A Film Canon

Based on the novel by Laszlo Kraznahorkai, who also co-wrote the screenplay, Sátántangó is Bela Tarr's magnum opus - a seven-hour, black and white, episodic examination of the last days of a desecrated Hungarian Communist compound. What little action occurs revolves around the arrival of Irimias (Mihaly Vig), the compound's unofficial leader, who disappeared some years before, and now returns, proposing a redistribution of the inhabitants and their funds in the name of some future, better collective that's only ever formulated apocalyptically. Whether Irimias is a confidence tricker or Communist prophet ultimately seems less important than his prescience of the way in which the dissolution of Communist infrastructure has left the workers craving work; or, rather, has forced them to deflect the invigorating repetition of physical labour into the enervating monotony of visual labour, of waiting for an event that never arrives, of watching for a disruption of the horizon that never occurs. This waiting without waiting, and watching without watching, informs the cyclical narrative structure of the film - based, as the title might suggest, on the six steps forward and back of the tango - as well as Tarr's proclivity for the long take, and it's the resultant, radical slowness that remains the most striking signature of the film. Whereas Andrei Tarkovsky, Tarr's most obvious 'slow' forbear, uses the long take to deepen and 'sculpt' time, Tarr uses it to flatten and denude time, externalising 'subjective' duration as mere lived duration. As a result, his long takes are as devoid of mobility as possible, and completely free of any kind of acrobatic or flamboyant cinematography, culminating with a series of frozen or near-frozen shots that last so long that you can almost feel the camera blink. After a while, there's nothing left to look at or notice apart from mild breathing, and then even that's exhausted, creating a kind of still life, or memento mori, that fuses the human figure and voice into the very architecture of the compound, paving the way for the nexus between the characters' and narrator's voices, diegetic and non-diegetic blackness, that closes the film. This may explain Tarr's use of the animal body as a kind of surrogate affective surface - most spectacularly in the eight-minute long tracking shot of a herd of cattle that opens the narrative, but most disturbingly in the torture of a cat that occurs halfway through - and forces the audience into exactly the same position as the characters it depicts. As a result, and against the proportionate critical insistence on how consistently fascinating the film is - even Susan Sontag, one of its most ardent champions, could only bear to watch it once a year - everything happens that might be expected to happen during the kind of visual labour the characters are forced to endure - the mind wanders, the body becomes physically restless, it becomes necessary to collapse diachronic into synchronic time, focusing on local indices of endurance and, finally, there's a masochistic acceptance, a dialectical communion with the heaviness of Tarr's world. It's an experience that strains and blunts the aesthetic faculties even as the film remains consistently beautiful - although the more dialogue- and narrative-oriented segments towards the end don't seem to play to Tarr's essentially abstract strengths - resulting in a kind of drunkenness, a stupor that doesn't make our appreciation of Tarr's constant explorations of light, water and glass much different from the material basis of those explorations, the vodka that everybody swills to numb the pain. What seems like a quite stylised, extended, numbed stare on the part of virtually every character at the beginning of the film simply becomes the position of the audience by the end, as well as the camera, which, thanks to a series of hypnotic, metronomic repetitions, gradually attains a relative stasis, as if it's finally become slow enough to simply register the movement of the earth itself, or whatever indiscernibility Tarr is gesturing towards. It's this indiscernibility, ultimately, his attempt to make darkness visible, that both cements Tarr as a remodernist and prevents the film being read as any convenient or straightforward political allegory, unless it's as an allegory of people who've been so numbed by political change and machination that they've lost any ability to engage with it meaningfully; an allegory of political overdetermination, resistant, by its very nature, to interpretative overdetermination. It's also this repetitive indiscernibility that gives the film its existential, absurd, and even comic qualities - carnivalesque in glacial motion - puncturing Tarr's tendency towards philosophical disquisition - and even this generally reaches an absurd, grotesque, unbearable pitch - with the rhythmic reminder that "Misery is still misery. The two spoonfuls we have only make the air thinner in front of our mouths."