An Intamate Epic: Satantango	by Girish Shambu

Let’s get the scary part over with right away: Satantango, which makes its belated debut on home video this week, is a downbeat, black-and-white Hungarian film that is, notoriously, a full seven hours long.

But in terms of myth and legend, it’s the Gone With the Wind of art movies. Satantango was a favorite of the late Susan Sontag; she claimed to have seen it 15 times. Since 1994, when it first played at film festivals, the movie has never managed to find general release in theaters, and understandably so. About 10 years ago, in full possession of my senses (I think), I made a trip to California solely for the purpose of catching one of its rare screenings. In Berkeley, where I saw it with about 50 other diehard film freaks in the audience, what surprised me was how this movie was hardly the endurance test I was expecting it to be.

But let me not oversell its accessibility here: There is no risk of mistaking Satantango for a pulse-pounding thrill ride. In many ways, it conforms to the stereotype of an art film. Its narrative is barebones and minimal, and its pace leisurely and observational. It wants you to enjoy the journey, and not worry too much about the destination.

The movie is set in rural Hungary under Communism, and follows the lives of a handful of characters who are involved in a dubious farm collective scheme. They are tempted to invest their money with a con man whom they see as a savior. The setting is almost hilariously gloomy: It rains constantly, the roads are nothing but sticky mud, and the air is heavy with miserablism. But what transforms all this dourness is a sly sarcasm, a mischievous wit that scampers through the entire movie. Even though the story is spare and quite uneventful, it develops with generous and steady sprinklings of humor and surprise.

Film culture in America has changed enormously since the 1960s, when foreign filmmakers like Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman were well known celebrities. The general filmgoing public was aware of them and went to see their films. But since then, movies, like all other products, have fallen victim to the phenomenon of fragmented niche markets. Just as we find cable TV channels devoted to specialized programming like game shows, cooking, or pets, cinema audiences have also become somewhat segmented into commercial film and art film viewers. Bela Tarr, who made Satantango, is one of the great stars of art cinema today, a giant of the film festival circuit, but I doubt many people who are not part of that audience have even heard of him. This ghettoization of noncommercial cinema is tragic because it keeps audiences from discovering and experiencing the full range of pleasures that the medium of movies holds in store for us.

There are at least two such pleasures on display in Satantango. First, Tarr shoots the movie in long takes. Some shots stay on the screen without edits for 10 minutes or more, which would be unthinkable in most movies. What threatens to be merely boring becomes, with the passage of time, powerfully immersive. It brings out the voyeur in the viewer, creating an intimacy with characters and their everyday lives, a spell that remains unbroken by edits.

Second, the film is structured so that the same actions are seen from the perspectives of different characters. (Think of Kubrick’s heist film, The Killing, which uses a similar idea and overlapping time structure.) This turns the movie into a vast mosaic that the viewer assembles piece by piece during the course of seven hours.

Both these aspects—the long takes and the handling of time—had a transformational influence on the American filmmaker Gus Van Sant. The director of such films as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, Van Sant discovered the work of Bela Tarr and embarked on a new path with films like Elephant (about the Columbine killings) and his recent and remarkable teen movie, Paranoid Park. Both these movies owe their style of extended takes and fragmented time structure to Satantango. For me, this crossover of ideas from daunting art movie to commercial teen film feels like a wonderful symbol: Good movies, no matter what their origins, can have a universal influence and impact.

(An animal cruelty warning: The film has scenes of a young girl rough-housing with a cat. Though these scenes are simulated, they are nevertheless unsettling.)