Bela Tarr

There are, of course, a few other things you could do in the 420 minutes it takes to watch Bela Tarr's 1994 masterpiece "Satantango," which begins a six-day run today at the Museum of Modern Art. You could, for instance, commit slow spiritual suicide by watching 14 back-to-back episodes of "Everybody Loves Raymond." At seven hours, not including two scheduled 15-minute breaks, this Hungarian film is one of those unusual works of contemporary art that demand from the audience a concentrated commitment - the luxury of time.

Born in 1955, Mr. Tarr has built a reputation among dedicated cinephiles, particularly those lucky enough to travel the international festival circuit, where for the last few decades he has been a favorite if irregular fixture. Among his champions was Susan Sontag, who included him in her short 1995 lament about the state of the art, "A Century of Cinema." As the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, Mr. Tarr's name was not included in a later version of this essay published in The New York Times Magazine. The omission not only further marginalized an already commercially marginalized artist, but also strengthened Sontag's pessimistic argument that cinema was a "decadent" art in the midst of an "ignominious, irreversible decline."

That's too bad; Mr. Tarr's work already presents its own formidable hurdles. Based on a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, "Satantango" traces the fate of a small, isolated community that attaches itself to a mysterious messiahlike figure of dubious character. The opening scene, which seems calculated to weed out fainthearted viewers, tracks a herd of cows as they meanderingly exit a barn and enter the muddy yard of the near-desolate village, with its cracked building walls and prodigiously strewn trash. As he does throughout the film, Mr. Tarr shoots this luxuriantly paced scene in long shot, using his beautiful framing and richly gradated black-and-white tones to find beauty in every miserable and mundane corner.

In time, we meet the town's other slow-moving inhabitants - men, women and, notoriously, a young girl - none of whom appear more evolved than the wandering cows. The film is divided into 12 chapters and replicates, Mr. Tarr has explained, the structure of a tango used by the novel: six steps forward, six steps back. (The title translates as "Satan's Tango.") In more immediate terms, the film unfolds as a series of extended, occasionally overlapping set pieces that underscore the townspeople's ritualistic lack of forward motion. The first time we watch an alcohol-soaked barroom dance alongside an outsider looking in, the scene seems merely ridiculous; later, after that character commits suicide and we return to the bar a second time, the revel has turned into a dance of the damned.

In an interview in the online journal Kinoeye, Mr. Tarr explained his predilection for long takes: "The people of this generation know information-cut, information-cut, information-cut. They can follow the logic of it, the logic of the story, but they don't follow the logic of life." In "Satantango," life is beautiful and grotesque by turns, and never less than mesmerizing. In this grubby corner of the universe, men and women steal from one another, spy on their neighbors, walk (a lot) and drink themselves into oblivion, while a lost, lonely child tortures her cat, then lies in the weeds to wait for deliverance. (Animal lovers beware: although Mr. Tarr claimed in a 2001 interview that the cat was not harmed during the film and was now living with him, it is clearly in distress.)

"Satantango" certainly demands time, but the story - which can be read as an allegory for the collapse of Communism and the false promise of capitalism - is relatively straightforward, with little (at least as far as I can tell) of the intertextual complication of, say, one of Jean-Luc Godard's works. Indeed, the film is filled with long passages that have relatively little dialogue, which forces you to play close attention to Mr. Tarr's brilliant sound design - to the ominous buzzing of a fly, a fat man's rhythmic wheezing and the syncopated sounds of three men climbing a staircase. Plans are apparently afoot to bring the film to DVD, but as with Mr. Tarr's gorgeous long takes, these sounds of life are best appreciated in a theater like that at MoMA, where the sacred contract between film and filmgoer has yet to be broken.

"Satantango" continues through Monday at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 708-9400.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/dvd_review.asp?ID=871

Artifical Eye rarely does a bad job, if you have a region-free.

Some Thoughts and Observations.

-The episodic structure of the film lends itself to getting split up. If you wanted to, you could probably watch an episode or two at a time like a tv show.

-Is it just me, or does this film feel like a long mercy fuck between Bresson and Kieslowski?

-It does not feel that long while you watch it. I've seen 90 minute Godard films that felt longer.

-The big dance scene is the newest member of my favorite scenes evah list. And a few others are bubbling under.

-I didn't count heads at the start, but there were probably 50 or so viewers at the first screening. About 30 minutes in, I could hear at least one person snoring. About 90 minutes in (during the first ep about the doctor) there were noticible walkouts. About three hours in, during the cat wrestling scene, there were even more. At the end of the night, I counted 25 heads. The next evening brought at least 24 (some people came in late) and about 21 made it through to the end, though no one stayed for the end credits.

i was really excited to see it this weekend at the MFAH, but i couldnt pass on the NFL playoffs :(

It was showing at the Film Center when I was visiting Portland but the wife was having none of it. NOW it's screening in Berkeley...on her birthday! Curse you, movie gods!

I'm in the burbs near Sugar Land.

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid31216.aspx

http://www.hlo.hu/object.06e4f656-18ec-4114-91ff-f17cde548173.ivy

See also: the one in Damnation that involves about 100 drunk people

http://bam.org/film/series.aspx?id=118

I guess showing Werckmeister on Oscar night is maximal counterprogramming.

re an ILE post of Eric's ... the consensus on The Man from London tips negative, but is hardly unqualified.

http://daily.greencine.com/archives/003803.html

Bela Tarr [Started by jay blanchard (jay blanchard), last updated Thursday, September 6, 2007 1:54 PM] 1 new answer

Anyone know when this is out on DVD ? Can't find any info on it.

how about letting it have a theatrical run first?

So old skool you are!

I've only seen his stuff in theaters, cuz I've read you can barely see anything on the DVDs that have come out.

need to check this guy out. favorite director of finnish film critic girl i have impossible crush on.

she doesn't prefer Aki Kaurismaki?

Eek! My Kaurismaki ignorance lost me major points, too :(

(She didn't know who Hsiao-Hsien was, though..)

I can't remember where, but I seem to remember hearing that Artificial Eye had picked up The Man from London. Anyhow - I'd be shocked if it shows up on DVD before the end of 2008.

Speaking of Kaurismaki, Artificial Eye is supposedly releasing ten of his films to DVD in the next month or so - the set of Shadows in Paradise, Ariel & the Match Factory Girl should be available on the 24th!

http://www.artificial-eye.com/dvd/ART350dvd/main.html

this is one of the few directors who probably does need to be seen on a big screen.

kaurismaki is some joke played by the finns.

shd I see Man from London? tonight?

JRo on Satantango:

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=14983

I'm glad to see that the book's getting a translation too. Krasznahorkai is great.

Reports from the Berlinale on The Turin Horse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vdRTQo39YE

Satantango on Super Bowl Sunday @ LincCtr from 2-11 pm, bitchez

see u dere

lol counterprogramming

they're doing it Saturday too if you're versatile.

the novel Satantango has finally been translated into English and will be available in 2 weeks.

http://www.amazon.com/Satantango-L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3-Krasznahorkai/dp/0811217345

I saw The Turin Horse yesterday in an empty theatre. I am still undecided about how I finally feel about it - at times, I found it incredibly pretentious and dirgey, even for Bela Tarr, which I guess is the point. But the more I think about it, the more I appreciate it, particularly the way it makes some of his other films seem like pretty light fare in comparison. It may be that we have less need for films like this now, but at least phenomenologically, it probably is the most effective of the recent clutch of endtimes art films. I wonder what it is like to work on a Bela Tarr set?

The big dance scene is the newest member of my favorite scenes evah list.
― The Dusty Baker Selection (Charles McCain), Tuesday, January 9, 2007 4:02 PM (5 years ago)

I'm two-thirds of the way through Satantango, so I just lightly skimmed this thread looking for some mention of that scene. Unbelievably good--not the actual tango part, the 10 minutes of insanity before that. I was trying to think of some way to describe the music and couldn't. If you'd asked me yesterday "What movie scene best captures what it's like to be drunk," I probably would have answered the "Rubber Biscuit" scene in Mean Streets. But Satantango beats it.

I wonder why Turin Horse felt less eventful than Jeanne Dielman, when they had a great deal (albeit superficially) in common, but with Dad, the equine, and gypsies added here.

It did win me over after the first 20 minutes of near self-parody, and some of the framing was exqisite, reminding me of Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Ford (counterintuitively, tho I think the b&w helps too), and the silent masters. Dad-actor had a great silent-era face.

Going to get around to watching it in the next week. Been tough to get myself in the mood for it though.

Found this from Sicinski:

Inside the hovel, Tarr stages the lives of the father and daughter as a kind of dour, Kafkaesque structural film, Jeanne Dielman without the tension.

http://academichack.net/TIFF2011.htm#screening

Got The Turin Horse out from the library. (I actually signed it out last year and returned it unwatched.) I didn't find it as weirdly interesting as Satantango or Werckmeister Harmonies, but it looked great, even at home, and it's the kind of thing where I want to go into school tomorrow and play the last scene for my students. Just so they can confront something that's beyond anything they can even begin to get their minds around, and in the hope that a couple of them will vaguely remember it years later. (Sort of like when my grade 8 teacher showed us an NFB film of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." I never forgot that.) The look on the old guy's face when his daughter would dress him was something. I was at a screening of Barry Lyndon yesterday, and the one line near the end describes that look very well: "utterly baffled and beaten," with a little extra baffled throw in, and even a strange sort of defiance. Their dinnertime ritual might be the most miserable thing I've ever seen in a film.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-po_XsQUAb0s/UDqR3Y3ixXI/AAAAAAAACK0/m5wV-vYOTwA/s1600/vlcsnap-2012-08-26-16h14m28s118.png

lmao I think I got the very last one of these

https://shoparbelosfilms.com/products/satantango-blu-ray-with-limited-edition-slipcase

whoa! is the "intermission filmstrip bookmark" like a snip of the intermission frames from the actual film?

My guess is: no, just a reproduction