Bela Tarr's "Satantango" Dark Age Cinema
Bela Tarr’s Satantango (1994), a seven-and-one-quarter hour film, depicts a rain-sodden, isolated rural village whose joyless inhabitants move about in a kind of stupor. Like all of Tarr’s communities—the manor in Autumn Almanac, the towns in Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies—Satantango’s village is cut off from the productive life of the surrounding world. All of Tarr’s movies seem to take place within The Zone of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. No one seems to work, yet no one is starving. People just exist.
After the death of a girl whose suicide-by-poison is mistaken for death-by-exposure, a group of villagers fall under the sway of Irimias, a bearded, slightly dapper, innocent-looking villager who offers an impromptu eulogy and a moral judgment of the village. Irimias persuades the villagers to hand over their life savings and relocate to a country manor to start a collective farm sanctioned by the state. But instead of the Apostles failing Christ, Christ fails his Apostles: the manor is as barren as any other setting in the film and Irmias directs the villagers to disperse themselves around the country, dissolving what little community they have. Irimias is also a government spy whose reports reveal contempt for his flock.
Ambitiously and expertly crafted, the film has a stark Tarkovskian vision of muddy fields and vast plains punctuated by dark, spindly trees, extremely long, mobile takes in the tradition of fellow Hungarian Micklos Jansco, and a bitter Bunuelesque desecration of the Christ-Apostles story. A post-Soviet political allegory is also suggested, with Irmias as the self-appointed leader of an isolated “republic,” whose spying activity suggests that a Stasi-style police state apparatus is now a permanent feature of Eastern European states, communism or no.
The style of the film is characterized by mobile shots of characters moving through space, an ensemble cast, intertitles, mysterious music, one-sided dialogue scenes, off-screen conversations, and the repetition of certain scenes which are visualized from another angle, reflecting a different character’s perspective on an event we have already seen. The long takes are both interminable (a two minute zoom on an owl perched outside a window at night) and incredible. In one scene, the camera circles around the interior of a government office as two men talk, transcribe reports, smoke, and pause to have lunch. The camera constantly circles around them, and pans back and forth between the characters in an uninterrupted 10 minute take (note that the camera is on a dolly, not hand-held, while all the lighting must be attached to the ceiling). This is as arduous and ambitious a long take as has ever been attempted. Hungary must have the best trained actors and dolly grips in the world.
The film has the gloom, pessimism, and overall un-ingratiating tone of an artifact made in the wake of a disorientating social cataclysm: Dada and Surrealism after World War I; film noir after World War II, American paranoia-conspiracy films after Vietnam and Watergate. The image of a static, depopulated world recall Soviet films from the Era of Stagnation. The film is an inverted passion play (each intertitle is a station of the cross) in which physical endurance is not rewarded (the villagers as a lost tribe of Isreal who never reach a Promised Land), and faith is misplaced and betrayed by an unworthy leader.
In Tarkovsky’s films, rain is associated with the power of nature, rebirth, and cleansing—think of the sun shower which bathes horses on a riverbank at the end of Andrei Rublev. The mud and muck of Tarkovsky’s films is the growth medium for a rebirth of nature, (think of the tendrils of undulating algae in shallow streams in most of his films, or the rippling surface of the planet Solaris) which signal a rebirth of the human spirit, which together comprise Tarkovsky’s major theme. The rain in Tarr’s films is simply God or nature’s punishment of humanity. No rebirth or renewal of the land ever occurs. The constant deluge doesn’t even rise to the level of a Deluge, a righteous flood which in the DeMille/disaster film fashion could be an opportunity for spectacle and the dramatics of survival. The rain seems designed to wear humanity down, which seems to have already submitted.
The ambience of the film may be damp, but Tarr’s tone is exceedingly dry. He offers no clues to his exact intentions. During the eulogy scene Irimias could be a Christ-like messiah, millenarian cult leader, utopian socialist, or greedy huckster. Nothing in the actor’s performance or the way the scene is shot tells the viewer that Irmias should be seen as either sincere or fraudulent, impassioned or deluded (which is how most unworthy leaders seem at first). The film constantly throws the responsibility for interpretation onto the viewer. The narrator describes the thoughts of a character in a way that describes how we might approach the film, “She felt that these events aren’t connected by accident, but there is an indescribably beautiful meaning bridging them.” Note that she merely feels this. She doesn’t know it. Even the films sublimity is shrouded in doubt.
Rather than liberating the viewer’s judgment, as Brechtian theory would have it, Tarr makes us uncomfortable and weary of the demands placed on us. Tarr takes the principles of the long take and composition in depth to such extremes that Bazinian humanism is turned inside out into something like anti-humanism. We long for a cinematic guide just as the villagers seem to desire a deliverer. Perhaps political freedom, like interpretative freedom, is not all its cracked up to be, something revered in theory but not in practice.
The film’s pessimism is utterly un-romanticized. The film is too long, slow and devitalized for melodrama. The characters lack the hubris and passion for tragedy. The film is too straight-faced for satire. The depiction of the village is too uniform and believable for absurdism—treating the unreal as if it were real. The images are too tactile and the overall style too literal-minded for surrealism. Irony implies the audience being aware of a moral or other disparity that the characters within the fiction do not. But the characters’ actions—such as they are—seem so un-motivated that there is no clear moral position to take towards them from which an ironic stance could develop.
The images are unfailingly sharp, detailed, and deep, and held for many minutes for prolonged viewer inspection, a fulfillment of Bazanian principles of the long take and composition in depth. Yet the inspection doesn’t reveal a full world, but a one-note, endless world of mud, isolation, and enervation. The further into the distance we look the more we perceive vastness and sameness. And the images are held for so long we exhaust their meaning, grow impatient with them, and experience sheer duration rather than “real time.” Because certain scenes are repeated—viewed from a different angle—we have endurance doubled. The use of non-professional actors and a rural setting recall various neorealisms. But the villagers are not ennobled and the village is not favorably contrasted with the city. Thus Satantango flirts with a number of modern cinema aesthetics but fulfills none of them.
Instead of dramatizing anomie, the film seems perversely designed to inflict it on the viewer. Film viewership and human existence itself are Sisyphisian labors inflicted on the audience and characters by a capricious deity who offers neither closure nor redemption, whose ultimate motivation is never revealed. Irimias defines himself in a way that seems to sum up Tarr’s intentions: “Don’t take me to be a liberator. Regard me as a sad researcher who investigates why everything is as terrible as it is.” Naturally, Irmias never discovers this “why” and Tarr is similarly mute on the subject.
The anti-humanism implicit in all this is leavened somewhat by the one bright spot in the film, an island within the texture of the narrative: an impromptu dance party in the town’s dinghy pub. The drunken dancers cavort, prance, tussle, and embrace exuberantly—endlessly—while a villager plays a repetitive tune on an accordion, like a needle skipping on a record. It is a fluorescent-lit, chaotic version of a Dutch joie d’ vivre/genre painting, a Fordian communal dance as mosh-pit bacchanal. This is the only note of sentiment in the film, albeit a well-earned one: the ability of people to find community and pleasure within even the bleakest environment using simple means; their bodies and an accordion.
Tarr wrests additional poignancy from the scene because this is the last human activity Estike, the girl who commits suicide, witnesses. The first time we view the dance is from outside the pub, looking in through a window, the dancing visually compressed and distant. A reverse angle from inside the pub shows Estike looking in, her eyes open in a sleepy wonderment. Or is she crying? Does this scene represent to her a joy that she will never share, thus hastening her suicide? Does this humane vision actually give her the peace of mind to conclude her life on “happy note”? Although ambiguity reigns again, Tarr gives us just enough information to make an interpretation that can lead to an emotional insight and response. The one ray of hope in the film—literally—is a change in the weather. The rain abates at the end of the movie. Sunlight warms the town square and, for once, the streets are dry. Years of movie viewing has conditioned us for an upbeat ending.
But the film takes a final turn for the worse. The last shot of the film depicts a man—Doc—boarding up the window through which he, and the audience looking over his shoulder, have observed people coming and going within the village. Distant, tolling bells on the soundtrack (shades of Bergman), which will continue over the end titles, could be mournful or celebratory, signifying either a funeral or a strange sort of transcendence.
As each board is nailed across the window the room, which has no other illumination, becomes darker, until Doc has sealed himself and the viewer in total darkness. Both Doc’s window on the world and our window (the cinema screen) have been neutralized. Everything, it seems, will stay as terrible or perhaps even get worse.
Among the villagers Doc was the least inclined to socialize or go outside. He has retreated back to his room and by sealing the window is retreating even further. The viewer is trapped in the darkened room with Doc. We are offered no more freedom, no wider perspective, any more light or hope than he is. We are lost and alone together. As punishing as the elements and untrustworthy as people can be, individuals create their own traps and art need not offer any respite from the gathering gloom. The film seems to be admitting to its own inability or unwillingness to provide a “window on the world” for the viewer. Vision reveals nothing and might as well be ended. This is an anti-cinema, anti-art gesture, denying the efficacy of cinema itself.
The tolling bell at the end of Andrei Rublev signaled the end of the dark ages, both for the tormented protagonist and the long-suffering Russian nation. But in Satantango, after more than seven hours of stasis and frustrated movement, the final shot suggests the beginning of a new dark ages—or the very extinction of humanity itself, the pulse of human civilization having slowed and stopped. Much more than the conclusion of Godard’s Weekend, the end of Satantango is a truly definitive and chilling “end of movie/end of cinema.”
After the death of a girl whose suicide-by-poison is mistaken for death-by-exposure, a group of villagers fall under the sway of Irimias, a bearded, slightly dapper, innocent-looking villager who offers an impromptu eulogy and a moral judgment of the village. Irimias persuades the villagers to hand over their life savings and relocate to a country manor to start a collective farm sanctioned by the state. But instead of the Apostles failing Christ, Christ fails his Apostles: the manor is as barren as any other setting in the film and Irmias directs the villagers to disperse themselves around the country, dissolving what little community they have. Irimias is also a government spy whose reports reveal contempt for his flock.
Ambitiously and expertly crafted, the film has a stark Tarkovskian vision of muddy fields and vast plains punctuated by dark, spindly trees, extremely long, mobile takes in the tradition of fellow Hungarian Micklos Jansco, and a bitter Bunuelesque desecration of the Christ-Apostles story. A post-Soviet political allegory is also suggested, with Irmias as the self-appointed leader of an isolated “republic,” whose spying activity suggests that a Stasi-style police state apparatus is now a permanent feature of Eastern European states, communism or no.
The style of the film is characterized by mobile shots of characters moving through space, an ensemble cast, intertitles, mysterious music, one-sided dialogue scenes, off-screen conversations, and the repetition of certain scenes which are visualized from another angle, reflecting a different character’s perspective on an event we have already seen. The long takes are both interminable (a two minute zoom on an owl perched outside a window at night) and incredible. In one scene, the camera circles around the interior of a government office as two men talk, transcribe reports, smoke, and pause to have lunch. The camera constantly circles around them, and pans back and forth between the characters in an uninterrupted 10 minute take (note that the camera is on a dolly, not hand-held, while all the lighting must be attached to the ceiling). This is as arduous and ambitious a long take as has ever been attempted. Hungary must have the best trained actors and dolly grips in the world.
The film has the gloom, pessimism, and overall un-ingratiating tone of an artifact made in the wake of a disorientating social cataclysm: Dada and Surrealism after World War I; film noir after World War II, American paranoia-conspiracy films after Vietnam and Watergate. The image of a static, depopulated world recall Soviet films from the Era of Stagnation. The film is an inverted passion play (each intertitle is a station of the cross) in which physical endurance is not rewarded (the villagers as a lost tribe of Isreal who never reach a Promised Land), and faith is misplaced and betrayed by an unworthy leader.
In Tarkovsky’s films, rain is associated with the power of nature, rebirth, and cleansing—think of the sun shower which bathes horses on a riverbank at the end of Andrei Rublev. The mud and muck of Tarkovsky’s films is the growth medium for a rebirth of nature, (think of the tendrils of undulating algae in shallow streams in most of his films, or the rippling surface of the planet Solaris) which signal a rebirth of the human spirit, which together comprise Tarkovsky’s major theme. The rain in Tarr’s films is simply God or nature’s punishment of humanity. No rebirth or renewal of the land ever occurs. The constant deluge doesn’t even rise to the level of a Deluge, a righteous flood which in the DeMille/disaster film fashion could be an opportunity for spectacle and the dramatics of survival. The rain seems designed to wear humanity down, which seems to have already submitted.
The ambience of the film may be damp, but Tarr’s tone is exceedingly dry. He offers no clues to his exact intentions. During the eulogy scene Irimias could be a Christ-like messiah, millenarian cult leader, utopian socialist, or greedy huckster. Nothing in the actor’s performance or the way the scene is shot tells the viewer that Irmias should be seen as either sincere or fraudulent, impassioned or deluded (which is how most unworthy leaders seem at first). The film constantly throws the responsibility for interpretation onto the viewer. The narrator describes the thoughts of a character in a way that describes how we might approach the film, “She felt that these events aren’t connected by accident, but there is an indescribably beautiful meaning bridging them.” Note that she merely feels this. She doesn’t know it. Even the films sublimity is shrouded in doubt.
Rather than liberating the viewer’s judgment, as Brechtian theory would have it, Tarr makes us uncomfortable and weary of the demands placed on us. Tarr takes the principles of the long take and composition in depth to such extremes that Bazinian humanism is turned inside out into something like anti-humanism. We long for a cinematic guide just as the villagers seem to desire a deliverer. Perhaps political freedom, like interpretative freedom, is not all its cracked up to be, something revered in theory but not in practice.
The film’s pessimism is utterly un-romanticized. The film is too long, slow and devitalized for melodrama. The characters lack the hubris and passion for tragedy. The film is too straight-faced for satire. The depiction of the village is too uniform and believable for absurdism—treating the unreal as if it were real. The images are too tactile and the overall style too literal-minded for surrealism. Irony implies the audience being aware of a moral or other disparity that the characters within the fiction do not. But the characters’ actions—such as they are—seem so un-motivated that there is no clear moral position to take towards them from which an ironic stance could develop.
The images are unfailingly sharp, detailed, and deep, and held for many minutes for prolonged viewer inspection, a fulfillment of Bazanian principles of the long take and composition in depth. Yet the inspection doesn’t reveal a full world, but a one-note, endless world of mud, isolation, and enervation. The further into the distance we look the more we perceive vastness and sameness. And the images are held for so long we exhaust their meaning, grow impatient with them, and experience sheer duration rather than “real time.” Because certain scenes are repeated—viewed from a different angle—we have endurance doubled. The use of non-professional actors and a rural setting recall various neorealisms. But the villagers are not ennobled and the village is not favorably contrasted with the city. Thus Satantango flirts with a number of modern cinema aesthetics but fulfills none of them.
Instead of dramatizing anomie, the film seems perversely designed to inflict it on the viewer. Film viewership and human existence itself are Sisyphisian labors inflicted on the audience and characters by a capricious deity who offers neither closure nor redemption, whose ultimate motivation is never revealed. Irimias defines himself in a way that seems to sum up Tarr’s intentions: “Don’t take me to be a liberator. Regard me as a sad researcher who investigates why everything is as terrible as it is.” Naturally, Irmias never discovers this “why” and Tarr is similarly mute on the subject.
The anti-humanism implicit in all this is leavened somewhat by the one bright spot in the film, an island within the texture of the narrative: an impromptu dance party in the town’s dinghy pub. The drunken dancers cavort, prance, tussle, and embrace exuberantly—endlessly—while a villager plays a repetitive tune on an accordion, like a needle skipping on a record. It is a fluorescent-lit, chaotic version of a Dutch joie d’ vivre/genre painting, a Fordian communal dance as mosh-pit bacchanal. This is the only note of sentiment in the film, albeit a well-earned one: the ability of people to find community and pleasure within even the bleakest environment using simple means; their bodies and an accordion.
Tarr wrests additional poignancy from the scene because this is the last human activity Estike, the girl who commits suicide, witnesses. The first time we view the dance is from outside the pub, looking in through a window, the dancing visually compressed and distant. A reverse angle from inside the pub shows Estike looking in, her eyes open in a sleepy wonderment. Or is she crying? Does this scene represent to her a joy that she will never share, thus hastening her suicide? Does this humane vision actually give her the peace of mind to conclude her life on “happy note”? Although ambiguity reigns again, Tarr gives us just enough information to make an interpretation that can lead to an emotional insight and response. The one ray of hope in the film—literally—is a change in the weather. The rain abates at the end of the movie. Sunlight warms the town square and, for once, the streets are dry. Years of movie viewing has conditioned us for an upbeat ending.
But the film takes a final turn for the worse. The last shot of the film depicts a man—Doc—boarding up the window through which he, and the audience looking over his shoulder, have observed people coming and going within the village. Distant, tolling bells on the soundtrack (shades of Bergman), which will continue over the end titles, could be mournful or celebratory, signifying either a funeral or a strange sort of transcendence.
As each board is nailed across the window the room, which has no other illumination, becomes darker, until Doc has sealed himself and the viewer in total darkness. Both Doc’s window on the world and our window (the cinema screen) have been neutralized. Everything, it seems, will stay as terrible or perhaps even get worse.
Among the villagers Doc was the least inclined to socialize or go outside. He has retreated back to his room and by sealing the window is retreating even further. The viewer is trapped in the darkened room with Doc. We are offered no more freedom, no wider perspective, any more light or hope than he is. We are lost and alone together. As punishing as the elements and untrustworthy as people can be, individuals create their own traps and art need not offer any respite from the gathering gloom. The film seems to be admitting to its own inability or unwillingness to provide a “window on the world” for the viewer. Vision reveals nothing and might as well be ended. This is an anti-cinema, anti-art gesture, denying the efficacy of cinema itself.
The tolling bell at the end of Andrei Rublev signaled the end of the dark ages, both for the tormented protagonist and the long-suffering Russian nation. But in Satantango, after more than seven hours of stasis and frustrated movement, the final shot suggests the beginning of a new dark ages—or the very extinction of humanity itself, the pulse of human civilization having slowed and stopped. Much more than the conclusion of Godard’s Weekend, the end of Satantango is a truly definitive and chilling “end of movie/end of cinema.”
posted by John P. Garry at 9:03 PM
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