Unspoken

Journal for contemplative cinema

“THE STYLE’S FUNCTION”: NARRATION IN BÉLA TARR’S SÁTÁNTANGÓ

Matthew Flanagan

Sátántangó is a film deeply concerned with the process of narration. More so than Tarr’s other “late” works, it presents not simply a series of events that take place within a fictional world, but a sustained exploration of the specific form and structure that represent them. When, before the film draws to a close, Tarr pauses the narrative to allow two unnamed clerks to type up a report of the characters and events that we have previously witnessed, his self-reflexive engagement with the very construction of the fiction film becomes impossible to ignore. This article intends to propose some brief ideas about the unusual strategies of narration employed in Sátántangó, and a couple of analytical models which might be used to reflect upon them.

“Narration” will be understood here as pertaining to David Bordwell’s definition in Narration in the Fiction Film as the ‘process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channelling the spectator’s construction of the fabula’ (Emphasis added). ¹ The fabula refers to the cause-and-effect chain of events that constitute a film’s fictional “story,” and the syuzhet signifies its narratological presentation within the film (“plot”). Within the fiction film, syuzhet manipulation functions alongside style to reproduce, reflect on, or even depart altogether from the fabula. This relationship manifests itself in varying degrees across different narrational traditions, but in Sátántangó all three collide in a particularly unique manner.

In the most rudimentary sense, Sátántangó’s narrative relates a farming community’s ill-fated attempt to set up a self-sufficient smallholding backed by a year’s collective wages from eight parties. The series of events is divided into twelve chapters, mirroring the structure of László Krasznahorkai’s original novel, and is related through the actions and perspectives of sixteen central protagonists. All the central characters are introduced during the first six chapters, and are listed here in order of their initial appearance within the syuzhet structure: Futaki, Schmidt, Mrs. Schmidt, Halics & Mrs. Kráner (chapter 1); Irimiás, Petrina, Kelemen & Sanyi Horgos (2); the Doctor & Estike (3); Kráner, the Innkeeper, Mrs. Halics (4); Mrs. Horgos (5); Kráner & the Schoolmaster (6). Other incidental characters appear at individual points during the full course of the narrative: the Captain (chapter 2), the two prostitutes (3), the accordion player (4), Steigerwald & Páyer (9), the two clerks (11) and the lone bell-clanger (12).

The first six chapters serve to establish the complete network of characters and relationships, and the final six chronicle the corollaries and outcome of the set-up. If the syuzhet structure does in fact mirror the dance of the film’s title (as many critics have suggested), the first six chapters (or “steps”) document the promise of a successful implementation of Irimiás’s plan (forward), and the final six its calculated dissolution (back). What follows is a brief summary of the syuzhet structure, with an emphasis on basic fabula material and subsequent temporal manipulation:

1. Futaki discovers Schmidt & Kráner’s plan to flee with the collected wages. He agrees to enter into the scheme until Mrs. Halics (and, later, Mrs. Kráner) announces that Irimiás and Petrina are coming on the road, even though Sanyi Horgos told the villagers that the two men died a year and a half ago. Halics is glimpsed crossing the farmyard. Mrs. Schmidt and, later, Schmidt & Futaki leave for the pub to await the tricksters’ arrival.
2. Irimiás & Petrina visit the Captain, who attempts to recruit them for an unspecified purpose. While they wait, time slips out of joint. Kelemen witnesses their presence in a bar near the courthouse. They journey to the pub, meeting Sanyi on the way.
3. The Doctor records the events of chapter 1 from the perspective of his desk. Mrs. Kráner brings him food for the last time. He ventures out in the rain to refill his flask with fruit brandy, and is intercepted by Estike outside the pub. He pursues her and collapses in the woods after spying Irimiás, Petrina & Sanyi in the distance. Kelemen loads his body onto a cart the next day.
4. Halics, Mrs. Halics, the accordion player and the bartender wait in the pub. Kelemen and Mrs. Schmidt arrive.
5. Sanyi cons Estike into growing a “money stalk.” Halics visits Mrs. Horgos. Estike wrestles with and poisons a cat, and confronts Sanyi as he waits for Irimiás & Petrina. She walks to the pub with the dead cat under her arm and peers in at the villagers’ drunken reverie. She encounters and flees from the Doctor, walks all night and commits suicide the next day.
6. The villagers (all present) count money in the pub. Mrs. Horgos enters and enquires about Estike. The villagers dance. Schmidt parades a cheese roll upon his forehead. Kelemen stomps and rants. Estike peers through the fogged window. Time passes. The villagers pass out. The accordion player vomits behind the camera. A spider spins a web between an overturned bottle and glass.
7. The next day. The villagers gather round Estike’s corpse. Irimiás gives a motivational speech, and receives the money for the scheme.
8. Perspective from the Front: Irimiás instructs the villagers to meet the next day at 6am in the manor at Almás. They depart in opposite directions. The villagers journey to their destination, inspect the desolate property, argue, and bed down for the night. [Fig 1]
9. Perspective from the Rear: After parting from the villagers (as above), Irimiás, Petrina & Sanyi journey to town and pass the location of Estike’s death. Horses gallop across the town square. They reach Steigerwald’s. Irimiás dictates a letter to the Captain, and negotiates the purchase of explosive with Páyer. The three men bed down for the night. Petrina prays. [Fig 2]
10. The villagers wait and argue at the manor. Irimiás arrives late and postpones the scheme. They all drive to town. Irimiás separates the villagers. Futaki is the last to leave.
11. Irimiás, Petrina & Sanyi walk. Fade. Two clerks read, amend and type up a document describing the behaviour a number of the film’s protagonists.
12. The Doctor returns from hospital after thirteen days, catches up with his notes, and goes in search of the distant tolling bells. He boards up his window on his return, filling the frame with darkness.

As this synopsis hopefully illustrates, the linear progression of the fabula is distorted by a syuzhet structure which operates independently of its logical development. During the first six chapters, the movement of characters begin to define the organisation of the syuzhet, and in the process certain episodes are disconnected from the fabula’s central conflict. Individual or groups of characters are tracked by the syuzhet through different fields of time: chronological time, synchronic time, narratological time, and real time (to this list Andréa Picard would also add ‘physical,’ ‘historical,’ ‘theological,’ ‘universal,’ and ‘parataxic’ time). ² The systematic distortion of the fabula forms a narrative matrix in which individual elements (shots, chapters and sequences) overlap and interlock rather than line up one after the other. The syuzhet’s focus is subject to ellipses (the gap between chapters 6 & 7, say), excision of significant events (Irimiás, Petrina & Sanyi’s arrival at the pub), and frequent repetition. We quickly realise that many fabula events occur simultaneously, and that the syuzhet patterning forces us to connect the paths of characters through their intersection rather than immediate cause-and-effect.

The second and final chapter establish a firm (non-)linear beginning and end point which encompass seemingly all the events of the others. As chapters cover varying time spans (minutes, hours or days), one may be contained within another, with the effect that events often feel like they are not just occurring diachronically or synchronically but in, around and over each other. To wit: the time span of chapter 2 comprises 1,3, 6 and almost all of 5, meaning that as Irimiás, Petrina & Sanyi enter the pub at the end of the chapter, the entirety of 1-6 have been covered. 3 begins at the same time as 1, but breaks free to take in the night and next day too. The events of 4 take place after 1, during the events of 2 and 3, and overlap with 5. Chapter 6 takes place after 1 & 4, but within 3 & 5. Chapter 7 begins in the aftermath of 6, and marks a shift toward the linear chronology of the second half (which is only disrupted by the synchronic presentation of 8 & 9, which begin and end at approximately the same point).

Jonathan Romney has suggested that this overlapping mosaic which ‘fragments rather than binds the narrative’ has a further implication: ‘the deeper we get into Sátántangó, the further we get into chaos, the further we stray from any linear narrative track.’ ³ This effect only seems to occur on a purely connotative rather than structural level, though (no doubt as a result of the narrative’s accumulation of dread, distrust, desperation and sheer duration). Paradoxically, as the fabula plunges the protagonists further into chaos, the syuzhet structure straightens out. Sátántangó conforms to Bordwell’s conception of the modern ‘converging-fate’ network narrative (for example, 21 Grams (2003)) as tending to become less fragmentary as fabula conflicts converge. More sequential scenes and fewer flashbacks are presented in order to arrive at a ’stable event frame’ which aims to achieve a sense of closure at once seemingly arbitrary and predetermined. ⁴

Sometimes the syuzhet’s organisation of events becomes inexplicably disjointed. In chapter 1, Halics is glimpsed walking across the farmyard. The incident is repeated from the Doctor’s perspective in chapter 3, but the overlap noticeably lacks temporal continuity. The time span between Futaki entering the house and Halics’ movement in chapter 3 is too slim. Either events have been invisibly elided, or time did in fact slip out of joint on the courthouse clocks in chapter 2. This moment of intentional slippage reminds us that Tarr is not so much concerned with “real” time as the experiential capacity of narrational time. To paraphrase Chantal Akerman, he wants us to feel the time that events take, which of course is not the time that they really take. ⁵

Art-cinema vs. Parametric Narration

On first glance, Sátántangó appears to bear all the thematic and stylistic hallmarks of art-cinema narration. The film certainly foregrounds the thematic and stylistic concerns of moral ambiguity, the weight of existential import, psychologically-charged landscapes, an interest in reaction rather than action, narrative ellipses, and stretches of temps morts. Tarr formulates a cinema of waiting, looking, walking and isolation, but one shorn of, say, Antonioni or Angelopoulos’ grand modernist gestures.

In his 1996 article A Place in the Pantheon, Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that the endless stretches of rural wasteland in Damnation and Sátántangó represent ‘the visual counterparts of people’s mutual distrust and alienation from one another.’ ⁶ The orientation of figures within landscapes in Sátántangó does indeed operate on this symbolic level, and is redolent of the art cinema. However, Rosenbaum’s next comment establishes an important distinction: ‘the plot operates almost independently of the moral and experiential weight given each shot: Tarr’s camera obliges us to share so much time as well as space with the grubby characters that we can’t help but become deeply implicated in their lives and manoeuvrings.’ ⁷ Each shot in Sátántangó is a heavily stylised artefact, achieving an autonomous density not as a delivery system of the expressive qualities of the plot but style. Art-cinema narration hinges on the equality of syuzhet and style as expressive devices, but in Sátántangó the balance often tips in favour of the latter.

Tarr’s current preferred form of narration is one where style creates patterns separate from the requirements of the syuzhet structure. As a result, it is perhaps more appropriate to consider Sátántangó as a parametric film, in accordance with Bordwell’s conception of a system in which “the narration literally stylises the represented events; images and sounds stand like translucent filters between the syuzhet organisation and the spectator.” ⁸ A parametric film must be unified by a set of identifiable intrinsic norms, but can also be open to a series of patterned reiterations. Bordwell identifies two general strategies: the ‘ascetic’ option, where the film limits its range to a narrow range of codified procedures, and the ‘replete’ option, where each stylistic event exploits a wide range of paradigmatic procedures. ⁹ As Tarr’s narrational devices are frequently subject to repetition, divergence or at times complete reinvention, Sátántangó lies in the latter camp. The film’s “repleteness” of style can be measured by the following primary stylistic tropes:

• Frequent use of the plan-sequence, often bookended by a pre- and post-action lag.
• Extensive camera movement. Tarr’s camera travels in every direction except underground, tracking laterally, vertically, horizontally, forward, backward, and in arcing or circular motion. Occasionally augmented by manipulation of the zoom lens.
• The still image: camera and focus remain fixed for extensive stretches of time.
• Shot scale: a pronounced variation between extreme-close-ups and cosmic long shots. Many iterations are explored between the two poles. [Fig 3-4]
• Repetition of staging and camera position (for example, the series of shots that link Estike’s suicide walk in chapter 5 with the journey of Irimiás, Petrina & Sanyi in 9). [Fig 5-6]
• Repeated use of planimetric compositions [Fig 7-8] and further decoupage-based motifs (such as the pro-filmic frame within the frame [Fig 9]).

Tarr uses variants of the techniques listed above to process scenes in additive fashion. Much of Sátántangó’s duration is given over to the act of walking, and each sequence offers a case study in the potential for subtle deviation between chosen narrational devices. Rear or frontal tracking shots are used frequently, sometimes in an intensely dynamic manner: as Irimiás & Petrina walk to the courthouse in chapter 2, the forceful and impulsive movement of the camera appears to propel both them and the swirling detritus down the street [Fig 10]. Later in the chapter, after leaving the bar near the courthouse, Irimiás & Petrina walk across the rural expanse to the pub where the villagers wait. The journey is relayed in five shots (38-42): a reverse track that anticipates the direction of their walk [Fig 11], a lateral approach from a distance before they are met by Sanyi (39), a parallel track in which the camera eventually falls behind [Fig 12-13], a frontal POV shot [Fig 14], and an “empty” track across the landscape as the non-diegetic score drowns out Sanyi’s voice. The relationship between these shots proposes a distinctive method of filming an incident that is motivated not by thematic or symbolic but aesthetic concerns. The shots themselves are largely stylistically autonomous, but united by a shared tone, pace, rhythm and duration.

The style’s symbiotic relationship with the syuzhet is in a state of constant flux throughout Sátántangó, and at times threatens to overwhelm it entirely. Rarely does a stylistic system dominate the syuzhet for the duration of a film, but Bordwell suggests Wavelength (1967) as a unique example. Perhaps fittingly, one shot in Sátántangó has always struck me as a direct homage.

Midway through chapter 1, after Futaki has agreed to enter into Schmidt and Kráner’s plan to split and flee with the collective’s wages, we see him sitting at Schmidt’s kitchen table hypothesising about his prosperous future. At the beginning of the shot (10), which lasts almost five minutes, the camera is positioned at the rear of the kitchen with Schmidt asleep in the foreground and Futaki sitting against the far wall to the left. The camera’s field of vision then advances and narrows at a slow and deliberate pace, passing both Schimdt and Futaki before straightening up to halt a hair’s breadth from the window pane at the far wall [Fig 15-17]. In a similar manner to Wavelength, the camera here forges a shape in time. Its movement is inexorable, and completely ignorant of the (admittedly minor) fabula exposition taking place in its vicinity. The close-up of the embroidered net curtain serves as a substitute for Snow’s postcard, and the parallel can be felt right down to the slightly crooked trajectory of the zoom itself. The shot displays an almost structural preoccupation with the parameters of the image, and is perhaps best considered as part of a lineage of that tradition. (It’s worth noting that there are two other notable extended zoom-shots: the focal advance toward the doorframe after Estike poisons the cat’s milk (shot 81); and the “owl-zoom”, in which the trajectory of the lens traverses three rooms to fix upon an extreme close-up of the bird’s steadfast gaze (131).)

This correlation with the avant-garde tradition is also alluded to in a number of shots that explore film’s ontological capacity to record “natural” phenomena. The two shots of the mist enveloping and then clearing around the disused building where Estike commits suicide [Fig 18-19] (and its repeat in the presence of Irimiás, Petrina & Sanyi [Fig 20]) recalls the strain of meteorological cinema located in works such as James Benning’s 13 Lakes and Ten Skies (2004, 16mm), the two real-time quarters of Chris Welsby & William Raban’s River Yar (1971/72, two-screen projection, 16mm) and Larry Gottheim’s contemporaneous Fog Line (1972, 16mm), a film with which these two shots bear an uncanny similarity. Fog Line records a blanket of fog clearing over a meadow from a fixed camera position [Fig. 21–22]: as the film begins, only the telegraph lines that bisect the frame and the tips of two trees are visible, but over the course of eleven minutes the bodies of the trees gradually emerge from the damp air, and colour – a soft green – begins to seep into the frame. The potential for this contemplation of landscape, environment and the gradual revelation of detail is, at times, integrated into the narrative temps morts of Sátántangó’s structure.

Excess

As the style and content of the above sequence shots suggest, not every element in Sátántangó obeys the immediate demands of the syuzhet structure. When the foregrounding of style threatens to distract from the syuzhet entirely, it often offers up a surfeit of duration and material detail that cannot be contained or accounted for by the process of narration. The abundance of these facets of the filmic image (in time) might be thought to border on the excessive.

Although Bordwell defines “excess” quite strictly as lying outside of the boundaries of narration – ‘materials which may stand out perceptually, but which do not fit either narrative or stylistic patterns’ – the idea still might be relevant to certain aspects of Kristin Thompson’s study of the subject in her 1986 article The Concept of Cinematic Excess. ^{10 11} Thompson suggests that excess arises from the conflict between a film’s materiality and the unifying structures within it, comprising fleeting or recurrent instances of obtuse meaning: motifs that resist symbolic interpretation, repetitions that exhaust their initial narrative function, aesthetic elements that are served up purely for perceptual play.

Particularly suggestive in relation to Tarr is Thompson’s observation that ‘the minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation [as in the classical cinema], excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning.’ ¹² Although it is important to establish that excess does not equal style, the ‘two are closely linked because they both involve the material aspects of the film.’ ¹³ As a result, the spectator’s attention to the formal organisation provided by style “might well lead to a noticing of excess as well.” ¹⁴ The boundaries between style and excess are almost certainly invisible, or at least unquantifiable, but the sheer emphasis on style’s decorative function in Sátántangó activates elements of the cinema that many films leave untapped: the parameters of the frame, the temporal capacity of the image, the materiality of the apparatus, and, duly, its capacity for excess.

The “replete” strain of parametric narration as practised by Tarr or Godard never fails to exploit the fact that although a narrative function may justify the presence of a device, it doesn’t always motivate ‘the specific form that individual element will take‘ (emphasis added). ¹⁵ Tarr experiments extensively with a corollary of this: the fact that motivation is insufficient to ascertain how long a device needs to be on screen in order to understand its purpose. Accordingly, the duration of shots in Sátántangó frequently exhaust their narrative function or potential for symbolic meaning. As we watch characters repeatedly trudge from A to B, our attention is drawn to the “excessive” elements belied by the material of the film: the mud underfoot, the gravel on the road, the visible force of the rain, the contrast of greyscale photography.

This attention to the abundance of material detail offered by the filmic image often gives way to a series of what Thompson describes as ‘variations that add nothing except as perceptual material.’ ¹⁶ Countless elements of decoupage within Sátántangó’s fictional world carry an interest far beyond their function in the narrative: the just-washed pint glasses in the bar [Fig 23]; the Doctor’s parched exercise books and overflowing ashtray; the wilted plants in dank rooms; rain-soaked external walls; weathered brickwork; peeling plaster; the spray of rainwater; damp, sagging net curtains; the condensation gathered on windows; neat furrows in a barren field; the sodden leaves in woods; the clods of earth on well-worn boots; the paper engulfing two figures in a windswept street. The quality of these elements are rooted in their fixity as material facets of the image, rupturing the controlled perceptual surface of narration.

Excess by its very nature is counterunity, and thus difficult to categorise it as part of a unified parametric system. However, the loose concept might furnish us with a means of thinking about the elements of Tarr’s work that are purely playful, pictorial or experiential; those elements that resist or exhaust connotative “meaning,” that remain ever elusive, ever opaque.

Thompson concludes her article with the suggestion that, for a viewer attentive to the concept of excess, a narrative film can ‘become a perceptual field of structures which the viewer is free to study at length, going beyond the strictly functional aspects.’ ¹⁷ A work that foregrounds or abounds with excess invites us to look deeper into it, renewing its “strangeness,” and heightening our awareness of how a whole film, and thus cinema itself, can work upon our perception. It is tempting to ascribe this tendency as Tarr’s governing artistic motivation.

I: TARR↩

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