User Reviews

I just finished the film. I watched it on DVD over a period of a few days. I refused to watch it all at once. I know some will criticize my method of viewing. I also know nobody in my social circle who would watch this with me. Sadly I am not able to talk about with this film with them so I came to this website yet again. I am not one of those people who are going to claim the film a masterpiece and the most amazing film I've ever seen. Nor am I going to be one of those people that call this film a boring self indulgent mess. I can see both sides and I think both opinions have some merit. I like art cinema but I too have limits. I didn't sit through an entire Tarkovsky film at a theater and I found David Lynch's Inland Empire excruciating. But I saw Werkmesiter Harmonies and I was so mesmerized that I had to check out Satantango. The movie is basically a series of beautifully stark and minimal black and white photographs that move. The heavy atmosphere is quite palpable and I appreciated visiting this world where no technology, cars, or plumbing exist (and when you see a static laden TV later in the film you will be startled by it's seemingly alien presence in this film's environment). I liked the score which was alternately eerie, pretty, and even zany. I was impressed by images of tumbling windswept litter, roaming cows in what appears to be an abandoned farm village (perhaps my favorite shot), the gradual emergence and gradual dimming of light, a stark journey by foot into darkness and rain by a character who seems to border on death more than once, and an owl spying on some sleeping newcomers. I also loved the same periods of time being revisited from different points of view. This film was indeed boring in places. Anyone telling you that they were not bored at all during this film is not an ordinary person. For the most part, the long tracking shots and real time pacing create a hypnotic effect or give you a heightened sense of really being in the "here and now" with the film but there were many scenes that were simply mundane (getting dressed, breaking for lunch, packing for a trip) or absurd (long silences with actors simply looking into each others eyes before finally speaking). Finally, I absolutely hated the cat torture scene which lasted much longer than I expected. I almost quit viewing the film as I felt privy to a feline snuff film. The director has told people that the cat did not really die and he actually owns the cat as a pet. Be that as it may, you will still be watching a vulnerable and innocent animal being brutalized for an extended period mind you and I can't abide by that. This part of the story was indeed one of the more fascinating elements but the treatment of this animal for the sake of the film was rather inhumane. I wish more people would criticize this directorial choice but many don't even bring it up. I'm glad I made it through the film. I wanted to test my patience. I wanted to meditate on the images and the unique sense of time. But I can't say that I was moved by the story or it's characters. It was a fascinating exercise for me and nothing more. I enjoyed Werckmeister Harmonies much more and consider it a superior but less ambitious film.

I am giving this film high points, not as some have suggested because I want to be in with the in crowd but because I really enjoyed it and even after a month of seeing it I am still thinking of the significance of various parts.

In my view, the reason the film is so long is because Bela Tarr wanted the viewer to be the characters, to feel what it is like to live their lives, squalor and all and not simply be a voyeur to the unfolding of the storyline as in other conventional films. The reason I don't in this case have a problem to give spoilers is that the Police Captain's speech when Irimias and Petrina are summoned before him is the heart of the matter for most of what follows. It is listed above in the Memorable Quotes section but so you don't have to go looking for it I will C&P it here.

"Captain: Not that human life was so highly valued. Keeping order appears to be the business of the authorities, but in fact it's the business of all. Order. Freedom, however, has nothing human. It's something divine, something... our lives are too short for us to know properly. If you're looking for a link, think of Pericles, order and freedom are linked by passion. We have to believe in both, we suffer from both. Both from order and freedom. But human life is meaningful, rich, beautiful and filthy. It links everything. It mistreats freedom only... wasting it, as if it was junk. People don't like freedom, they are afraid of it. The strange thing is there is nothing to fear about freedom... order, on the other hand, can often be frightening." This is so profound that most of the important themes in the film flow from this short speech. Probably the most important one is the observation (paraphrased) that people like the concept of freedom but they don't actually like to be free. It is usual to hear that people who, to one degree or another, live under oppression want to throw off the yoke of whatever system it happens to be but when they actually have their freedom they don't know what to do with it. In the film there is much talk about clearing off with the money from the sale of the farm, either fairly or unfairly divided and living lives of their own making. What follows is that Irimias appoints himself as the group's leader and everybody falls in line thus voluntarily placing themselves in a hierarchy.

The other major theme from the Captain's speech is this. "But human life…..links everything". Every living thing is connected to every other living thing. Do you remember the voice over following the little girl's death? It talked of this connection existing between her mother; her brother who cheated her out of her savings; the cat the doctor and herself and she knew that after she was dead her angels would protect her. We then move forward towards the end of the drunken scene where we are presented with the analogy of the spider weaving a web over all of the drunken people. If a single strand in the web moves then the spider knows. In real life this could be a look backwards to the operating methods of the KGB. Also forwards to such things as the Patriot Act which legalised wire tapping and social networks like Facebook which was conceived by the CIA to farm information about individuals which could not be found in any other way.

If someone has control over another living thing then they use that power without remorse. Examples of this are the little girl and the cat; Irimias and the group and the police captain and Irimias. Compare this in real life to what happened in the Stanford prison experiment.

Without self discipline and left to their own devices people will become immoral. Examples of this are Irimias representing some unwholesome elitist class; the Schmidts planning to abscond with the money; The little girls brother stealing her savings; Mrs Schmidt with Futaki; the little girl's mother, no different to the cattle in the farmyard. The Police captain using Irimias for spying; the police gathering apparently useless information; the doctor's spying.

We should be on our guard to beware of false prophets of hope. In the film this was represented by Irimias and Petrina. When the silver tongued Irimias gave his speech he moved seamlessly from "This event is tragic beyond all comprehension" to "You can achieve a better life by giving me your money". In everyday life I would include most off planet redemption religions together with our political leaders who by and large represent themselves first, lobbyists second and for the represented they do just enough to get re-elected.

Beware of false prophets of doom. The man banging on the pipe in the ruined church shouting "The Turks are coming" when there were quite clearly no Turks in any direction.

My interpretation of the incredibly sad final scene is that if this is the way we choose to group as a society, sandwiched between false prophets of hope and false prophets of doom and without any self discipline then there is no light at the end of the tunnel. if people had self discipline combined with freedom and self order, as the police Captain suggests, there would be no need for authority but since they don't they are confused between these false prophets of hope and false prophets of doom, therefore all attempts to continue as a workable society are ultimately bound to fail.

Bela Tarr's seven hour rambling film about the people in a collective in Hungary around the fall of communism.

Its good but seeing this in what was a largely single marathon sitting was trying.

It's got some wonderful segments and is good over all, but it's a long slog thanks to Tarr's style of long takes and shooting things like the table while action happens off screen. It's a good film and I intend on watching it again down the road, but I don't think I'll be able to sit for the 7 plus hours it took to watch this in one sitting the first time. I'll break it up by sections.

Yes I know the length of the film should not come in to play,a good film is a good film, but at the same time this is a slow seven hours.

Worth seeing but in bits and pieces

The ending of Béla Tarr's 7-hour meditation Sátántangó still haunts my soul, and let the fact I'm starting at the ending be your spoiler warning. In the movie, a group of bickering villagers is led from their farm by Irimiás, a figure they fearfully respect and whose promises they swallow. Left behind is The Doctor, who spends his days in seclusion. Suddenly, the mysterious sound of church bells (also heard at the start of the film) prompt the lumbering Doctor to actually leave his seat, almost as if faith replenishes him. However, he finds that the church is in ruin and the sounds were those of a madman hammering the remnants of the bell, repeating the phrase "the Turks are coming". He returns home and nails his doors and windows shut, sealing himself in for good. In the darkness, he recites the film's opening narration as the credits start to roll.

I find that few films beg for analysis and speculation quite like those of Béla Tarr. Just enough is kept vague and open for interpretation, but just enough is obvious too. The above paragraph gives us plenty to pontificate when it comes to false prophets, nihilism, the nature of human faith in general, and whatever else. This is to say nothing of characters like The Captain and his lecture on authority (wherein he references Pericles; one that I'd never heard of).

This is one of those movies you may use as a joke to describe what film snobs are into. If I told you that the film begins with an 8-minute take of cows on an abandoned farm, themselves eventually forsaking it, you'd probably chuckle and snort in disbelief.

However, nothing could set the film's tone of desolation more perfectly than this opening sequence. The image is a grainy black-and-white, the wind echoes between the empty buildings, the soulless cattle go about their way, and the cinematography is without fault. Some speculate that the opening also foreshadows the fate of the principal characters. Indeed, certain characters in the movie do seem as easy to herd as common livestock.

But there is more to talk about. How about the plotline about the little girl (Erika Bók) who is convinced to kill her cat due to the promises of her brother (the scene is disconcerting in how believable it looks, but a veterinarian was reportedly on set at all times)? Or the rainy night where Irimiás returns and each of the other storylines comes to a pivotal moment? Or the part where Irimiás sees the ruin where a death will take place and collapses to his knees as a fog brushes past it and vanishes? Or the non-chronological way in which Tarr and László Krasznahorkai present the narrative, aptly stepping back and forth in time as though it were a tango? You may laugh again, asserting that this is just one of those films that try to be artistic and cerebral. Possibly, but do please exert a few more mental horsepowers to determine if it succeeds, before deciding it is merely fartsy.

My praise of the film's more technical achievements is genuine, as well. The sets, costumes, and effects are completely and utterly convincing. The actors, likewise, seem at home in the movie's universe. The music by Mihály Víg, who also portrays Irimiás, captures the time period and rural environment skillfully, whilst sometimes also being quite bone-chilling. Of Gábor Medvigy's long-take photography, where the camera almost constantly hovers about the scenery, I cannot say enough.

The catalog of Bela Tarr may be the final stage of film fanaticism. He who "likes movies" starts by looking at all the new mainstream releases for fun, then he might learn about the essential old classics, then he probably seeks out something more obscure and artsy (where vision is untarnished by studio interference), soon he starts looking at straight-up weird movies, and eventually, he reaches the most impenetrable auteurs of the past. I don't know that this is the process of all cinephiles, but I know many consider it a rite of passage to sit through all 7 hours of the bleak, slow, yet endlessly muse-provoking Sátántangó. Nail your door shut and let the film swallow you whole.

This is a 7 hour long film, whose long takes slowly start to creep under your skin and ultimately leaves you enchanted. In an almost abandoned village, the remaining villagers plot and scheme to get away with the money, but are all conned out of it by the false prophet Irimias. The story might appear to be about the end of communism or the exploitations of capitalism, but this is not the case. At the heart of this story lies the plight of a traumatized child (Estike) and an old recluse (Doctor). They are the true victims of a monstrous scheme which deprived them not of their money, but of their hope for a full, rich and human life and ultimately of their lives as such. What they were confronted with was a picture of a society in which cold, heartless human beings destroyed their own lives and those of others through their low-life plodding, drinking, fornicating - in short - through their unrelenting, drunken dance of Satan. It was this picture that killed them.

What is perhaps most striking is the relation between this film and Tarkvosky's work. I think that, although this remains highly speculative, Tarr has taken up Tarkovsky's work as the thesis of a Hegelian dialectical triad. The thesis is the subjective, poetic and intimate splendor of a girl, Estike, sitting perfectly still with a purring a cat on her lap, a scene which lasts for minutes! So far Tarr's images are the offspring of Tarkovsky's work, although Tarr's long takes seem to capture the core of someone's existence with concrete textures in an almost sculpture-like way, whereas Tarkovsky's images seem to revolve entirely around their poetic nature. The antithesis however is the introduction of an ethical dimension: we learn that Estike is not only a deep girl who has an openness towards the sublime, but is actually a traumatized child with very very deep psychological problems, because we actually see her torturing and killing her cat and finally killing herself. Thus the poetic image is suddenly interrupted by an objective antithesis, although this ethical moment is also revealed as something which was always already present in the existential renderings of the film's characters: this is perhaps Tarr's critique of Tarkovsky! This ethical moment ultimately solidifies itself as a social and political moment, in that society's nihilism is identified as the cause of Estike's tragedy. However, the ethical, the social and the political are ultimately dismissed as one-sided, because the conduct of Irimias and the total abandonment of Doctor shows us that the ethical fate of society and the individual human being, cannot ultimately be determined by political means alone, but also demands a more radical transformation of man, perhaps an openness towards the sublime, which yields a synthesis between, the poetical, the intimate and the sublime with the ethical the social and the political. What is thoroughly un-Hegelian however, is the way in which Tarr ultimately sketches a very bleak picture of society, in which this synthesis is far from realized, and gives us nothing in the way of assurances that it is in fact realizable: on the contrary, it shows us only the dance of Satan.

This is a film that features such powerful imagery, that years from now, after having seen this film, images will continue to circulate in our collective imaginations. Revealing very "mild spoilers," without giving away anything vital about the storyline, but only to suggest some of the powerful themes and imagery which interconnect throughout this 7 hour film, the opening sequence features cows fornicating in the mud and rain which renders no harm to anyone, and is in complete balance with nature, but then sequence after sequence of tortured souls reveals the unbalanced state of man that thrives on lies, deceit and treachery, believing in false icons, following false prophets, captured in the net of their own fear, like the image of the spiders weaving their tiny nets over the satantango dancers in the bar sequence, only to do it again night after night so that their delusions, and the hold this falseness has over them, reoccurs again every day just as sure as the sun rises...

...and the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells...

...like Edgar Allan Poe, who knows who sounds the bells that captures the attention of our imaginations? What about Odysseus tied to the mast by his shipmates as he sails past the luring voices of the Sirens, whose sound is intoxicating, but is the key to luring unknowing sailors only to be eaten alive when they set foot on land... ...or like the false Prince in Tarr's most recent film, "Werckmeister Harmonies," who knows the source of evil? How many of us ever see the face? But we are lured by so many influences, not the least of which are the temptations of man so prominently featured in this film, the face of evil... ...fear, conspiracy, perdition, and all the many demons that live inside the human soul that perpetuate delusions of grandeur and evil, the evil that is human...

SATANTANGO is a unique film experience requiring the audience to sit through the incredible duration and severity of this film, filled with unbelievably compelling images of bleakness and despair, literally holding the audience captive, sealed into the already darkened room of a movie theater. In Tarr's version, humanity, it seems, is sealing themselves into the same total darkness. In this film, there is no light, there is only rain and a consuming darkness, and in the distance, the sound of bells...

"And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..."

This Hungarian film was listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, it is most likely I would never have heard of or even watched this, and despite the length I was determined to try it. Basically, set in 1980's, Hungary, in a small ruined and decaying village, at the time near the end of Communism, the farming community is gradually collapsing, and life has become a virtual standstill. Many of the villagers are expecting large cash payments, and they plan to leave after receiving it, but there is the return of Irimiás (Mihály Vig), a smooth talker, and he was thought to be dead for two years. The plot of the film mostly revolves around what his return has done and how it has impacted the various villagers, whether it be the money problems, the lack of things to do, the personal and family hardships and tragedies, and some finding the will to leave after all. You could argue that the film has hardly any plot or story at all, as it has many long takes of random and slow moving events. These include some cows standing in a barnyard, a POV walk down a gravel path, a doctor walking, a person lying on floor, men in a pub as camera pulls away, a little girl torturing a cat, her standing in the corner looking at the cat, the girl walking with the cat down a path, a long accordion dance with some villagers - barnyard style, a tango with the accordion music, a dead girl in an open coffin, loads of men sleeping, horses in a courtyard that have escaped the slaughterhouse, a man in an abandoned house, a drive in the pouring rain, three men walking down a street in strong wind and rain, a man typewriting, a man sitting alone in his chair, a sweep over some marsh land, man enters church where man is ringing and repeating "Turks are coming!", and many more long and meaningless events. Also starring Putyi Horváth as Petrina, László Lugossy as Schmidt, Éva Almássy Albert as Mrs. Schmidt, János Derzsi as Kráner, Irén Szajki as Mrs. Kráner, Alfréd Járai as Halics, Miklós Székely B. as Futaki, Erzsébet Gaál as Mrs. Halics, Erika Bók as Estike and Peter Berling as Doctor. The film is almost seven hours long, and with uncut takes lasting sometimes ten minutes this is understandable, the longest take definitely being the dancing before the tango with that repetitive music tune that goes on and goes, as does the dancing. I will admit I didn't see much of a plot, if there was one, but some of the long takes were interesting to watch, just for the fact that almost nothing happened, it is not your conventional film, no fast moving action and mostly real time footage, it has developed a cult following which is understandable, you have to be very patient and open for this epic black and white drama. Very good!