Three Conversations With Béla Tarr, A Video Essay and A Recent Viewing of His Film Sátántangó (1994)

 

Video Essay: Orders of Time and Motion - The shots of "Sátántangó"

 
A new video essay explores the images on screen in Béla Tarr's epic film. By Kevin B. Lee.
 

 Lee's new video essay was made for the release of the restoration of Béla Tarr's Sátántangó (1994). The video essay is also available on the Arbelos's Sátántangó Blu-ray.  MUBI, February 1, 2021

Sátántangó, following its bewildering eight-minute prologue tracking shot of cattle wandering aimlessly around the weathered structures and mud-soaked grounds of a deserted farming estate in rural Hungary, opens with a shot of a dim and basic furnished room gradually filling with morning light as a man named Futaki  (Miklós Székely), having risen off-screen out of bed, hesitantly approaches the window to investigate the tolling of imaginary church bells that have woken him from his sleep. The final shot, seven hours later, is its inverse: another man, known as the Doctor (Peter Berling), boards up his cluttered room by nailing wooden planks to the window, the room incrementally robbed of light, the disembodied echoing peel of bells ringing in his (and our) ears as the screen turns a final black. Two mirroring images reflecting opposites: lightness and darkness, a move towards and away from the world, from cradle to coffin, a circle opening and closing. Contained between each of those distant poles is an expansive, and blissfully slow epic of monumental cinematic proportion and cultural standing. Indeed, few films of the past twenty-five years have attained the kind of venerable status that Béla Tarr’s 1994 Sátántangó has achieved, to the point where its reputation as one of the greatest achievements in world cinema has transcended its own materiality as a “film,” and transitioned into becoming a sacred art object that is revered and studied with as much devotion as perplexity. It is not so much a film that you watch, as it is a work of art that lives in you for a while or longer, depending on your disposition. It consumes you as much as you consume it.

 Based on the eponymous 1985 novel by friend and frequent collaborator László Krasnahorkai, the film is set in the twilight days of Communist Hungary on a collective farm in serious financial and moral decline. Cut off from the nearby town by the incessant autumn rains, the villagers’s plan to abandon the estate after splitting their year’s worth of pay is interrupted by the imminent arrival of former farm worker turned police informer Irimiás (Mihály Vig) and his sidekick Petrina (Putyi Horváth), whose manipulative powers enable him to hold a god-like sway over the townspeople. So goes a rudimentary summarization of the film’s main storyline, yet it does not begin to suggest the formally intricate architectonics of its construction, the different temporal and spatial linkages that Tarr manages to bind together through shifts in narrative and character perspective by using, as does the novel, the twelve-steps of the tango as its skeletal structure.

 Tarr is entirely unconcerned with rushing towards the next plot beat, nor is it really the plot itself that remains with us afterwards. Rather it is Tarr’s radical elongation of time, materially stretching it till it becomes a palpable presence in the body that can you can touch and feel; a monotonous heavy lump that we are all unremittingly shackled to. It is the preoccupation with all things peripatetic, the endlessly long perambulatory shots of figures walking across landscapes pounded by rain and wind and debris. It is the delicate balancing act achieved between evoking the physical and metaphysical world; how reality in the film is simultaneously earthbound, elemental, chained to the here and now with a weighted down corporeality (the rain, the wind, the ticking clocks, the animals, the drunken bodies), and also a medium to realms and revelations unseen, but intuited in the images and sounds; in the haunting mist that rolls across the plains; in the unfathomable sight of horses galloping early morning across an empty town square. It is the interaction between movement and stillness, music and silence. Remember, for example the extended dance sequence in which the villagers get totally shitfaced in the local tavern the night before Irimiás’s impending arrival, the carnival-like accordion score that is played by one of the revelers seemingly without end as the villagers freely and joyously careen across the frame, while the camera itself is bound to its own strict choreography. Or a very corpulent Peter Berling as the Doctor, a reclusive alcoholic whose sedentary routine of boozing and spying on his fellow villagers through his window is direly interrupted when he himself is forced to replenish his supply of pálinka, the camera following him in long extended tracking shots as he heaves his hulking mass across the farm grounds direction town, his breathing audibly labored as he trudges unsteadily through inclement weather. These are just a few instances that highlight the different wavelengths Sátántangó is running on, revealing the complex matrix that make up the life of Tarr’s cinema in all of its hilarity and despair. Whatever your reaction may be to the film, there is no doubt that it is a work of singular strangeness the effects of which are not quantifiable, but are felt and experienced on a much deeper and mysterious level.

 I had the good fortune to talk with Béla Tarr a bit over the phone about the Sátántangó prior to its re-release in a new restoration in New York.

 NOTEBOOK: Could you talk about your friendship with the writer László Krasnahorkai, the author of the book, and how it informed you coming to make Sátántangó?

 BÉLA TARR: You have to know, it was 1985 when we met. A friend of mine gave me the manuscript of Sátántangó, I read it in one night, and I fell in love with the novel and afterwards I called Laszlo—I’d never met him before, I'd never heard of him before, because it was his first book—and that was how our collaboration started. It was very simple and I think he is one the most talented writers in the world. I love his work.

 NOTEBOOK: Did you have any problems when you first wanted to make the film in the ‘80s? How did you start work on the film?

 TARR: It was mostly a political problem. We couldn't start in the ‘80s because of censorship from the communist government at the time, but by the early ‘90s it became possible to do it and it took four years to do, from 1990 to 1994.

You have to understand. This man [Lázsló] was living in the Hungarian lowlands, and he saw a lot of things in the reality of how people were living, and of course he transformed it and created this beautiful novel. I understood when I started working on this project that I cannot do any kind of adaptation. I had to go back to the Hungarian lowlands, like him. I had to see how life is going on out there, and I had to find the film language, I had to figure out how I can get the same stuff that he did in the novel. By the end, I spent two years in the Hungarian lowlands filming, I can tell you I know all the houses, I know all fucking roads, I know everything in this part of the country. By the end of my time there I could find the way to film and afterwards we could use the dramaturgical structure of the novel, and of course we did not have a script, we had only the novel and my vision. That's all we had.

 NOTEBOOK: What about the sense of time that you found in that place? 

 TARR: Hey man, if you are sitting in the Hungarian lowlands, I'm sure it's the same in the desert in, let's say, Arizona, when you are out there: there is no time, no distance anymore, you can go hours, weeks, and you don't see anything. You are out of time; you have a different sense of time then when you are living in a town. And so, the slowness of the drama came from this. You know, you have to understand that first you have to know the life of the places and then afterwards you have a feeling for how you have to film it.

 NOTEBOOK: Is this how you found the language, which has become a signature of your work, of the long takes?

 TARR: You have to know, if you watch my first movies starting with Family Nest [1977], and you can see how the takes became longer and longer. And if you see Damnation [1988]you'll see that the kind of style for Sátántangó was almost ready. So you know it was step by step. You are thinking about the world and you are thinking about what you did before and what you have to do. You have new questions, and you cannot give old answers to new questions. You have to force yourself to go ahead, and that's how it happened. It came slowly, and of course after Sátántangó we did it some more, in other shit, and by the end in The Turin Horse [2011]we only have 29 takes. Time, anyway, is a part of our life. Time and space, and you cannot ignore it. I know most of the films are ignoring time, because they are just going through the storyline, they are just telling the story: action, cut, action, cut, action, cut, and making it clear to us what is happening. But we don't know what is happening in the world, really. And I am interested in the world, not just in filming it.

 NOTEBOOK: How did you cast Mihály Vig, who also did the music for this film and others of yours, in the role of Irimiás?

 TARR: I have to tell you, when we did the casting, we knew the shooting would be long with long shooting days, I think in the end it was 120 days, and I needed somebody who could really understand this and someone who was capable of joining us, not only physically but also mentally, spiritually understand what all this crazy shit is. He was a friend of mine, I knew him since 1983 when we made our first movie together and we met all the time. And, I have to tell you, I count the music as a main character and we record the music before the shooting, because I have to know my main character before the shooting starts.

 NOTEBOOK: Was music playing on set during the takes?

 TARR: Yes, sometimes but not always. When we needed it for the dolly guy, for the movement, we played it, like, of course, in the dance scene.

 NOTEBOOK: The dance scene is probably my favorite in the film. How did you go about creating a scene like that, did you give the actors any kind of specific instructions?

 TARR: Man, if you want to give instructions for this scene to an actor, you are so stupid. You just let them to be free, they were drinking enough, they were almost totally drunk, and I saw it that they were in a good mood for the dancing, and we shot that only once, then it was done. You know everything has to be about freedom. Let them be free. In the case of that scene, I was able to get a lot of spontaneity. Of course, the camera is not free, the camera has a strict choreography, but the actors have to be free, because they have to show themselves. If I give them instructions of how they should do it, I am sure, even if I have the biggest fantasy in the world, I am 100 percent sure that I cannot get the same stuff that they are just bringing themselves.

 NOTEBOOK: The scene minds me of something out of a Brueghel painting. Do you see any connection between Brueghel’s paintings and your films?

 TARR: The paintings of Pieter Brueghel are all the time with me. I love his paintings and this summer during a big project I did in Vienna I saw many of his paintings. He is amazing and all the time I am pondering his influence. I don't have any influence from any filmmakers, or any other people. But I got a very strong influence from Brueghel. The influence is the empathy. Of course, if I don't have empathy for my characters, then why would I be doing this job? If don't love the people, if I do not understand the people, if I do not show them tenderly—this is why I am doing this shit. Man, I am not a filmmaker, I am not a part of the film industry, I am just a human being. For me, the camera is only a tool for showing how I see the world. That's all.

 NOTEBOOK: Final question: What is your relationship to Sátántangó now twenty-five years later?

 TARR: Of course, the same how it was twenty-five years ago. This is one of my kids. Do you know any father who doesn't love his kids? I do not think so. When we did this restoration, I was watching, take by take, and I have to tell you that I did not want to change anything. For me it's totally okay, you can take it or leave it, it's up to you.

 "I Am Interested in the World, Not Just in Filming It": Béla Tarr on "Sátántangó". By David Perrin, MUBI, October 17, 2019.

 

 When I asked Béla Tarr if he ever suspected that his seven-hour “Sátántangó” would resonate 25 years after it first screened at the 1994 Berlinale, the semi-retired Hungarian filmmaker hunched forward in his chair and responded with the raspy, “who gives a fuck?” grumble of a barfly at last call: “I’m not prophetic,” he grinned, revealing a well-punctuated set of teeth. “I was just an ugly, poor filmmaker. I still am. I don’t have power. I don’t have anything — just a fucking camera.”

When it comes to auteurs who look as if they could be characters in their own movies, the 64-year-old Tarr has to be near the top of the list, somewhere between Wes Anderson and Clint Eastwood. I met him on a brittle February afternoon, when he sagged through the lobby doors of Berlin’s Savoy hotel in a thick winter coat and a sour cloud of cigarette smoke. The stringy gray ponytail that slipped under the back of his hat was the same color as the stubble on his chin and the light in his eyes; Tarr didn’t seem pale so much as monochrome, as if he’d traveled back to the German capital via one of the signature black-and-white tracking shots that galvanized his reputation as a slow cinema godhead.
 
A quarter of a century had passed since Tarr unveiled “Sátántangó,”  and now he returned to the same theater to premiere Arbelos Films’ 4K restoration of a seismic masterwork that would encapsulate the auteur’s apocalyptic vision. Adapted from the László Krasznahorkai novel of the same name, and maintaining the book’s dance-inspired chronology, “Sátántangó” tells a Möbius strip-like story about the collapse of a farming collective in post-communist Hungary, news of which inspires a mystical charismatic vulture of a man named Irimiás — played by composer Mihály Vig — to “return from the dead” and prey on the desolation he finds among the desperate and easily manipulated townsfolk. Things end as they began: In darkness and ruin and the sight of cows being coerced towards their own slaughter.
 
Much has changed for Tarr, his people, and the world at large over the last 25 years: He quit making features after 2011’s “The Turin Horse,” Hungary joined the European Union, and the planet rushed headlong into the information age. On the other hand, to watch the pristine new print of “Sátántangó” is to recognize that much has also stayed the same or slumped backwards: Tarr is still railing against the cynicism he sees on all sides, Hungary has repeatedly embraced an authoritarian Prime Minister who the filmmaker refers to as “the shame of our country,” and even the most democratic bastions of Western civilization have been reintroduced to the pitfalls of populism. When history repeats itself, clarity can be easily mistaken for clairvoyance.
 
 
“I wasn’t trying to see the future,” Tarr said, pounding the table between every breath. “I was just watching my life and showing the world from my point of view. Of course, you can see a lot of shit permanently; you can see humiliation at all times; you can always see a bit of this destruction. All the people can be so stupid, choosing this kind of populist shit. They are destroying themselves and the world — they do not think about their grandchildren. They do not think about anything other than how they can survive this shit. And it’s very, very sad. But that sadness provokes. It pushes you to do something.”
 
Tarr looked into the abyss until his gaze calcified into a hard stare (and perhaps the most nihilistic film of the 21st century), and then — having achieved a feeling of perfect clarity — he stepped back into the shadows. “Film by film, I invented by my cinematic language,” he said. “This language is my language. It came from me. I cannot repeat it. I cannot use it for other shit.” It was the same logic he’s espoused since first announcing that “The Turin Horse” would be his last feature. Judging by the current state of things, however, it may seem like Tarr did not do enough.
 
And yet, in a perverse way, the recursive arc of recent history only underscores the full power of his allegorical films: “Sátántangó” has always been synonymous with the time required to watch Tarr’s work, but seeing this movie anew reveals the time required to see it clearly. A complete and devastating story is told over the course of “Sátántangó,” but seven hours and 12 minutes was never going to be long enough to capture a power cycle that turns an entire people against themselves.
Twenty-five years, on the other hand, might be sufficient for someone to recognize the full scope of Tarr’s magnum opus, and to look at the moral inertia it’s dancing with from a different perspective. Tarr’s cinematic language is best expressed through the weight of time, a burden that can be felt in both individual shots as well as the films that comprise them — in the way those films condense that language into a contained snow globe of hard sorrow, and the way the years then shake their stories full of new life. The longer that time continues to cocoon “Sátántangó” on both sides, the more it will transform before our eyes.
 
This is by design. “Since ‘The Almanac of Fall,’ my goal has always been to make timeless stuff,” Tarr said, referencing the bleak 1985 thriller in which he first mumbled through the basic sounds of his self-invented tongue. “That’s why you do not see any cars in my movies, or if you do see a car it has a kind of eternal form.”
 
In lieu of an origin story, Tarr set the table for an anecdote about the trip that broadened his horizons and granted him the permission he needed to pursue a harsh cinema of seemingly uneventful long-takes. “Most films just tell the story,” he said, “action, fact, action, fact, I don’t fucking know what. For me, this is poisoning the cinema because the art form is pictures written in time.” He coughed hard between breaths, as if expel that sickness. “It’s not only a question of length,” he said, “it’s a question of heaviness. It’s a question of can you shake the people or not?”
So far as Tarr is concerned, Marvel movies aren’t the problem as much as they are the clearest symptom of a broader disease that has spread between genres. “Most shit today… they aren’t films, they’re just comics,” he said. “It’s just blub-blub-blub, a bubble of a sentence and then we go to the next section.” Forget about Netflix: “I’m just deeply sorry for somebody who is watching movies on this shit because they miss everything.”
 
Our problem, Tarr argued, is that most cinema leaves us stuck on the surface. “People just tell a fucking story and we believe that something is happening with us,” he said. “But nothing is happening with us. We are not really part of the story. We are just doing our time, and nobody gives a shit about what time is doing to us. It’s a huge mistake. I just did it a different way.”

Happy that filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang and Lav Diaz have run similar marathons with the slow cinema torch, Tarr waves away the suggestion that it took bravery and conviction to pull off “Sátántangó”  — to spend years trying to secure funding for a seven-hour dirge that was only ever going to screen at festivals and specialty theaters. “Film is a language, and there are languages within that language,” he said. “This is my language. How can I communicate with you without it?”
Tarr never intended for “Sátántangó” to shadow his entire career (“I was a relatively young person, I did not understand”), but he insisted that making this bleak epic was more enjoyable than it looks. “It was really, really big fun,” he said, without a trace of sarcasm. “We were in the countryside, far from everything, and it was good. It was two years. … Really odd things happened. But we created a kind of family and enjoyed it very much.”
 
Tarr wouldn’t say if “Sátántangó” was his personal favorite (“I’m like a fucker who has nine kids — all of them are different”), but he insisted “Sátántangó” played the same to him now as it did 25 years ago. He still remembers every shot by heart. He can even tell you exactly when a fly buzzed onto the camera lens during a long-take that he decided to leave in the final cut. Still, for all of the personal memories and cinematic details that have always made it impossible for Tarr to extricate “Sátántangó” from the time it was made, he’s never had any interest in anchoring this story to the particulars of the political decay that had inspired it.
 
“Politics makes everything too simple and primitive for me,” he said. “Social instability is a constant in my films — all the time of course I am talking about poor people, miserable people, people who never had a chance. Always that has been equal in my work. But everywhere is the same.” He cited the soul-crushing finale of “The Turin Horse,” in which the lead characters flee over a hill to escape their desolation, only to return across the same ridge after presumably spotting familiar horrors on the other side.
 
Tarr himself has yet to suffer such a fate. While he will never unretire from feature filmmaking, recent years have seen him dabble in museum shows, including a visual hymn to Vienna’s homeless population, and an Amsterdam installation that complemented his oeuvre with one final scene expressing his rage about Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis. But even that piece, which may never be formally (or legally) screened anywhere else, only ventured so close to the ephemeral: “By the end, that exhibition could have touched on political issues like border fences and all the horrible shit that Hungary has done to refugees, but I had to ignore it because…” He trailed off.
 
Tarr doesn’t aspire to affect change so much as provide viewers with a more lucid perspective on their place in the world. He wanted wanted to make films that would feel timely all over again in 25 years; films that institutions would feel compelled to restore because they seemed perennially relevant for one grim reason or another; films in which people could always find some dark reflection of their own particular despair. Even now — maybe especially now — he still trusts in people to look.
 
“Listen, when I said ‘poor ugly filmmaker,’ it’s because I don’t have power,” he said. “As a filmmaker, you have to believe in the people — in their power — because if you do not believe in the people then why do you make film… for what? If you don’t have hope, you do not do a fucking movie. You don’t do a movie for the money, because the money just comes and goes. It’s not about the money. It’s because you are such a big fucking maniac who believes in people; who believes that people will watch and people will be touched. It’s because you still believe that people are good, sometimes they just do stupid things. They will pay the price for that by the end, but they do not see it now. So what can filmmakers do?”
 
Then he answered his own question: “This is our job.” And while Tarr might be retired, revisiting “Sátántangó” makes it clear that his movies will continue that work for a long time to come.
 
Béla Tarr Reflects on Making Seven-Hour ‘Sátántangó’ 25 Years Ago and Life as an ‘Ugly, Poor Filmmaker’. By David Ehrlich. Indiewire, October 17, 2019. 

In the past, when I’ve interviewed filmmakers it’s been at my own initiative — or at least at the initiative of an editor making an assignment. This time, at the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film in April 2001, where I was serving on the jury and introducing Béla Tarr at some of his screenings, someone handed me a tape recorder, and Mark Peranson agreed to transcribe the interview afterwards if I would speak to Béla, who’s been a friend ever since Sátántangó. I hope that the casual grammar on both sides of this conversation doesn’t obscure too much of the meaning. (J.R.)

 BELA TARR: […] In Sátántangó, we had a set. The doctor’s flat, it was built.

 JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: You know, that’s my favorite scene in the film.

 TARR: Yes, but it was built! It is artificial, but you don’t feel it in the movie…

 ROSENBAUM: Maybe that’s why I like it so much, because it’s in such a small space.

 TARR: No, it wasn’t small.

 ROSENBAUM: But it feels small in the film.

 TARR: Yeah, sure.

 ROSENBAUM: Was the actor playing the doctor a professional actor or a nonprofessional?

 TARR: He’s a writer named Peter Berling. He wrote a lot of books on the Middle Ages that are on the bestseller lists in Spain. He played some small characters in a lot of Fassbinder movies and he worked with Werner Herzog. In Fitzcarraldo he was the director of the opera. But you know the other set we built was the opening shot of Damnation, because we had a nice landscape, we had the nice cable cars. But we didn’t have the house — so we built just a window and two walls and some black carpet.

 ROSENBAUM: It’s very interesting to learn this. One of the things that’s very interesting to me is how much you’re a master illusionist.

 TARR: I don’t know. Because this is real practical work, and just listening always which is real, and how we can do it, I never think about…

 ROSENBAUM: I know, but it’s still significant to me that many people who see Sátántangó get very upset about the cat, because they think this was really done to the cat. And it wasn’t. The point is that they are seduced into the narrative in a way that it feels very real.

 TARR: But you know, this is my job. I just do that. 1 just wanted to make some tension. You know, the cat is still alive….

 ROSENBAUM: And it’s your cat.

 TARR: No, it’s not my cat. But I have a cat at home and I have two dogs, it is impossible for me to kill or destroy any animal.

 ROSENBAUM: I thought you said it was one that actually you adopted after the film…

 TARR: No, no. It was one cat of a friend of mine. She just slept a little. She just got an injection, and she slept. There was an animal doctor and it was very safe. When the girl is jumping with the cat, they also just played. And all of the sound that was used was artificial, it was from the sound archive.

 ROSENBAUM: One thing that interested me, when I saw Sátántangó again, it seemed to me that the doctor was the hero, which I hadn’t thought of before. And you said that the only other one that’s a good character is the girl, because she’s innocent.

 TARR: Yeah, but you know, who is to say about good or bad?

 ROSENBAUM: Relative to the other characters, that’s what I mean.

 TARR: I think they have a different position. The doctor, he’s just observing. But you know he isn’t the real hero, because he missed what has happened, he has definitely missed everything. And when he came back, the whole thing doesn’t exist. But he believes. This is also very strange because he’s also in the trap. Everybody’s in the trap. That’s the problem. Everybody left, and he just started writing again, and he believes everything is the same, but everything has changed. That’s why I think he is not the real hero.

 ROSENBAUM: But he hasn’t been fooled in the same way that the other characters have been.

TARR: Yeah, sure, because he has a different cultural background. You know, maybe this is our personal opinion, maybe this is a kind of mentality how we can live, just to be.

 ROSENBAUM: To me what’s very interesting is that the two most powerful sequences in the film are the sequence with the doctor and the sequence with the little girl. And they’re the two sequences that are about people who are alone. The rest of the film is about people who are together. And it becomes a different universe in a way, for the people who are all together. The kinds of deceptions are different, and the kinds of ambition are different. To me the film is a dialectic between those two things. And the spectator spends more time with the other people overall, so you have to become people who are in a group and people who are alone in the course of watching the film. And that’s what I think is so necessary about the long takes. Because when you have long takes, you share so much with these people that you have to become morally identified with them in some way. It’s not simply observing them.

 TARR: Sure, because I must tell you some practical things. What you mention to me, it’s the kind of the tension. You know, you have actors, and I always apply their personalities. if I have a long take, six minutes, I don’t say too much to the actors. I just say what is the situation. And I say, okay, shoot. They just develop something from their personalities, some deep things, because they have no instructions — they are just in the situation. You can see in their eyes how they are. And that’s the most important thing. You know, because they are being, they are really reacting, they have no help, they must listen to each other, they must do, they must react to each other! If they don’t do it, I stop the take and go back to one, and we start again.

 ROSENBAUM: Aren’t they reacting to you too, because you’re saying you have to move here and do this?

 TARR: Yeah, yeah, sure, but the most important thing is their presence, how they are present in the situation. That’s the difference. I’ve seen how some other filmmakers work, they give a lot of instructions to the actors, and I never understand why. Because they don’t trust them. I trust my people! Because if I choose them, and I say, “Okay, you will be the main character,” and then don’t say anything, just come and do it. Then afterwards, you have a special tension, because they must develop something from inside.

 ROSENBAUM: I always like to think that you could divide all filmmakers into filmmakers for whom a shot is a declarative sentence, and filmmakers for whom a shot is a question. And in a way what you’re saying is that for you a shot is a question. And what the people do is the answer.

 TARR: And they have six minutes. They cannot escape from the situation. You know, several times they’ve finished the scene and I just leave it, I didn’t stop the camera, and they are in the situation. And several times, I just said, okay, the camera is rolling, let’s just start again, from the beginning.

 ROSENBAUM: Is this the same way you worked on both Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies?

 TARR: It was the same from the first movie. How I work with the actors was similar. In Sátántangó, we used only three times a perfect text, including Irimias’ funeral speech, because it was very well written, and the second long Irimias speech about eternity. But the other text was very flexible, and I just left it to the people. Okay, just say what you feel, because it’s much better than what we can write.

 ROSENBAUM: But yet at the same time there are sequences, for example, the sequence with the doctor sitting at his desk, where you feel that every gesture is part of a composition, you don’t feel that it’s improvising.

 TARR: No, no, no. Because his personality, Peter Berling, you know…when we found a good chair for him. We had five chairs. We just showed every one to him, and I asked him to please sit and try which is best for him. He said, “The third, that’s the one I like.” I said, “Okay, that’s really your place. You just sit there.” He couldn’t move. It was really difficult for him. You know, his personality, he likes putting everything in order, because he’s German. The whole character was ready when he was sitting in the chair and just watching how he makes order. I asked him, please arrange everything how you normally write. And afterwards, it was ready, the whole character and everything, it was ready…

 ROSENBAUM: So it wasn’t just your composition. It’s also his…

TARR: Yes, of course, because if he is not comfortable, he can’t be. I’m not an aggressive director, who is forcing something, which is not interesting. You cannot force people, under the pressure, in ten minutes…

 ROSENBAUM: What about the way that you directed the soundtrack? Because what’s so important in that sequence is his breathing. When you did the sound separately, was it his voice or did you use another voice?

TARR: No, it was dubbed. You know it’s very strange because the guy who dubbed the doctor plays the circus director in Werckmeister.

 ROSENBAUM: To me part of the comedy that I liked so much in the sequence was how so much work was required just to sit there and get drunk — the labor of every movement. And in a way the sound of the breathing is what articulates that. Like he’s climbing a mountain.

 TARR: I can’t say anything about that, you know, it’s a very practical thing.

 ROSENBAUM: No, I understand.

 TARR: It’s something, it was very difficult to do, because several times my cameraman didn’t want to do something because he always says it’s impossible to turn the camera here (gesturing)…

 ROSENBAUM: When he’s writing…

 TARR: Yes, the camera is here, and he’s writing and afterwards it goes there, and he’s watching how he’s putting something, and my cameraman says always that it’s impossible. And I have a very good dolly guy, and he has a lot of ideas, how we can do what I want. That’s the reason when the cameraman changes, the dolly guy remains the same!

 ROSENBAUM: Was it very hard to do the part of the shot where Berling falls down?

 TARR: We shot it only three times, and we used the second one. If you have a good take, afterwards I make only one more, always, because you are never safe. The lab could make some mistakes.…I was very surprised, because he’s 140 kilograms, but when he falls down, Jesus Christ! The first time I just sat behind the camera and thought, Jesus Christ, he’s never going to get up. When he’s sitting, he’s okay, but when he’s walking he’s very fast. I had to force him, don’t run, Peter, don’t run!

 ROSENBAUM: It’s also interesting how much of Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies is devoted to people walking. In a way it’s meditative, but it also becomes almost like a metaphor for narrative itself…

 TARR: Don’t tell me anything about metaphors!

 ROSENBAUM: You hate metaphors, you hate allegories, you hate symbols…But I think the problem that people have, more with allegories than the other two, is because it’s impossible for most people outside of Eastern Europe to look at anything inside of Eastern Europe and not see allegories…You have to understand that when I say metaphor for narrative, I’m not saying this is your idea, I’m saying this is my idea. And the reason why, which I think is important, is it becomes the issue again of becoming implicated in what the characters are doing. In Sátántangó, when you follow someone walking, it’s almost like a rest between the more dramatic things.

 TARR: Maybe. Okay, I try and explain it to you. You know, if you are in the Hungarian plain in the early morning, before the shooting, and you are just sitting there, just watching. And you just watch the perspective. And you don’t know what you see. Is this one endless hopelessness? You really don’t know. Is this eternity or just relativity? That is what I really don’t know. When they are walking, you know, I have the same feeling, always, what is this, is this real distance or we are just…? You know, like a treadmill they are just walking, walking, just endless walking. Do you have perspective, or hope, or just nothing, or always staying there, in one point? That was the case in Sátántangó….[In Werckmeister Harmonies], it’s completely different.

 ROSENBAUM: No it is, I see. But I think the only way for me that it’s similar, which is important, is that I experience it in some way in musical terms. In Sátántangó — do you know the term pedal point? It’s when you hold a chord for a very long time. And when you hold a chord for a long time it becomes meditative, because it gives you time to think, and almost makes a demand on your imagination. And that’s really interesting, because it comes at certain points in the narrative in Sátántangó when it’s very important to have time to think. To me, that’s what’s so beautiful about the portions from the novel read offscreen that come at the very end of the sequences. And I think that is involved also with a kind of identification that may not even be conscious, but still plays a part into how one gets involved with these people.

 TARR: I understand. When we started to think about Sátántangó, in the beginning, we wrote a script for the producers and the money, and it was very linear. Without chapters, it was just a story. It looks like a movie story. It took nine years to get the money. When we started to think about it, I sat together with Agnes [Hranitzky, Tarr’s editor and partner] and László [Krasznahorkai], and we thought, now, okay, we forget the script, and went back to the original structure. Because it was a minimum six hour long movie, that was sure at the beginning. And we thought we couldn’t make a linear, six hour-long story without any break, and we decided immediately, let’s go back to this chapter structure. And we also thought, what if nobody wanted to distribute it, then we would have 12 short movies. Twelve chapters, this is very simple, and at the end of every chapter, we will use some sentence from the novel.

  ROSENBAUM: What I find very beautiful about it is it kind of extends the story in another direction, in the imagination. To me, one of my favorites is the one with the people in the office, when you hear what happens when they go home at night. It makes the relation between cinema and literature so close, when they’re usually at opposite ends. You somehow bring them together.

TARR: Yeah, sure, because Krasznahorkai’s language is absolutely impossible to adapt for the movie…

ROSENBAUM: Because it’s stream of consciousness, partly …

TARR: Yes, but our point of view is similar, how he watches the world and how I watch the world. That’s the reason why we are sitting together, we can talk about life. When we are writing the script, we are talking about concrete things…

ROSENBAUM: Is he around during the shooting at all?

 TARR: No, no. He is a typical writer from the 19th century. He was on the set two or three times in the shooting, and nobody listens to the writer, everyone has practical work. He just wanted to sit and say this is a very primitive job, a shit job, because you never talk about the art, you never say nothing to the actors, you never say any intelligent things, only practical things. And he always escaped from the shooting.

ROSENBAUM: By the way, apart from The Melancholy of Resistance [the novel Werckmesiter Harmonies is based on] in English, have there been other translations, and in what languages?

 TARR: Sátántangó was translated into German and French, published by Gallimard. And I hope that there will be a translation in English finally.

ROSENBAUM: You know that there’s part of one chapter in English, that’s all.

TARR: Yes, but someone told me it’s a shit translation. But he’s a really good writer, and I hope somebody will translate it…His style is really middle European. It looks like Thomas Bernhard, Kafka and the others…

ROSENBAUM: I believe you, but I can’t still see [Sátántangó] without thinking of Faulkner. They’re cultural equivalents in a strange sort of way. Because Faulkner is rural, stream of consciousness, the same day from different points of view — more than one writer does these things.

 TARR: You don’t understand how shit the translations of Faulkner are in Hungarian. That’s always the problem — I’m really, really sad that I can’t read them…

ROSENBAUM: I can’t read Kafka properly, either…

 TARR: Or like Joyce, Finnegans Wake, what can you do with it in another language? You can’t do nothing! You can’t understand. That’s the reason why I think that literature is always limited. If somebody lucky is writing in English, there’s a bigger audience. But you know a Hungarian writer, there’s only 10 million or 15 million people reading it. [Cue to end] I really enjoyed this, I’m lucky, you were an excellent interviewer.

ROSENBAUM: This is very interesting, I learned a lot.

 TARR: We were just talking.

 Falling Down, Walking, Destroying, Thinking: A Conversation with Béla Tarr. By Jonathan Rosenbaum.  Jonathan Rosenbaum, September 3, 2001.

 The following exchange appeared in Cinema Scope no. 8, September 2001.

 

Quarantine has felt a lot like slow cinema. The hours in one room, and then the hours in the room next to it. The sleeplessness and excess energy without anywhere to store it. The lack of structure which has developed, in its way, a new structure.

 
Paul Schrader, author of Transcendental Style in Film, started a recent interview saying, “If you come to expect action, you’re not going to get it. … Transcendental style is essentially a withholding device. … You’re creating dead time.” Slow cinema furthers the transcendental style; is its logical conclusion. Where transcendental style can build to a flourish or climax, as Schrader cites in the case of Ozu or Bresson, slow cinema is an end in itself. Action and story are stripped away, until there is only time. The genre finds its high-water mark in Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr and his seven-hour-plus film, Sátántangó.
 
I thought a lot about this movie — one Susan Sontag said she would watch once a year for the rest of her life — during the first few months of lockdown. With no choice but to shelter in place indefinitely, my friend Ross and I decided to seek out films we had not yet seen, ones that were dense and long, ones we had avoided when we still had credible excuses. These were the films we always planned to tackle “next” or “soon,” when we could “find the time.” From the start, Sátántangó was our Holy Grail, the one we jokingly trained for — watching other films in order to get to this one. Everything before was the build-up.
 
Based on the 1985 novel of the same name by László Krasznahorkai (who co-wrote the film’s script with Tarr), Sátántangó follows the disintegration and migration of a small farming community in rural Hungary. But describing the plot to explain the film is to miss the point. Tarr said in a recent interview tied to the film’s re-release, “Most films just tell the story, action, fact, action, fact, I don’t fucking know what. For me, this is poisoning the cinema because the art form is pictures written in time.” So while things do happen — and they do — they seem incidental to the film and Tarr’s project.
 
Sátántangó’s overture is an eight-minute tracking shot that sets the tone; the camera watches from a distance, moving in unison with cattle as they plod along, one after the next, in a barren wasteland. In stark black and white, we are introduced to characters, each and all past hope, with no glimmer of improving their circumstances. One man cheats with another’s wife and soon they conspire together to rob their neighbors, every interaction a zero sum game. Across the road, another man watches these petty grievances unfold through binoculars that emulate the camera’s eye, noting each shred of minutiae in a notebook. They do nothing, and he studiously scribbles it down for no one to read.
 
The film is divided into 12 chapters and its third is where Tarr makes his mission statement clear. Across an hour of screen time, the spying man, an obese doctor, finishes his bottle of alcohol and sets out to replenish it. That is the chapter’s action, its narrative thrust, and in this time he: argues with and casts out his caretaker, collapses to the floor reaching for something, lies there for a while, pours the last drops of his liquor from a bigger container into a smaller one and finally into a glass, drinks those last drops, sets out into the pouring rain (a rain that beats the characters down across the film’s runtime), bums two cigarettes from prostitutes hanging out in an empty barn, finally arrives at the bar in the still-pelting rain only to inadvertently scare a young child and consequently follow her to make amends (to no avail), and ultimately collapses in the woods from exhaustion/desperation/hopelessness after calling out for help to passersby who do not hear him. The next morning, he is thrown in the back of a horse-drawn carriage and carted off, presumably back to his house, without the alcohol. That hour of screen time has been these five months of quarantine.

 
Tarr makes time elastic in Sátántangó. The events that unfold are at once shorter, as we do not literally see every actual second of the doctor’s day transpire, and somehow far longer, as we feel the duration of his time spent lying on the floor — seconds as hours — or the endless walk toward the town bar that scarcely seems to get closer. Even when two characters talk as they would in any film, we feel time, the time-ness of the exchange, its existence in time. J. Hoberman wrote that Sátántangó is “constructed out of morose chunks of real time, is not so much narrative as experiential.” In a sense, we too have transcended narrative linearity in our daily lives. Time moves, the world has stopped. In the past, I may have grown weary or impatient with Sátántangó’s more trying moments. Watching the film now, I briefly forgot about everything beyond the screen as that carriage receded from view and reached its vanishing point.
 
The structure of Sátántangó echoes its title, the six steps forward, six steps back of the tango. There is progress: The group moves to a nearby abandoned mansion at the suggestion of Irimias, a supposed soothsayer who is more likely a grifter and a charlatan. It is unclear if the move will be anything of substance for the townspeople; they seem to know they are being swindled, yet accept it willingly because it is better than nothing, than having to make a decision themselves and live their own lives. Things might improve for them; maybe this will be a new start.
 
The film closes where it begins, with the doctor sitting alone at his desk, looking out at nothing. He hears distant church bells and believes it could be divine providence. He follows the sound up the hill, seeking salvation, an answer, something, but finds only a deranged man ringing the church bells and raving, “The Turks are coming.” Taking in the scene, the doctor walks back down the hill and boards up his window, his last connection to the outside world, until he is in total darkness, his own private abyss.
 
Sátántangó adopts an undeniably nihilist viewpoint. No one is coming. The best the doctor can hope for is a newly replenished bottle of liquor at story’s end, a mere solace among the wreckage. But as the days passed after viewing the film — and it’s one that stays with you long, long after viewing — I began to think about the person behind Sátántangó. Tarr originally wanted to make the film in 1985, right after the publication of Krasznahorkai’s book, but the politics in Hungary at the time prevented it. As soon as the Soviet Union fell, Tarr returned home from abroad and set out to make the film, completing it four years later, in 1994. And though its contents speak to a bleak future, its very creation speaks to a brighter one, one devoid of censorship and toward a free artistic expression. For a movie about the apocalypse, Sátántangó is awash, in its way, with hope. Sontag must have felt something in those seven hours she wanted to recapture and relive, again and again. Tarr said in that same interview, “As a filmmaker, you have to believe in the people — in their power — because if you do not believe in the people, then why do you make film … for what?”
 
It took me an entire day to watch Sátántangó, with short breaks for food, sunlight and exercise. I turned off our air conditioner, because I wanted to hear every aspect of the sound design, and so I spent the day sweating in the thick summer heat. My wife, having received a notification from our internet provider alerting us we were nearing our monthly allowance, asked me what I was doing on August 4th, the day our Wi-Fi use spiked.
 
A few days later, I talked about Sátántangó with Ross. Though it cannot compare to seeing the movie in a theatre surrounded by people, it’s a consolation to still share art in a time when it feels like we’ve never been further away from each other. He told me what he thought about it, how it made him feel, what he thought the film was trying to say, and I did the same. It was a small act, one we used to take for granted, as it was couched between the rest of our packed days. We hold this space every week to commune and listen to each other, to hear how someone else sees. These calls provide a ballast to the week, it gives us a sense of anticipation when so much else is unknown. It’s these new paths that keep us going when most of everything we know and need and love has disappeared overnight. Some of it may never come back.
 
And so we change. We watch these long movies not only for pleasure or because we’re searching for structure, but also because these movies keep us connected. They invent time — a fictional version of time that runs alongside our everyday. While Ross and I talk about the movies, we also talk about the news, what we’re reading right now, about our families and how we’re holding up. We watch in order to look forward, to keep our hope, to answer Tarr’s question, “For what?”
 
Watching Sátántangó at the End of the World. By Jesse Noah Klein. Talkhouse, September 14, 2020