Already destitute, villagers lead desperate, quiet lives. Meanwhile (earlier? Much later?), a ne’er-do-well named Irimiás (Mihály Víg) is tapped by the police to spy on the village for reasons unclear. Early in the film, “early” being a relative concept in Sátántangó, somewhere within the first hour, two villagers conspire to steal the remaining money from the collective and flee.
Based on László Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel of the same name, the film features a circular narrative involving a perpetually declining collective farm in an unnamed Hungarian village.
Linearity and resolution are certainly not what Sátántangó has to offer. The Blu-ray’s accompanying essay by Janice Lee and Jared Woodland, titled “How to Watch Sátántangó,” (movies so seldom come with strategy guides-I’m reminded of the glossary handout audiences were given at screenings of David Lynch’s Dune adaptation in 1984) similarly assumes in the reader an attitude toward Sátántangó as if it were some arcane torture device, noting in their walkthrough of those opening eight, cow-centric minutes, “Looking at and talking to yourself, recognize that your most terrible viewing experience isn’t sustained stillness but the confrontation with your own dependence on linearity and resolution.” It’s an unfortunate (if apt) way to frame Sátántangó, reducing the work from art to endurance test, something to be surmounted, the Dark Souls of movies. I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of Sátántangó at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica this past Sunday, as part of the American Cinematheque’s “Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair” series. Eight minutes down, about 430 to go-Béla Tarr’s 1994 masterpiece has a daunting runtime of over seven hours. The shot is nearly eight minutes long and free of human dialogue, an act of provocation in its deliberate simplicity and harbinger of things to come. Sátántangó’s opening shot follows a herd of cows wandering a desolate town.
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