Left Field Cinema

Pace and length. They’re two very important elements in film production. The runtime of a film and a films pace can make or break a feature film in terms of commercial concerns. For Hollywood, the variance in pace and length is limited to a very narrow set of parameters and restrictions, the shorter in length and the faster in pace the better. It all boils down to financial concerns, if a film is ninety minutes long instead of a hundred and fifty minutes long it can mean the difference between showing it in a cinema five times a day or eight times a day. Basically the longer it is the harder it is to make money. Beyond three hours it becomes really difficult. Luckily for Satantango’s director Bela Tarr, commercial concerns are not foremost on his mind. With an almost undefendable run time, clocking in at an astronomical seven hours and thirty minutes, it is over two hours longer than the next longest film I’ve ever seen, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander full cut being a mere five hours. Satantango’s run time, and parts of its content make it difficult for me to recommend to everyone, but hopefully by the end of this episode you can decide if it’s a film for you or not.

Based on the novel by Tarr’s long time collaborator Laszlo Krasznnahorkai. Satantango takes place in a financially deprived village in rural Hungary during the 1980’s. Autumn has arrived, the weather has turned foul and the villagers are awaiting a large cash payment. A con man arrives in town, and sets about exploiting the death of a child to trick the somewhat idiotic villiagers into parting with their money. It doesn’t sound like the sort of film you can get seven hours of content out of does it? But what would take an average director seven minutes to complete, Tarr takes seven and a half hours to present. Satantango isn’t excessively long because the story is so complex and intricate that it requires the length to cram everything in, it’s because Tarr likes events to unravel slowly, very, very slowly. The narrative is divided into twelve episodes, each episode moves onto another character or set of characters, then leaving them to return later. The episodes vary in interest, content and persons, and through them all we gather a true sense of the population of this rural hell hole. Only a couple of dozen people live there, and the major commodity appears to be cows, supplemented by booze, medicines, and sex. Often the episodes will have meaning, but the meaning is often obscured, the mysteries unsolved, the questions left unanswered. The film is an exercise in hermeticism. The esoteric nature of Satantango can be infuriating at times, after the first three hours or so I found myself longing for just one shot which cut before the two minute mark or one character who could really say what he or she means. But this infuriation is part of the experience Tarr is delivering, a firm believer that to some degree art should challenge, and provoke the audience and that films are as much about endurance as they are about entertainment. Make no mistake about it; this film is all about how much you can endure. It might entertain you at times, but for vast stretches it will test your patience to the limit. Watching Satantango in one sitting is not advisable, as the film is as long as an average working day, and as slow paced. It is a challenge to get through the film in such a manner. However on DVD it is split onto three discs, so my advice would be to watch it one disc at a time over several days. This way you stand a far more likely chance of making it all the way to the final shot. I don’t wish to dwell on the runtime but it is part of what makes this film unique. It’s not the longest film ever made, in fact it’s not even close: John Henry Timmis’ film playfully titled The Cure for Insomnia leaves Satantango far behind at a ridiculously staggering run time of 87 hours, it is still currently the longest film ever made. I have never watched the film, but with no plot line to speak of it is notoriously difficult to watch and very few people have ever seen it all the way through let alone seen it all in one sitting.

So far I don’t seem to be doing a great job of selling this film. The truth is that Satantango is hard to access, difficult to understand, and often downright unpleasant to watch. Never the less, I do not for one second regret watching it, or feel that I wasted my time. More than that, I found the experience to be a rewarding and at times enjoyable. Here are some reasons why: the visual splendor, shot entirely in crisp black and white thirty-five millimeter stock. The imagery is dark, gentle and mesmerizing. The shots track or dolly ever so slowly around this dingy location, taking its time it glides effortlessly past many characters. Often focusing on nothing in particular, some shots take up to ten minutes focusing on one element. A hilarious scene involving the entire village dancing aimlessly in the local bar, just gets funnier every minute that passes, the expectation of the next cut is pushed further and further away. Episode eleven of the film is the most random featuring two unknown military officers not part of the main narrative working late. The episode is one exhausting shot, which continually moves around the characters 360 degrees, like a really slow Michael Bay money shot. Andrei Tarkovsky’s influence can be seen on Tarr, the look of the film is very much akin to some of Tarkovsky’s early work, especially his sophomore feature film Andrei Rublev. The focus is never off, often giving us crystal clear stubble on a man’s cheek, or fine detail in a woman’s iris. The use of light, makes the blacks feel poignant, the contrasts rich and luscious; slowly grading from black to white through every shade of grey. For 1994 this film is visually incredible, and along with The Thin Red Line, Three Colours Trilogy, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels it boosts some of the best cinematography of its production decade. Some of the shots are literally unforgettable, often because of their simplicity, for example a long tracking shot following a young girl walking for about five minutes, the camera slowly zooms in and out as her proximity to the lens changes, this has the rather disorientating effect of keeping her in the same position in the shot but making the background shrink and then expand. There are literally dozens of impressive shots in this film, they come one after another, always slow and measured, sometimes the participants seem staged, but deliberately so, Tarr along with the films cinematographer and long time Tarr collaborator Gabor Medvigy, have created a very distinctive and mouthwatering style. Earlier another impressive shot tracks behind three men walking through the windy streets, large piles of dead leafs and light street debris follow them, being pushed by this invisible force. Again, as with Tarkovsky’s films, wind plays a powerful part in Satantango: often heard howling outside the buildings sometime pelting the village with rain or simply herding around the dead vegetation. At times it reminds of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The Last Picture House which used wind to a similar effect, in a similarly depressingly poor village. More than anything in Satantango and The Last Picture House, this most forceful of natural phenomena adds a sense of something more powerful at play as it remains simultaneously the most obvious of elements and also the most invisible. Nature is dangerous, it feels like it’s controlled by more than just random combinations, there is almost a consciousness behind it here. There is a mystical undertone to Satantango, it subtly permeates through the narrative. A mysterious sound of ambient ringing occasionally engulfs the scene for no reason and with no discernable source. Fog moves like a predatory animal, bells chime out from a distance, and people’s motives for unusual and unpleasant behavior are obscured from view. It all comes together with a unique and unquestionable feeling of menace and magic at play in this strange little world Tarr and company have created.

It is also worth noting, that Satantango is one of the only films I’ve nearly turned off. Not because of the length or the pace but because of the films centre piece, episode five, which involves the young girl torturing a domestic cat for what feels like an eternity and then killing the animal with rat poison. This sequence invokes a kinesthetic and visceral reaction in the audience, the cats terrified squeals are genuine, its confusion and worry is literally sickening to watch and morally dubious at best. Its slow death is equally horrific to watch. Despite wrestling with my principles I persevered and feel happier for it, it was literally the most difficult thirty minutes of any film I’ve ever had to watch. It’s not the first time animals have been harmed on screen, but there is malice at play within the character of this young girl who is obviously confused by this cruel world she exists in. Her attitude towards the cat is distressing in performance, but also artistically can Tarr justify this type of action in his film? Something for an ethics debate perhaps.

Despite the horrific nature of this episode, Satantango is also filled with contrastingly beautiful scenes and moments, a perfect epigraph for the films story line shows an extended shot of a heard of cows moving through the village, aimlessly, not following a leader, but all heading in the same directions. How this masterful image was choreographed so perfectly is beyond me. The aforementioned extended dance sequence; and other images of the villagers in unity staring at their new home, or all passing around and sharing the same bottle of water. But all the time they are observed by nature, at night a congregation try to sleep together in the ruins of an old mansion or castle the whole time unaware of an owl sat above them calmly examining the new residence. Such brief but touching moments are made all the more poignant by the misery of what surrounds them, man and nature are both trapped together in this hell on earth, the cows, the birds, and even the domestic cat.

This film is just about the polar opposite of commercial main stream cinema, Michael Bay’s Transformers for example being the reverse of this film in every possible sense with more cuts in the first five minutes than Satantango has in its entirety.

If you have the patience to make it through this colossal film, then you will find the experience very rewarding, the films imagery is so starkly bleak and original that it will haunt you months after viewing it. The films content is so testing that it almost views like right of passage for art house cinephiles; but more than any of this, you will never see anything quite like Satantango again.

M.Dawson