Satantango

I required five nights to complete watching Bela Tarr’s Satantango (Hungary 1994). The film is seven hours and 19 minutes long. A Hollywood director from the forties would use about 85 minutes with this material; Rod Serling probably could get the gist of the narrative in a half-hour Twilight Zone episode. Bela Tarr’s actors are compelling and the film is an immersive experience; you drown in it. Tarr’s enormous, punishing duration has a kind of fractal structure; the film uses duration as an object of contemplation at all possible levels – the situation is fantastically protracted, individual shots are enormously distended; sequences are punitively long; and the film goes on forever – the characters are dirty and foul beyond belief, the sets ridiculously squalid, and the Hungarian steppes like the movie itself seem extend in all directions forever. In fairness to Tarr, who is a great artist (although one might argue that his films are too punishing to be works of art), the film’s endures, as well in your memory. For days after you have watched the last images, parts of the picture remain in your imagination and disturb you. Not so much a plot as a situation, the film seems to document the collapse of a collective farm isolated on the Hungarian plains by distance and ceaseless rain and mud. A messianic figure arrives and imposes his will on the dispirited farmers. A little girl tortures a cat and takes rat poison. A fat elderly and diabetic doctor forages the dismal landscape for booze. Sometimes, bells ring. This is the Twilight Zone aspect of the picture: the bells are ringing in a church destroyed and its steeple leveled in the last war. The movie is too long and difficult for me to recommend to anyone but the most earnest and patient cinephiles. For most people interested in cinema, the movie will be a rumor, a fabulous monstrosity hidden in film history, unseen, but often mentioned, legend glimpsed from time to time, but impossible to grasp. I will write about this film in an essay.