Left Field Cinema

Bela Tarr’s 1994 feature Satantango is infamous within its obscurity, owing mostly to its runtime; an incredible seven and a half hours. It is Tarr’s fifth picture, and marks fully the end of the transitional period from his early films into the mature style he exhibits in later works such as Werkmeister Harmonies (2000) and The Man from London (2007). Perhaps unfortunately for the objectivity of a review, I adore Tarr’s work, believing patience to be the cornerstone of all good expression and Satantango was the first of his films I was exposed to. It was also released on my third birthday, a fact I’m desperately trying to give some relevance.

The plot of Satantango is bafflingly simplistic. An episodic feature split mercifully into 12 segments, it follows the onset of autumn and winter in a financially and culturally desolate Hungarian town. Conned out of a collective fortune by a returning inhabitant, the characters drink and stumble their way toward the gradual realisation of their mistake and ultimate demise. It is excessively difficult to outline the plot, or know if spoilers are included in this review, because very, very little of anything that can be identified as a narrative point occurs. This is for many viewers a point of trepidation: a 7 hour film with little plot seems utterly pretentious and necessarily void of any viewer/film interplay. Any review of Satantango has to address this, and has to evidence the brilliance of a film which, in summary, seems to have such very little potential.

It is impossible to understand the work of Tarr without some dabbling in thematic and even philosophical intentions. Throughout his work, I see Tarr as an essentially existential director. His constant focus on the absurdity and perpetuity of life and its structures is explicit in his work. In Damnation and Werkmeister Harmonies this is expressed in a surreal and bizarre manner (the man stamping his feet or the transcendent and precarious cable cars in Damnation, the absurd influence of the Prince in Werkmeister Harmonies) that makes them essentially narrative devices: their surrealism renders them as realistic only within the cinematic narrative. It is possible to see Satantango as the peak of this existential theme, but it doesn’t employ these surreal and obviously cinematic devices. Where a three-minute shot of a man stamping, drunk and alone in a sodden dancehall is enough to evoke absurdity in Damnation, Satantango shies away from such classically character-bound behaviours. It takes its absurdity for the most part (there is a notable exception in the final episodes) simply from the lives of the town’s inhabitants.

Tarr’s blistering monochrome captures almost 7 hours of non-events, or at least, non-events in cinematic terms. A boy cheats his sister out of money, men and women get drunk and dance, people pack suitcases, people speak in non-sequiturs and there are an awful lot of tracking shots following characters walking. These are cinematic non-events, but they are events that compose our lives. It is banal perhaps to point out that our lives do not occur in three acts bound by lazy characterisation and an over zealous DP. But by treating these events with the cinematographic decisions he does, with his typically blistering monochrome, and ultra-sharp resolution in shots often pushing the eleven minute limit, he presents these events as essentially useless. His refusal to use soft-focus in any depth of his shot presents the viewer with excessive environmentally clarity, but his sparse screenplay (Tarr often rejects scripting his films) and the lack of events for characters to reveal themselves means his characters are the opposite of clear. The events become opaque in all but procedure and the characters, because of this fundamental ignorance of their real selves, become dishearteningly real. This is why Tarr needs his 7 hours (personally I would have dropped 20 minutes from a bar drinking scene which really does grate, but that’s why probably why Susan Sontag doesn’t think I’m ‘devastating and enthralling’); to fully approach the banality and length of real-life events.

To focus merely on his masterful revelation of absurdity though is to do injustice to the film. There are points in which it is simply beautiful. The patient and expansive nature of the shots make them heartbreakingly beautiful, makes them seem almost a burden, a facet of great sadness despite their wonder. One shot in partiuclar of two characters walking down a street in a raging wind (weather, especially wind and rain playing a large role in the burdensome nature of the films beauty) is for me personally my favourite shot of that decade. It is an essential film for both of these reasons, for its thematic patience and realism, and its simple beauty. It is, whilst I perhaps cannot justify this, my favourite film of the 90’s, simply because it was, for me, unique when I first viewed it around 6 or 8 months ago. Achingly beautiful and thematically strong, and with artificial eyes recent release of the film on 3 separate discs (I think there is a quiet agreement that one sitting is just silly) any trepidation about seeing this groundbreaking film is quite unfounded.

Ben Conway