Sátántangó (1994)
dir. Béla Tarr
Rated: N/A
image: ©2019 Arbelos
You don’t just watch Sátántangó, Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s 7.5-hour paean to slow cinema. It seeps into your bones. At least, it seeped into mine.
Up until now, the movie was notoriously difficult to see. A flawless new 4K scan of the film, and imminent release on Blu-ray, will change that. Prior to 2019, the only home video release of the art film was a 2006 DVD by the Chicago non-profit cinema arts organization, Facets, which (I’ve been told) wasn’t the best transfer, and has now become all but impossible to find. So, with a beautiful transfer of it readily available, I suppose the only bragging rights left among cinephiles will be seeing all seven-and-a-half hours in one sitting in a theatrical setting.
I had the opportunity to do just that at Dallas’s historic Texas Theater, and the experience was exhilarating, transcendent, anger-inducing, exhausting, and ultimately very rewarding.
Sátántangó (the English translation is, quite helpfully, Satan’s Tango) is the story of the members of a farming collective in Soviet-controlled Hungary. When the collective collapses, various members scheme to flee with the profits from the sale of the community’s cattle herd. The situation becomes complicated when one of the members, long-thought dead by the others, returns to town to convince the group to give him the money in order to help them settle in a new commune elsewhere.
The most fascinating thing about Sátántangó is its structure. Based on the South American dance, which moves within a six steps forward, six steps back framework, the film is split into twelve distinct parts and moves forward and backward in time as we see the events play out from different characters’ perspectives. What keeps the picture so engaging, throughout the long takes that often show very little action, is piecing together just where in the story you are at any given time, and how the actions you’re watching now are affecting, and are affected by, what you’ve already seen.
And I’m not kidding about those long takes. The film famously starts with an eight-minute long tracking shot of the aforementioned herd of cows. Tarr is on record as saying there are only about 150 total shots contained within the film’s 432 minutes. A lot of them last somewhere in the 10-minute range, and it doesn’t take long for the effect to become hypnotic.
One of the sequences, which depicts the townsfolk drunkenly dancing in a bar to an accordion player’s music, becomes more – not less – transfixing as your eyes move from one dancer to the next over and over again. The sequence becomes meditative, almost transcendental. We see this party three times during the film, from three different perspectives. Tarr has claimed the actors were actually fall-down drunk during filming, and it’s not hard to believe.
Blurring the line between reality and fiction in Sátántangó prompted me to become infuriated with it. At almost the halfway point, we focus on a young girl, probably 10-years-old or so. Her name is Estike. Her brother takes advantage of her when he tells her that if they pool their meager money and bury it in the ground, it will magically grow into a money tree. She watches him bury it, then walks back home. A little while later, Estike walks back out to check on the deposit, and she discovers the money gone. She confronts her brother, who tells her to get lost.
At this point, Estike decides to take her anger out on the only thing she can find that has less power than she does: her pet cat. She tortures the cat, first hanging it up in a netted bag, then shoving its face into a saucer full of milk laced with rat poison. The sequence perfectly sums up the overarching themes of the film: nihilism; political and economic impotence; humanity’s inclination towards pettiness, anger, fear, and cruelty. The problem with it – the thing that made my blood boil – is that Tarr resorted to the exact behavior on which he was commenting. He has said in interviews that a veterinarian was on set the whole time, and that they absolutely did not actually kill the cat for the movie (I’m assuming the dead cat that Estike carries around with her after she poisons it was a fake).
But Tarr misses the point.
A real, live cat is hung from a bag. Then, its face is shoved again and again into a bowl of milk. Not to mention the fact that he asked a young girl to participate in these actions. Tarr’s aesthetic was for long takes and the camera observing its subjects in unbroken shots. It would have gone against that aesthetic, but there were ways to avoid torturing a defenseless animal. Cut around that shit. Use puppets. Art is not worth causing non-consensual suffering.
It is beyond a doubt that Sátántangó is an unparalleled work of art. Tarr’s dedication – the film was shot over a period of three years – is worthy of respect and awe. He uncovers truths about human existence over the course of those seven-and-a-half hours that most mainstream Hollywood movies never get near. It’s a shame he succumbed to some of humanity’s baser instincts in order attain his vision. Still, the incredibly rich, challenging experience of watching Sátántangó is one I will never forget. It’s also one I would be eager to return to in the future.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
Sátántangó is an amazing achievement, the infamous cat scene notwithstanding. I feel lucky to have gotten to experience it the way that I did. But, yeah, I had to dock it that half-star for the cat torture.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The day of the screening was an absolutely gorgeous day. I took the opportunity to stretch out in a hammock in the back yard for about an hour, since I knew I’d be spending the next eight hours in a dark, windowless room. The best quote of the afternoon was the person introducing the film saying: “Thanks for being here on this warm, sunny, beautiful November day to watch an eight-hour film about rain.” He wasn’t kidding. It rains A LOT in Sátántangó.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- There were somewhere around 20 or 30 of us who participated in this all-day event. That’s not a bad turnout for this type of screening. The Texas Theater was showing it two weekends in a row, and they offered us the choice of staying for the whole thing, or breaking it up, half one weekend, half the next, at no additional charge. I didn’t take close stock, but I think we all stayed for the whole day.