PIERCING THE HERMETIC SKIN OF SÁTÁNTANGÓ
Robert Davis
Shots and cuts need each other. They are cinema’s primal handmaidens. The shots, as moments of luminous accommodation, ripen and expand and are popped like soap bubbles by the cut.
– Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema 1
In the final hour of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, two men are typing descriptions of the people we’ve seen throughout the film. The pair is rewriting a report about the remains of a collective that was submitted by the group’s own tentative leader, Irimias, but it could as well have been a script conference between a filmmaker and novelist, adapting existing profiles for another purpose. It also functions as rare character development for the letter’s author – possibly a savior, spy, or con-man – whose calm pious demeanor seems at odds with personal descriptions like “bloody whore,” “fat sow,” and “wrinkled worm filled with alcohol.” This shepherd has reserved some acid for his flock.
In the office, the two men work to soften Irimias’ many barbs. One dictates and edits while the other types. They pause for a snack then resume their work, continuing long enough for the light outside the office window to dim, a wonderful example of time passing quite literally before our eyes. The physical world worms its way into the film, even if the soft evening light, like the rain, is controlled by filmmakers. 2
The camera revolves around the men at work in a continuous tracking shot. Sometimes it is pointed away from the window, at bureaucrats lit by fluorescents and sunlight, and other times it catches the men from the opposite side of the room partially backlit by tall bright windows. But after the outside light fades, a camera operator can be seen in the room, twice reflected in the window, his forearms made briefly visible by the now dusky exterior, the falling sun, and the expiration of the golden hour.
So, an already self-reflective scene achieves another layer. One act of God reveals another.
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A film that demands such patience and attention from its audience gets exactly that from those who see it through: an audience of active watchers. While Sátántangó is often described as a detailed self-contained world, like all films it shows evidence of the filmmaking process, sometimes unintentionally as in the photographer’s reflection, sometimes playfully like the visible brush strokes of the Impressionists, and sometimes individually in an active viewer’s mind. What is most unusual about Sátántangó is that the film itself seems to mingle with its own themes of external, quasi-spiritual forces. As the characters react to foreign elements, the cinematic machinery breaches the narrative hull, hinting at something outside the film: the filmmaker, viewer, and apparatus of its art. The villagers look to a savior but get only Irimias. They pray to God but drift to sleep mid-prayer without response, proceeding as if to live a hopeful life in a story stacked against them, under a sky constantly raining upon them, inside a wind that blows trash at them as they walk. The sound of distant bells wafts into the town like a heavenly knell, but the film’s final segment gives the sound a concrete – and even absurd – explanation; a blind monk in the ruins of a chapel clangs a warning about approaching Turks. The evidence of the process pokes holes in an otherwise hermetic locale, but those holes feel like parts of the whole, like the spaces of a crocheted afghan.
The reflection of the photographer in the scene with the bureaucrats recalls a scene earlier in the film when we look through a pair of binoculars, through the eyes of a doctor who records events on paper by describing villagers in his notebook. Once again we see a writer of character profiles. Once again we’re aware of physical optics. With a panning zoom lens, Tarr shows magnified events that are already familiar to the viewer. We saw them earlier in the film. With elongated shots, Tarr creates a meditative space for the viewer then launches deliberate repetitions into that unpredictable field of personal thoughts, arriving at an alchemy that is inherently tied up with the experience of sitting for hours in a dim theatre.
When the camera follows the villagers’ exodus down a road of compacted soil, the wheels beneath the camera dolly resemble those on the cart up ahead, taking the same path and carrying a similar load – even though they are outside the frame. Through the magic of cinema, one set of wheels makes a persistent rumble for minutes on end while the other moves in greased silence, its parallel axles matching not only those of the cart in-frame but also: the reels of film inside the camera running closely above; the projector’s twin circles running at the back of the theatre; and the circular mise en scène recurring throughout the film. Sometimes the camera glides to enclose the villagers horizontally, sometimes revolves above a heap of sleepers, and sometimes moves in the z-axis of a pub to survey its dancing patrons. Even the drunken dancers themselves move in circles, dancing ad nauseam to a looping according tune.
Such moments are as playful as the story is absurd. Sátántangó’s long takes may approach ideals espoused by André Bazin; but, as filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky says in Devotional Cinema, it is often the cut that turns a shot into a moment of clarity, ending the dream with a reflection on the dream. 3 Dorsky argues that a successful film lulls the viewer cyclically into a dreamlike state but reawakens her with a clap, plunging the viewer temporarily into a world while making her steadily aware of its artifice, alternating between subjective and objective viewpoints.
Repeatedly Tarr shows us a group of characters – in conversation or revelry – then after a long time makes them stop to look toward the camera. At the end of a ten-minute dance sequence, their gaze gives the impression that the shot has outlasted the performance, as if the cast is looking to the director for instruction. But a character’s comment on someone’s imminent arrival at the pub is confirmed moments later in a traditional reverse shot of the pub’s entrance on the fourth wall.
The sudden appearance of classic film grammar – shot and reverse shot – within Sátántangó’s non-traditional visual language has the inverse effect of Dorsky’s soap bubbles. The dream of the film seems to be interrupted in moments when actors look into the lens, but showing their point of view in the next shot resumes the dream, bringing the viewer back into the film’s world. Yet, at the same time, the appearance of common editing techniques brings Sátántangó closer to the universe of film that Tarr sometimes seems to eschew.
Such editing also reduces its narrative world to nominal boundaries. Consider the opposite impact of a shot near the end of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker; the camera pans to a wall of books in an otherwise sparse room, changing the context of a space only seen in half until that point. Tarkovsky’s pan expands the film’s world and adds important information; Tarr’s reverse shots limit it. If the actors’ gaze in Sátántangó seems momentarily directed at filmmaker and viewer, after the cut it excludes them, once again returning to the dozen or so characters in the narrative.
Consider the different effect in Claire Denis’ U.S. Go Home, which observes a young man dancing in a long unbroken shot punctuated by a cut to his sister, smoking and watching from an adjacent room. Her presence is unknown before the second shot, so the cut recasts the first as subjective and makes use of the naturally voyeuristic tendencies of the camera to enter the character’s head. Similarly, Tarr’s cut re-contextualizes the sequence preceding it, but only after the actors had been ambiguously suspended, lifting the film briefly outside of its narrative.
The scene of bureaucrats typing in Sátántangó also recalls the celebrated ending of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, whose virtuoso final shot begins by tracking very slowly through a hotel room toward a window with open French doors. As the camera draws closer to the opening, a figure can be seen faintly reflected in the glass of the right-hand door, a man in a suit thrusting his hand into his coat jacket pulling out a pistol. Antonioni constructed the reflection quite deliberately. The gunshot is the catalyst – purposely muffled, almost unseen – for the final step of the film’s existential journey, the trigger that causes the camera to detach from Jack Nicholson’s character, leave his body like a departing soul, and turn around to see the hotel room from the outside. The sequence mirrors a shot earlier in the film, in another hotel room, when the camera seems to lose track of Nicholson as he drifts into a flashback on a balcony before wandering — behind the camera — into the present. In Sátántangó, Tarr often moves his camera among the assembled actors, watching them in medium-shot before drifting strategically past an actor’s face in close-up. His filmmaking arises from the same spirit of poetic repetition, the same drift between subjective and objective, and the same interplay of actors, movement, and light that seemed to inspire Antonioni.
Rear Window, too, is sometimes cited for its similar circumstance of a man watching his neighbors through a window. Beyond that superficial detail, consider the way Hitchcock famously contextualizes the shots of Jimmy Stewart by cutting them against the objects of his gaze. It’s the Kuleshov effect that Tarr stretches to the breaking point at the moments when his characters look into the camera. Further consider Rear Window’s themes of hermetic locales breached by foreign bodies: Grace Kelly entering the distant apartment and Raymond Burr mirroring the action in Scotty’s. And finally consider how the themes of voyeurism seem to riff on the experience of watching the film: the way Scotty views his neighbors not through a telescope but through a camera lens, the way he fends off the intruder not with a weapon but a flash bulb, and the way the window blinds that open and close the movie seem to lift and fall like theater curtains operated by unseen crew. Saying that Sátántangó exists outside the language of classic film fails to see the obsessions he shares with the likes of Hitchcock and overlooks Tarr’s remarkably fresh iteration of old techniques.
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When he first appears in the film, meek and righteous Irimias is virtually defined by the bearded face of a storybook Jesus, but from that moment on his motives are in question. He convinces most of the villagers to leave the collective and rebuild at a nearby manor. In so doing, he requires them to pool their money with him. Once they reach the extremely inadequate manor he claims that the authorities won’t tolerate their plans and suggests the group divide up temporarily. By any evaluation he is at best a coerced spy and at worst an opportunistic con man. But like a cult leader, he aspires beyond simply emptying the collective’s coffers. When he gives each family a small amount of money to hold them over, one gets the sense that he’s slipping a hook into a fish.
Having taken the collective under his wing, Irimias delivers a message to the group. After his remarks, he then walks toward the camera and out of the frame; every on-screen eye follows him, and his exit from the picture leaves the group looking into (or near) the lens, as if lost. Irimias passes into and out of the frame as easily as he does the collective. Often the camera follows him on long walks up the road, sometimes preceding him, sometimes following, and other times assuming his point of view. Although collapsed to the point of dysfunction, the collective tentatively exists as a bubble into which an external force is injected. This is a collective of lethargy and inertia, not vigilance. It’s the wounded prey to his predator.
Irimias frequently uses animal metaphors to denigrate people. Filmmakers have notorious trouble coercing performances from animals, but when creatures appear so naturally in Sátántangó the film approaches documentary realism, with the camera itself implied as a subject. When Irimias first approaches the town on a long dirt road, a fly alights on and crawls quickly across the shield that covers the lens. It appears at the end of a long shot, so Tarr could have cut a few frames earlier to remove the fly. But it remains; the fly is a fact of this farm road, and the camera is a fact of Sátántangó.
Similarly, the most adventurous of the cows in the film’s opening shot makes a beeline for the camera – or perhaps for a recognizable human behind it. A herd of galloping horses rides into a later shot then turns sharply left when reaching the frame’s edge – as if directed by off-screen wranglers. During a lengthy tracking shot through the manor, an owl on a balustrade is seen in profile until the camera is close enough to attract its attention; it turns to stare at the machine.
But the limited acting abilities of animals achieves a chilly, resonant horror in the famous sequence involving Estike and her cat. Like a prowling feline — or like Irimias entering the collective bubble — she enters and exits a barn through a hole in its siding. She coerces the cat into a role-play that we presume is the reverse of the abuse she normally receives from adults. She shakes the cat telling it that she’s the stronger of the two, scolds it for childish lapses, and eventually kills it with rat poison. The girl adopts the role of the aggressor, just as the camera adopts her point of view; in one shot it even tracks into a space that she recently occupied, sampling her vantage of the countryside.
While it’s often cited as a disturbing scene (arguably Sátántangó’s centerpiece), Estike’s encounter with the cat accumulates even more layers when the extra-narrative details seep around the edges. Viewers often wonder whether it’s real, prompting many writers to point out that it was shot humanely, that the squeals on the soundtrack (like most of what we hear in the film) were added during post-production, and that Tarr himself now keeps the cat as a pet. In real life, it lived. But such commentary defends the camera and the filmmakers from the kind of aggression we see on screen. Beyond concerns for the cat’s wellbeing, its behavior differs from the girl’s. An animal, like a small child, freely makes eye contact with the crew. As this cat struggles it often seems to notice people behind the camera. What’s surprising, however, is that the young girl playing Estike, Erika Bók, does not, and the discordant image of the two is striking. Through long takes of precise action, this young nonprofessional remains intensely in character. The question of how a debuting actor can give such a deadly serious performance while skillfully avoiding the nearby camera remains unanswered. The zoom lens and tight framing, which constantly seek the action, echo the cinematic elements that mimic the doctor’s binoculars in an earlier scene, but most of the action in the loft is staged with the girl squarely facing the camera, as if she’s hitting a mark just beyond the footlights.
If the film were entirely fictional, the sequence would be far less effective. But due to the subtle self-reflexivity, it’s impossible to forget that someone is watching, both the filmmakers and the viewers. The episode is as premeditated as the girl’s trip to fetch rat poison, and it becomes increasingly difficult to separate all of those someones from each other. Viewers slip seamlessly into the roles of voyeur, perpetrator, and victim, as easily as the camera slips into Estike’s point of view at the edge of the hayloft, as easily as the girl reverses roles with a pet, and as easily as an untrained actor fakes revenge on a cat.
The cinematic apparatus also appears in the hooks that connect the girl to the story’s other threads. After the complex scene with the cat, the girl discovers that she lost her money to her lying brother, echoing the regrets of the villagers who learn that their destination is a wreck only after they have destroyed their furniture. In the night rain, Estike approaches the glowing pub in the distance. The composition matches an earlier scene in which the doctor made his way toward the pub on a rainy night: the foreground character in the lower left of the screen, the distant glowing pub in the upper right. Often, films use such compositional similarities to signal an identical location. Perhaps she is using the same path to the pub that the doctor used. But Tarr uses this similarity as a different sort of signpost: it’s not the same location but the same moment. At the pub the two characters and their stories cross paths, the timeline having folded back unexpectedly. The two shots show the same rain and the same night but different sides of the same pub. The composition is a varied repetition, not a physical marker but a cinematic one.
Before she meets the doctor outside the pub, she stands at the window and sees the revelers indoors. For a moment, she is Chaplin’s Little Tramp in The Gold Rush, peering through the saloon window on New Year’s Eve. It is apt that the doctor and the girl meet, that they meet outside of any buildings, and that their journeys are linked through careful composition. They are the film’s primary outcasts.
* * *
Sátántangó opens with a faint droning sound that seeps into the film as gently as the cows amble into the empty barnyard. Although its muted ringing mixes softly with the ambient sounds, they’re otherworldly enough to seem extra-diegetic. A viewer lost in a story doesn’t ask whether the music is inside or outside of the narrative, but Sátántangó’s sound design seems to provoke this question deliberately. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, a character refers to an unusual sound of bells; perhaps the drone is diegetic after all. We learn in the end that the score is distinct from sounds referred to by the characters – fittingly the actor playing Irimias composed it. It wafts into and out of the soundscape as a frequent reminder of the otherworldly bell, the expat Irimias, the possibility (and unlikelihood) of supernatural forces, the mist enveloping the location where Estike dies, and the foreign machinery of cinema.
The source of the ringing, revealed in the film’s climax, is absurd. The revelation answers nothing and leaves not only the musical score but now the diegetic bell in the realm of mystery. The doctor, left behind by the collective, traces the peal to a derelict chapel where the bell tower has long since collapsed. There a blind monk issues a noisy warning: The Turks are coming. It’s quite possible, of course, that the Turks have already come, trashed the resident’s furniture, destroyed a child as easily as she destroyed a cat, taken the money, and carted the people to a nearby town to keep them cowed and productive. But the doctor takes the warning seriously, boards up his windows, and entombs himself in darkness, the blind having led the blind.
The doctor intends to protect himself from approaching foreigners, but his actions inadvertently conjure the image, once again, of theater. When Tarr squares the four sides of the window with the four sides of the movie screen, the boarding-up is a gradual, physical fade to black, an ending as playful as the curtains at the end of Rear Window. It’s the final action of a film whose narrative bubble floats close to the point of a pin, whose soundtrack is a recurring external question.
But the film does not end precisely when the window goes black. The credits follow, accompanied by a familiar drone, unbound by the picture on the screen.
I: TARR↩
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