Owen did a mini episode on Tarr’s Sátántangó. You can listen to it here.
Sacred mist, speechless animals
For more than seven long minutes, the herd of cattle - patient, unhurried - emerge from the tattered and morning-smudged buildings. A coil of mist, brackish water. Gábor Medvigy’s camera (a wide lens, and softly deep - burred, like a days-old glass of water) begins to track these slowing beasts, from right to left. It falls to one, stomping and frisky, whose bulk centres in the midst of all this ambiguous life. It too moves away, and the camera continues on its own unhurried survey (or surveillance, unblinking?), right to left.
Across its 156 shots, Sátántangó - 1994, of course, and belonging to Béla Tarr - is filled with such moments of pregnant foreboding. This is an unusually desiccated place; inhuman in the most literal of ways. There are no people. Life has absconded. We’re being invited to watch the cattle ‘as they are’, unmediated by the prods and yelps of farmers and machinery. Protean and primeval, this is rural Hungary at the difficult interstitial moment of communism’s collapse, a collective farm literally rotting and bulging and the seams. Collapse isn’t felt as an explosion, but a brush of heavy breath against the cheek. For Jacques Rancière, this time - the time of Sátántangó - belongs to the “time after”, a “time when we are less interested in histories and their successes or failures than we are in the delicate fabric of time from which they are carved”. And this is true, perhaps; but while this particular scene is shorn of its sociality, we are invited to question the bodies of those who are not yet present, of those who - in turn, like cattle - will also stamp and emerge from the crumbling facades of desolate buildings. Houses, a pub, a barn. Etc.
The film began life long before its release in 1994. First forays were made as far back as 1985. It took the literal collapse of a regime to propel it into possibility, even while its consciously atavistic aura - an obliterated present, an evacuated civilization - seemed to peer backwards in time, or at least to wipe the mirror, stare unblinking at timelessness. Here’s Tarr: “in all our [films], the location has a face. It looks like an actor”. But I’m not trying to write, en masse, about Tarr or even Sátántangó. I’m speaking about animals, and about animal life. Two scenes, separated by long, sprawling hours. Later, the demure demagogue Irimiás - having fallen to his knees before a mist shrouded, rain-wrapped church (“have you not seen mist before?” says Petrina, his sidekick - deflating this moment of possibly sacral exegesis) - arrives in a town (its streets cobbled and wide, its buildings grand), only to witness twenty or more horses clatter and break into the plaza. We hear them before we see them. It is unreal and transcendent, a moment that belongs squarely - yet obliquely - to the sublime. Sequentially, this section or chapter is called “Mennybe menni? Lázálmodni?” (Going to heaven? Having nightmares?”). Questions, questions. But the long take rears its animal head here, too - as with our cows. For András Kovács, writing in 2013 about Tarr, these epic takes are generative of a mode of participation - of being invited inwards, into the inner as well as visible mysteries (that’s how I scan it at least). They call it, “living in these spaces”. It is living, but not in an emptily embodied way. We are here, but our presence only revokes our ability to understand. A gulf emerges between the seen and the imminent. These moments (cattle, holy mist, horses) border on the holy. But arriving there, we are dumbstruck - our mouths mumbling inaudible insanities (or inanities, only).
Anyway, I - Owen - did a mini episode about Sátántangó. Have a listen. Step inside.