed its first Bay Area screening for Saturday, February 17th, 2007. Tickets are disappearing. For those with neither the time nor the patience for an all-day screening, Facets Video has released a Region 1 DVD, available for stop-and-go home viewing.
By now, in an era of audience-active phenomena such as Lost or even Pulp Fiction, non-linear narrative should not be too tough to handle. But when employed by a seven and a half hour Hungarian movie, such trickery can feel heavier than anvils. At times I felt an ant, forced to carry myself and my ideas and the film and its characters across the gulf from projection booth to screen to my eyes to my brain all by myself. That dance sequence is so long you won't believe it. Honestly. You start to think it's reaching a zenith when the camera starts to move the first time, but rest assured, if you have to pee—go pee. Yet I didn't go pee. I watched the whole goddamn thing. And you know why? It made me laugh. A man balances a "cheese-stick" on his forehead and periodically crosses the dance floor. A bodacious woman fights her way through the dance with a desperate hanger-on, one minute smiling and twirling, the next punching and kicking. A drunk stumbles into the crowd and forces a few to move like him, jagged, before collapsing on a bench where he kicks, every now and then, at the continuing revelry. And then some more stuff happens. By the time the stuck-on-repeat klezmer quits and all on screen are staring stunned out at the audience you won't know whether to clap, yell, guffaw, shake your head or some combination of all. 
Nearly every scene in Sátántangó plays against the audience's expectations, much like the narrative plays with the characters' hopes, twisting them inside-out into obsolescence. Yet the elliptical construction chisels its way to a brilliant epiphany in its final chapter, when we see the pieces nailed together in a most poetic way. Tarkovsky, again: "When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particlar way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life." Sátántangó has this awareness, despite the differences in approach/outlook to, say, Mirror. It brings together its disparate parts into a confounding collage of story, philosophy, and aesthetic criticism borne from the daily preposterous comedy called life. It's jumbled up going from a to c to d to b to e, but it's the perfect syllogism. Each sequence informs the next and reflects on the previous, notwithstanding the appearance of random-fire tangents. Sátántangó's narration places it in past tense, but it is hardly a memory: you walk through its paces every minute, watching the circle distend & meander into an oval—until, finally, you witness it closing.
To approach Sátántangó merely as a test of wills only ensures displeasure, discomfort, and plain dissatisfaction. One must surrender to its rhythm from the get-go or the whole endeavor is lost. You may yet feel weighted down by the mind-numbing aspects—it's a rough, lengthy road cleft with forks—but if you find yourself laughing at the opening scene of bulls and cows fleeing the village (ever slowly, all in one carefully executed & choreographed shot, with ample time for a mounting on the side), you're no doubt in tune with Tarr. You can relax and let the film come to you. If not, you may want to skip the copperplate migratory storytelling and slug's pacing for the above-mentioned Kusturica film, with its propulsive forward motion and breathless energy. If you stick with it, though, you will be delighted in parts, frustrated beyond belief in others (the dance sequence does end, don't worry), dozing often, but ultimately fulfilled by the final reel when key mysteries are answered (though, much as you'd expect from a labyrinth, narrative dead-ends abound) and the whole thing is boarded up with finality like a hardback tome falling shut on its featherweight pages.
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House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight is the infrequent publisher of the blog Vinyl Is Heavy.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Lateral Sculpture: Béla Tarr's Sátántangó
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19 comments:
Ryland, this is a stellar bit of film scholarship. I've only seen the film once, and the conditions were hardly ideal (a wonky video transfer), but there was no doubting the power of the artistic vision before me. I really like your analysis of the pacing and editing, particularly your comparison/contrast with Tarkovsky and Kusturica, which proves quite insightful and informative.
I have just purchased the new region 2 release, and will be clearing a day in the near future so I can revisit the film in a manner more amenable to its original intent.
Tremendous work!
really an excellent piece. you are right in emphasising the satirical tone of the work.
it is interesting that most of the essays on Tarr are concerned exclusively about the formal elements of the work. I think the content is also very important specially its political implications.
I recently read Krasznahorkai's novel The Melancholy of Resistance and the satirical and political tone is more evident in the novel than in the movie adaptation Werckmeister Harmonies. It is also far more political and has some long philosophical digressions which are not there in the movie. Its conclusions are still quite bleak and nihilistic but reading it is a joyful experience. an absolutely brilliant work. I recommend it very highly. I hope someone is working on translating Satantango too.
this is a nice overview of the novel Satantango btw.
The Facets release has been delayed; the website now says 'Release date to be announced.' I'm also planning on getting the region 2 release instead, even though I've found the Facets releases of Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies to be more watchable than other people give them credit for.
For folks around DC, the National Gallery of Art is going to be showing these two in March. No Satantango, though.
Good work, Ryland, making this supposed beast of an art film approachable. Last time I saw it, at MOMA, a few years back, there was some gentle snooring and occasional restless shuffling, but one could sense that the audience was into it, thoroughly.
The Artificial Eye dvd is said to be the better of the two versions available. Of course, its a region 2 copy, so you'll need an appropriate player or you'll have to do a wee bit of hacking in order to make your region 1 player an acceptable host. This is really quite simple. What you will do is nothing more than change the factory pre-sets. Eventually I'll buy an all-region player, but for now this works just fine.
Watching Satantango at home in chunks makes of it a completely different experience, a different film. I experiment sometimes by turning off the sound and playing some music of my own choosing to accompany the picture. I've tried it with music by Edgard Varese, Luc Ferrari, and the dark crushing drones of Sunn O))).
Around here, in the mornings, we sometimes watch Sunrise Earth, on the Discovery Channel. Y'know, ambient nature scenes. One morning I got the idea to play the opening scene with those cows instead. My girlfriend thought I'd lost my mind. I'm finding that these other uses for Satantango are quite enjoyable.
In the beginning of Twenty-Nine Palms, Bruno Dumont uses a maddeningly inane pop tune that plays on the radio in that Hummer as the couple drives through the desert, and which is repeated later in the film. At the time it made me think of Tarr and that klezmer, both, time suspending devices, and I thought, these people are doomed.
Much as I like Satantango, I still prefer the desparing noir that is Damnation. It's interesting that The Man From London brings Tarr back to noir. Specifically, the unrelenting fatalism of Georges Simenon. In these non-Maigret, straight-up crime novels, the protagonists are undone by their own actions. These novels are very conscise and usually short. All excess has been pared away. We don't really like these characers, but Simenon's genius is to make us feel their turmoil until he disposes of them. These stories are rather funny that way. Absurd, even. I'm curious to see what Tarr makes of this.
Again, Ryan, very good work.
Very nice, Ryland.
What fascinates me most about Satantango now, a month after seeing it, is its humor. It might be the funniest film I saw last year, and it was funny in every way that a film can be funny: absurd, sarcastic, bitter, sick, angry, warm, physical and verbal, high and low, black and white.
You know that old comedy rule that repeating a thing three times is funny, five times is annoying, and seven times is the funniest thing ever? Is there any more perfect example of that than the accordion marathon?
The film is littered with little jokes (sick, cruel ones: a fat man falling down, cat torture; clever, highbrow ones: the fog joke being the best) and is structured around one big joke (I won't give it away, half the fun is figuring it out).
This was not what I expected. To read people's accounts of the film, I was prepared for 7 1/2 hours of horror, depression, slow slow-moving cows, cameras and communists, long speeches about the workers and death and how it sucks to be poor and muddy. And I guess those things do exist in the film, but never at the angle you think they would.
Fantastic piece, Ryland! NOTE to readers in Colorado: Sátántangó is showing at Muenzinger Auditorium in Boulder on Sat. Jan. 27 starting at noon (details at www.internationalfilmseries.com).
I have been wondering whether I should go, both intrigued and (of course) daunted -- I can't say I'm entirely convinced now, but after reading this piece, I'm a lot more intrigued and a lot less daunted, at least. I've invested plenty of challenging but fruitful time in Tarkovsky's work, so it seems like it's worth a try.
kj, I was really tickled your remark about finding other uses for Sátántangó. Way to avoid the trap of chilly, arm's-length reverence for great works of art!
Melissa, if the film ever played in my area, I'd move heaven and hell to see it. If that helps your decision making in any way.
Thanks for publishing this! I was at one of the NWFF screenings also, and I'm so happy that I was able to have that experience.
One thing I thought about the cows in the opening shot (and this thought certainly made the word "cosmic" reverberate throughout my viewing), is how irrational and pointless their movement seemed to be. Without anyone that we can see herding them, they just begin to migrate, one blindly following the other.
This irrational, herd behavior is most definitely reflected in the actions of the humans later in the film: from the willingness of Futaki to join in on the scheme to steal the town's money to the scene where the inhabitants are literally herded away by Irimias.
And how cow-like is the doctor when he's passed out on the side of the road, picked up like roadkill, and loaded onto the back of a truck?
Certainly the actions of the people in the central dance scene are just as irrational (not to mention the virtual"mounting" attempts that take place). Unlike you, perhaps, I found this endless dance scene one of the most powerful in the film: it seemed, to me and the friend I saw it with anyway, a poetic expression of human existence itself. The guy with the stick just keeps mindlessly pounding out a rhythm while people twirl about, dancing joylessly for no good reason, changing partners at random. It really struck me too, how different the scene seemed from the point of view of the little girl watching briefly through the window (seemed almost like a good time) to how it seemed (good time to awkward to horrible) watching it for 10 minutes.
But you are 100% right about one thing: go pee. When explaning this movie to others I've used this as an example: During a scene in which a character was packing a suitcase, my teeth began to float. I thought to myself, "You know, I bet I could get to the bathroom, pee, and get back to my seat, and that damn guy will still be packing his suitcase." Sure enough, he was.
"Tarkovsky moves laterally, always panning or tracking from side to side..."
This isn't true. At least not "always."
While he admittedly pans horizontally more often than not, there are also many times when he pans vertically (The Sacrifice) or diagonally (Andrei Rubylev -- if I remember correctly) and I'm sure there are others.
Not that it really takes anything away from your wonderful essay, which I liked quite a bit.
This talk of panning and tracking reminds me of David Bordwell's extensive discussion of Dreyer's employment of same in his Films Of Carl-Theodore Dryer. Of interest here, might be Bordwell's analysis of Ordet, where much of the camera's movement is centered around the mad, Christ-like figure of Johannes, and how each movement functions to set up the moment of blissful resurrection at the conclusion.
Thank you all. It was fun to write. And a public thanks is due to Keith for working with me to untie some syntactical & structural knots -- and helping guide this essay into the beast that rightly is.
alok: I have yet to read anything from Hungary but now it's mighty appealing.
KJ: Now I may have to buy the damn thing so I can do my own scoring...what a fun idea. For me, I'd probably throw on early, angry Fennesz or an SYR disc. However, part of the film's -- and the montage I mention's -- power comes from having no noticeable soundtrack until closer to the end. Plus, it makes all that bell-ringing that much more cathartic.
Sean: Yeah, it's damn funny: you can't front, you can't fuck with that. We should program a screening followed up a day later with OFFICE SPACE playing on a loop. That way people can come in and watch for a bit whenever they want and then stay for the beginning to catch up or skip the whole thing if it might remind them too much of what they're *hopefully* escaping from.
Melissa: Needless to say, but I'll say it anyways -- DIVE IN, the water's pretty good.
pobrecito: I think it's the perfect opening for those reasons and another -- it's obvious they were being guided by *something* right? Kind of like the humans were vaguely guided by Irimias, right? It's a limitted free will on both parts. I think Tarr thinks we're no better than those silly cows so hey, why not give them their due and set them free? ... As for the dance sequence, I do kinda like it but I don't really relish living it again on Feb 17th. I'm definitely taking a potty break at that point.
Anon: I'd argue that vertical reveal in THE SACRIFICE is, in fact, a lateral move. It's not following a horizon line but it's still tracking across the action, albeit from an inspired angle high above.
KJ, again: Dreyer's actually one of my blindspots. I just saw my first Ozu picture and really liked it even though I don't quite get why Schrader calls it a transcendental film. It's a lot rougher than that. I imagine Dreyer to have much more in line with Schrader's Calvinist upbringing so I understand that. All this said, I haven't read Schrader's book. I've only heard him speak about it. The point being, I need to get to Dreyer but, as with most things, I'm not rushing there. It'll happen. I do appreciate all that Bordwell has to offer, though, and will most definitely read the piece once I see the film. Until then, you can check out my take on TOKYO STORY, which pretty much floored me.
Thanks again. And please, lurkers, join the fray: I want to hear your thoughts as well. Any & all feedback is great. And helpful.
On a few occasions in Solaris the camera spins in a slow circle. Does that not count as a non-lateral movement?
"Does that not count as non-lateral movement?"
Too many negations...can't compute. Regarding those shots, though: they're an example of his surveying-the-scene pans. Not a tracking shot but still a lateral movement that keeps the film static & centered within itself, despite the fluidity of the camera movement. It's similar to something like the scenes in the doctor's house in SATAN where the camera moves around his little hovel with him, kind of coiling, like I said in the piece, as a serpent might. Tarkovsky doesn't move that much but it's the next evolution of that aesthetic, I think.
When I think of lateral movement, I think of something like what Hou Hsiao-hsien does in Flowers Of Shanghai or Millenium Mambo (or any of his recent films save Cafe Lumiere, come to think of it), where the camera drifts along a fixed plane, up-down and side-to-side but never in-out. Much like Tarkovsky's long pans in Andrei Rublev (though with a fixed horizontal limit, unlike them seemingly infinite space in the Tarkovsky takes).
The shots in Solaris and Satantango, though, break up the two-dimensional tableaux and move into and through the frame, creating a wholly different kind of space and some shocking effects (such as when people suddenly pop up where you don't expect them to in Solaris, or the long slow circle that traces back to the pump in Satantango).
"active passivity of regard"
It's an evolutionary step, I think. I cannot compare it to Hou (still need to get there, too, in addition to Dreyer) but I can to Mizoguchi. I think that might be the apt comparisson for Tarr, actually, as both stage elaborate camera movements designed to survey. That make sense?
Sure, but a lateral survey has a very different effect than a three-dimensional one. It's a different way of creating a different kind of space. Lateral moves keep us outside the film space, circular movements envelope us in it.
"Tarkovsky's world is a blend of agnostic mysticism & honest self-doubt"
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"...it seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroad, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, turn to God." - Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986
What a great essay on this impressive film! Thank you for contributing to the blogathon Ryland, and sorry for the late comment.
Your analysis of the camerawork and the actors' presence is so precise and pertinent I feel like seeing it rolling before my eyes all over again.
"You never doubt, in Tarkovsky's films, that what is in front of you is exactly what needs to be seen at that specific moment, but in Sátántangó the viewer is tempted to scour the corners."
The extension of time and its "monotony" introduces a new unfamiliar attitude for the viewer. We can blink without missing a crucial clue. We can look away, close our eyes, think about something else... the film invites us to live our life in the meantime, because there is no manipulative storyline, the film unfolds in "real-time" and we can hop in and out at will. Particularly the dance sequence, where our attention is taken to untenable extremes, until finally Tarr succeeds to make the audience comfortable to look around. And we distance ourselves from the hypnotic effect of cinema.
Since the film is no longer in direct connection with our subconscious (conditionned reflex of montage) we are free to enter the film as a free-willing visitor. A new relationship can develop between us and the screen.
I never thought of the comparison to Underground. I'd like to watch them both in a double bill.
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