Wherein Ben and I take a long time to wrap our heads around the film, only to find it appears to have the better of us.
Please read the following with the understanding that Ben wrote four lengthy posts on the film which I didn’t read because I hadn’t yet had a chance to see the film. Most of what I have written below, tucked into the midst of Ben’s review, was penned before I’d seen what Ben had to say about the film. Anytime that this is not the case, I will indicate with a snarky comment.
Ben, on Satantango, pt. 1:
A couple of New York Jews have been hearing about a particular restaurant for years, THE best place for lunch in town, bar none. So, finally, after many failed attempts to make it happen, they make it happen. Well, you can imagine their excitement as they meet at the door, their expectation as the waiter takes their order and their total silence as they devote themselves to nothing but their meal. After the last crumb is gone and the check is paid, Morty says to Schlomo: "I can't believe it. After all this time, listening to everyone go on and on about this place - the food is terrible!" "I know, I know," says Schlomo, "and such small portions."
With this film, the problem in that joke is inverted. The food is good but the portions are too large... way too large... ohmygod these portions are just too goddamn much! Let's get this out of the way from the outset. More is not always better. If sometimes less is more, then sometimes more is less. Yadda yadda and all the rest of those clichés on behalf of minimalist restraint, judicious moderation, call it what you will. SAN is just too much. It's just too much man. It's not like I didn't give it my full attention. I started watching at 7:45 this morning and finished at 3:15. I paused the film to piss now and then (isn't that in the Geneva Convention or something?) and I had a snack break between the second and third discs. So, I was down for the struggle. I went the distance. I feel this earns me the right to vent a bit. And I have to as a precondition for appreciating what is impressive about the film.
It's not the I think the excessive length of SAN is pretentious. I understand that the duration of the film as a whole is to a large extent the result of the duration of each scene. And in turn, I understand that the duration of a given scene is to a large extent the result of Tarr's complete commitment to - can I just refer to it as the Tarkovsky school as a shorthand for now? Tarr understands what the old Germans listed as one of the main laws of dialectics, the transformation of quantity into quality; what the old Anglos called a change in degree to the point of being a change in kind. I respect this and for certain passages of the film I was completely captivated by it. Nevertheless, this very principle can turn yet again, can come around and bite us on the ass. Tarr achieves an almost terrifying power but sometimes squanders it by hanging on too long. The prosaic and mundane image becomes poetic and philosophic... and then becomes boring and irritating. Sometimes, not in every scene, but sometimes. And as a whole, the film is, well, just too much. So, yes, I'm sorry to be so corny and conventional, there is not enough cut in this director's cut. Even though Tarr obviously made his film in accordance with what is essentially an anti-editing cinematic paradigm, SAN suffers from a serious lack of editing.
Having complained about the portions, l'm ready to talk about the good food. But I will wait to hear back from you before continuing further. I don't dare attempt to make sense of SAN without your input and I want to be sure that you've finished watching it prior to addressing the plot, nevermind what it all means. Besides, I have chores to do and a powerful need to look out my own window.
Dan interjects, briefly:
I'm impressed. One sitting. You must be mad. In all senses of the word.
I haven't even started it yet. And tomorrow, I run errands in the morning and attend Katherine's school play all afternoon, so I won't be able to dig into it until Wednesday at the earliest.
Ben retorts:
In your face! And I even turned down work this morning too, so intimidated was I at you throwing down the SAN gauntlet. Get on it pal. My head hurts.
[sometime later] Dan keeps Ben abreast:
Made it through discs 1 and 2 before Katherine’s birthday duties called. Will finish tomorrow.
Ben tries to taunt me with:
Replay on the Happy Birthday salutation. That you found time for the first two discs is pretty impressive given your present schedule on the home front. It also allows me to enjoy a repeat performance of my Darwin's Nightmare rip-off; i.e., blurt out a few stand-out scenes before you get a chance to mention them.
The opening (slow) pan of the cows is something else.
And the (slow slow) zoom in on the kitchen window, resting finally on a focus through the sheer curtain to the rain outside is something else again.
And the whole Beckett come Kafka conversation between Eric Clapton come Jesus and his sidekick and the police lieutenant; shit, the chat between the first two on the bench in the hallway before they even meet with the cop...
And and and... But in the midst of so much gradualism and even stasis in so many scenes, the moving shot of the two guys walking down the alley with all that flotsam and jetsam wind-whipping in their path - I can't remember experiencing a stretch of cinema so visceral for me; I just "got into it," felt as if I was a tumbling tumbleweed myself, and at a very primal level, I just gave over to the experience; out of control like a dead object but at the same time free from any subjective reflection, I felt like I could have watched that scene for hours, stayed "in" it for ever. I want to register this response for the record because my purpose is to validate in this instance the method in Tarr's madness. I really want to pay him the highest compliment I can when it comes to this scene. I was not ready for it to end when it did. It seemed short to me. I just wanted it to go on - even with it's uncomfortably driven motion and environmentally threatening tone - forever. And Tarr is well aware of the singular impact of the scene in the film as a whole because he brings it back later as a coda in revised form.
And lots more besides, but I just wanted to plant my flag in that scene for now.
Dan, having finished the film, as well as having written his review, which follows somewhere below, returns to Ben’s earlier posts and responds with:
I believe that I have a comment about Tarr's adoration of the long take in my review below (slipping us into real time, not film time), but I'd also like to point out that there might be something else at work here. This business of how the film is edited together, with many of the storylines overlapping in time, is kinda interesting, particularly when you consider how audiences of this same year were had their socks knocked off by Tarantino's loopy narrative in Pulp Fiction. Whereas other more conventional directors (and editors) would cut back and forth between different scenes occurring at the same time, Tarr abjures such editorial choices, instead creating these LOOONG uncut scenes; consequently, he has to occasionally loop backward in time and revisit a moment or a scene from a different pov. This serves dual purposes; Tarr's able to create these (yes, slow) cyclical rhythms, and he's able to show us these moments from slightly different perspectives, in a cubist-like study of these villager's reality.
Ah, yes, I see what you mean about our convergence of opinion now. Good call on that moment. The pair braving the storm as the refuse refuses to leave them alone. With so many scenes of people walking walking walking, it IS interesting that this scene stands out. Could the garbage be symbolic? This is, after all, how they view the villagers they are about to scam. And, like all good con artists, he knows the target is best left to con himself. Shit, the whole village is giddy and terrified of this pair's return--they know they're gonna be duped, and in some perverse way they're looking forward to it.
Then Ben engages:
Yes, but the recursive tactic from an alternative angle in SAN is used so sporadically. It's not so much random as it is seldom. It's not consistently cubist. The narrative is mostly chronological; at least I think it is. This is what led me to suggest that Tarr doesn't really care that much about telling the story in a linear way, or not, whatever. The whole thing just sorta sits there like a dead duck anyway, except the events featuring the little girl, but even these are not genuinely catalytic for the plot. Hence, I agree that the relationship between one scene and the next is perhaps best grasped as a spatial relationship (as I tried to explore before) but I don't think it is quite right to designate this spatial relation as cubist. It's rather "one scene to the next" in a relatively atemporal row. Time only becomes a big (big!) deal once we are committed to a particular scene, inside a given shot.
I suspect that it may prove impossible to sort out these compositional issues because the basics of character motivation that are usually front and centre is drama as an explanatory mechanism are null and void in SAN. We can speculate on the objective circumstances conditioning the characters, but we really haven't got a clue as to their subjective thought processes. Maybe we have a handle on their behavior (maybe), but what are they thinking? Tarr doesn't show us what he shows us to answer this question. So why he shows us what he shows us the way he does is that much farther away from our comprehension.
What I'm calling the tumbling tumbleweed scene stands out in the film a number of ways. It is an urban street not a rural road. Perhaps related to this but definitely what makes the scene so dynamic, they are moving fast, unlike the painfully slow crawl to the horizon line in the other scenes. Add the detritus blowing every which way but loose (hey if you can squeeze in Blondie, I can make room for Clint), it's a strong pulse of action in a film that tends towards stasis. The coda of this scene - not as im
pressive with the addition of the teenage assistant to the duo and rain to the wind - is a bit less blustery with the garbage. Does any of this mean anything? Don't ask me, phone Homer Simpson. I will only venture to repeat that I am disinclined to see symbolism anywhere in the film.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled program. Ben, on Satantango, pt. 2:
Dan, I've tried, honest I have. I spent the day doing laundry and getting my tax slips together for the accountant and fixing my mother-in-law's doorhandle, just as a diversion from writing this email. But I did there and done that and even the brilliant sunshine cannot stop me from giving in to my impatience. WARNING: Free-associative rambling below.
I couldn't believe it when the credits rolled and informed me that the film is based on a book. Wonder what in hell the book is like. Mike Nichols' Catch 22 took Joseph Heller's cubist narrative and made it linear, a big reason why the film didn't really work. I can't imagine how strange the book of SAN must be. Or did Tarr do the opposite of Nichols, take a relatively straight-forward tale and turn it into a weird (very weird) assortment of large (very large) snapshots? This assortment is certainly odd and yet, it's not really the editorial arrangement of the film's chapters that makes SAN's plot so challenging to grasp. This is to say that the chronology of the narrative is only partially jumbled. Far from being radically random with respect to time, the temporal dimension is merely askew, and I guess this has something to do with the story being presented as if it were a dancer crossing the room. Most ot the moves are forward but there are a few side steps and even a bit of backward motion. But I really think the arrow of time in the film as a whole is not such a big deal for Tarr. Rather, over the entire seven and a half hours, the chapters are perhaps better received as different spatial takes or alternative visual perspectives of a collapsing framework or decomposing social situation. It is at least clear that the film is about Hungarian society falling apart in the immediate post-communist period. This is conceptually approached ahistorically to the point of Tarr entering into an almost (almost, bit not really) atemporal narrative aesthetic. The ideological ramifications of this sort of thing tend to be politically conservative if not outright reactionary in most cases, Tarkovsky may serve as exhibit A. I am not quick to paint Tarr with this political brush, however. SAN is bloody ambiguous, at least for me, as not the plot itself but rather its meaning is not clear in my eyes. In particular, what purpose is Eric Clapton pursuing? Sometimes he appears to be the nemesis of the village and sometime the saviour. The flip-side of this coin is that sometimes he appears to be an enemy of the state and sometimes an agent of the state. Frankly, for much of the film I thought he was little more than the ring leader of a lame gang of petty thieves who had pulled a big heist. Eventually though, I realized that the village was close to a ghost town because the entire system was in crisis and the government was not so much administering authority as merely presiding over the ruins as the society self-destructs. The village would have once been the infrastructural center of an agricultural collective that ceases to exist and the disoriented motions through which the characters go are the movements of individuals who are truly lost in the emergent privatization. This is presented as disorganization to the nth degree, taking the term literally, the social organism is undergoing a biological breakdown; the walls of the barns are rotting, the land gives up nothing but mud, the cows are wandering loose, the horses in the provincial capital (those of the police perhaps) will trot wild in the plaza before the film is done. So all of this is pretty clear. What is not clear is the meaning of all this as it is given to us in the plot of SAN, especially, as I mentioned, with respect to the central conflict between Eric Clapton and the others. Is he trying to reunite them all, form a new association in radical opposition to the regime change taking place? Or is he an opportunist manipulating them for his own selfish agenda? When he has that great conversation with The Man early on, he appears to be an outlaw with some sort of Robin Hood potential, but near the end when the two secretarial cops write up that report based on his testimony, it looks as if he has sold the others down the river. In all of my confusion about this, I refused to attempt an interpretation of two key items that kept coming up, the money (where did they get it? why do they give it to Clapton? what is he going to do with it?) and the explosives Clapton speaks of needing to acquire (what for?). Frankly, I just regarded these as McGuffin-type devices, not because I think Tarr and before him, whoever wrote the book, employed such devices but simply because they were beyond me. At the same time, I think it would be wrong to compensate for the inability to make sense of these features in particular and the plot in general with a fancy symbolic reading. Indeed, I am adamant that looking at SAN symbolically or even semiotically is a dead letter. Unlike Tarkovsky for whom symbolism is pervasive, albeit symbolism of an excruciating private nature, Tarr's Tarkovskian cinematic aesthetic is symbolically inert. Tarr's whole project, it seems to me, is phenomenological. What I mean by this now is not the tendency of phenomenology to disregard so-called objective criteria in favour of personal consciousness in describing experience. This tendency can quickly become idealist and I'm not accusing SAN of this. No, the strand in phenomenology I am applying to SAN has the potential for a materialist orientation insofar as it is all about attention to the concrete character of experience. Tarkovsky is much more abstract than Tarr. No doubt, this is ultimately because he is coming from a wacky blood-on-the-cross mystical zone. My present point, however, is to distinguish the aesthetic meaning of the long long takes these two directors take. Tarr is certainly more realist than Tarkovsky, but to say this begs the question as to how so. It's not that freaky and magical events transpire in Tarkovsky's universe but not in Tarr's. Again, this speaks to Tarr's spiritualism, which is not my point. It's that Tarr keeps us in a scene for ten or more minutes and from the same point of view too in order to absolutely submerge us in the concrete. This phenomenological priority is not Tarkovsky's. From a fully Tarkovskian position this is actually rather prosaic film-making which has not entered into The Image as a certain kind of poetic abstraction. Be this as it may, Tarr's concreteness achieves its own kind of power and beauty. And it just bizarre and inexplicable enough that the otherwise prosaic and realist aesthetic takes on a mantra/pedal-tone/white-noise/dirge head trip of its own. Bear in mind that I am only dealing with the matter of the long shot now. None of what I have been groping for here has addresses Tarr's obviously unrealistic script, dialogue interaction, sound effects, music or even some of the other visual issues at stake. Tarr is psychologically and metaphysically superficial compared to Tarkovsky but his aesthetic is not just an idiosyncratic obsession of a non-conformist, unconventional, not-commercial artist. I have offered this notion of phenomenological concreteness as a first approximation of his aesthetic and I have given this a specifically spatial application. In my next installment I want to make use of Henri Bergson's concept of "duree" in order to come at this from a temporal consideration, because as I indicated parenthetically, Tarr is not really atemporal and I think Bergson's concept applies to Tarr's aesthetic to the extent that Bergson insisted that his notion of the experience of duration was not a purely subjective affair and I am trying to understand Tarr in non-idealist terms.
I am just rambling anyway and I have to pick up my kid from baseball and then go to the opera.
Dan, Part 2 to Ben’s Part 1 or some such nonsense:
Here's my part one to your part two [ed: see!] This will be a free association post, as I just can't seem to get my thoughts to cohere in any uniform way. The film's still kinda fucking with me, I guess.
First off, I'll start with what I didn't like.
The doctor sequences. That smug, corpulent prick bored the shit outta me. I know that he's intended to be an in-village mirror of the law enforcement types, always surveilling the village, taking notes, keeping records, passing judgment. But it got old very quickly, and I really couldn't wait for him to get off the bloody screen.
That's about it. Otherwise, I really dug this film. I know it's slow as shit, with shots that seem to linger on for-fucking-ever, and there were many a-time that my index finger lingered over the fast-forward button, but now that I'm done, I'm glad that I resisted the urge. There's something to be said for surviving this film, but there's something more to be said for allowing yourself to enter into its languorous rhythms, and immersing yourself in Tarr's dismal but oddly amusing world. Using the long, uncut scenes, lasting anywhere up to ten minutes without a cut, film time echoes real time, so we are encouraged to move beyond voyeurism into participation. And I also think that part of the film's perverse charm is Tarr's decision to sit on some shots long after they seem to have served their purpose, while other times cutting away from shots just as they're about to get really interesting.
Am I misguided to think that this is a pretty funny film? It's got that same deadpan wit that fellow travelers like Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki (heard of him? He's a Finnish Jarmusch, only he's funnier and darker. Which is to say, he's better.) Along those lines, the first interrogation scene with the cop (?) was quite brilliantly darkly comic, as he tries so hard to impress upon them the need for leading a responsible life, and it's like water off the proverbial duck's bath. They'll have none of that, thank you very much. And yet later they, despite having dismissed the cop's overtures, turn around and rat out every person in the village, in a lyrically dismissive discourse that the cops then have to turn into the kind of bland bureaucrat-ese that will pass muster in the department, in another bleakly funny scene. At this point, I must fess up that it occurs to me t
hat I misrepresented the film with my tag line that Satantango is Becket meets Dostoyevsky. Rather, what we have here is a continuum of sorts, with Becket, and Tarr (and by extension Jarmusch and Kaurismaki*) at one end, and Dostoyevsky and Tarkovsky (and, by extension, Bergman and perhaps Bresson) at the other.
In fact, just as I might if I were inclined to produce a piece contrasting Becket with Dostoyevsky, I find Tarr's contrasts with Tarkovsky far more instructive than his parallels. Sure, there are surface similarities, such as a fascination with reproducing real time via long uncut shots, and a keen eye for the sorta cinematic candy that can be absolutely arresting. However, when you study the content and context of these striking visuals, you find a distinct separation in intention. I find a study of the walls in the manor house, vs. the walls in the Stalker's home to be instructive in this regard. Whereas the walls in the manor house are decrepit, weather-stripped st
ructures, you sense that the damage has been done here. Whereas, the walls in the stalker's house positively throb with decay. The corrosion is an ongoing process; Tarkovsky's walls are a living testament to the ongoing rottenness of life, while Tarr's walls simply remind us that time, in its inertia, has passed, and done its business. There's nothing metaphysical at work; with Tarr we are firmly in the material world. Also, ignoring the cat/kid suicide scene for a moment, Tarr strikes a much lighter tone. The deadly serious Tarkovsky clearly had his funny bone surgically removed sometime back in the Middle Ages. He is incapable of an ironic pose, whereas Tarr appears unafraid to indulge in them from time to time. Witness the funeral scene, where Vladimir/Irimias uses this most grim and tragic moment to deliver a speech that at first glance has all the fire and brimstone of an old school preacher, attempting to unite a community out of this tragedy, but really turns out exists primarily (solely even) to further his con by massaging the villager's sense of guilt and remorse.
I have much more to say, but the tide is high and I'm moving on (random Blondie reference of the day.) Actually, I hafta mow my lawn.
Back with my part two to your part three later.
*some Kaurismaki quotes of note:
"Maybe my films are not masterpieces, but they are documents of their time. That's enough for me. Masterpieces I can't do - even though I try."
"The problem is, I have seen all the other films. All the serious films ever made I have seen, more or less. They are so good... and I am so bad. Very early in my so-called career, I knew I would never make a masterpiece. So I decided to make lots of decent films."
"I have two methods. If I have a screenplay, I follow it. If I don't, I improvise. Nobody else improvises - not the cameraman or the actors. Just me."
"When I write, I am sober. I can direct drunk. I can't edit or write drunk."
Please read the following with the understanding that Ben wrote four lengthy posts on the film which I didn’t read because I hadn’t yet had a chance to see the film. Most of what I have written below, tucked into the midst of Ben’s review, was penned before I’d seen what Ben had to say about the film. Anytime that this is not the case, I will indicate with a snarky comment.
Ben, on Satantango, pt. 1:
A couple of New York Jews have been hearing about a particular restaurant for years, THE best place for lunch in town, bar none. So, finally, after many failed attempts to make it happen, they make it happen. Well, you can imagine their excitement as they meet at the door, their expectation as the waiter takes their order and their total silence as they devote themselves to nothing but their meal. After the last crumb is gone and the check is paid, Morty says to Schlomo: "I can't believe it. After all this time, listening to everyone go on and on about this place - the food is terrible!" "I know, I know," says Schlomo, "and such small portions."
With this film, the problem in that joke is inverted. The food is good but the portions are too large... way too large... ohmygod these portions are just too goddamn much! Let's get this out of the way from the outset. More is not always better. If sometimes less is more, then sometimes more is less. Yadda yadda and all the rest of those clichés on behalf of minimalist restraint, judicious moderation, call it what you will. SAN is just too much. It's just too much man. It's not like I didn't give it my full attention. I started watching at 7:45 this morning and finished at 3:15. I paused the film to piss now and then (isn't that in the Geneva Convention or something?) and I had a snack break between the second and third discs. So, I was down for the struggle. I went the distance. I feel this earns me the right to vent a bit. And I have to as a precondition for appreciating what is impressive about the film.
It's not the I think the excessive length of SAN is pretentious. I understand that the duration of the film as a whole is to a large extent the result of the duration of each scene. And in turn, I understand that the duration of a given scene is to a large extent the result of Tarr's complete commitment to - can I just refer to it as the Tarkovsky school as a shorthand for now? Tarr understands what the old Germans listed as one of the main laws of dialectics, the transformation of quantity into quality; what the old Anglos called a change in degree to the point of being a change in kind. I respect this and for certain passages of the film I was completely captivated by it. Nevertheless, this very principle can turn yet again, can come around and bite us on the ass. Tarr achieves an almost terrifying power but sometimes squanders it by hanging on too long. The prosaic and mundane image becomes poetic and philosophic... and then becomes boring and irritating. Sometimes, not in every scene, but sometimes. And as a whole, the film is, well, just too much. So, yes, I'm sorry to be so corny and conventional, there is not enough cut in this director's cut. Even though Tarr obviously made his film in accordance with what is essentially an anti-editing cinematic paradigm, SAN suffers from a serious lack of editing.
Having complained about the portions, l'm ready to talk about the good food. But I will wait to hear back from you before continuing further. I don't dare attempt to make sense of SAN without your input and I want to be sure that you've finished watching it prior to addressing the plot, nevermind what it all means. Besides, I have chores to do and a powerful need to look out my own window.
Dan interjects, briefly:
I'm impressed. One sitting. You must be mad. In all senses of the word.
I haven't even started it yet. And tomorrow, I run errands in the morning and attend Katherine's school play all afternoon, so I won't be able to dig into it until Wednesday at the earliest.
Ben retorts:
In your face! And I even turned down work this morning too, so intimidated was I at you throwing down the SAN gauntlet. Get on it pal. My head hurts.
[sometime later] Dan keeps Ben abreast:
Made it through discs 1 and 2 before Katherine’s birthday duties called. Will finish tomorrow.
Ben tries to taunt me with:
Replay on the Happy Birthday salutation. That you found time for the first two discs is pretty impressive given your present schedule on the home front. It also allows me to enjoy a repeat performance of my Darwin's Nightmare rip-off; i.e., blurt out a few stand-out scenes before you get a chance to mention them.
The opening (slow) pan of the cows is something else.
And the (slow slow) zoom in on the kitchen window, resting finally on a focus through the sheer curtain to the rain outside is something else again.
And the whole Beckett come Kafka conversation between Eric Clapton come Jesus and his sidekick and the police lieutenant; shit, the chat between the first two on the bench in the hallway before they even meet with the cop...
And and and... But in the midst of so much gradualism and even stasis in so many scenes, the moving shot of the two guys walking down the alley with all that flotsam and jetsam wind-whipping in their path - I can't remember experiencing a stretch of cinema so visceral for me; I just "got into it," felt as if I was a tumbling tumbleweed myself, and at a very primal level, I just gave over to the experience; out of control like a dead object but at the same time free from any subjective reflection, I felt like I could have watched that scene for hours, stayed "in" it for ever. I want to register this response for the record because my purpose is to validate in this instance the method in Tarr's madness. I really want to pay him the highest compliment I can when it comes to this scene. I was not ready for it to end when it did. It seemed short to me. I just wanted it to go on - even with it's uncomfortably driven motion and environmentally threatening tone - forever. And Tarr is well aware of the singular impact of the scene in the film as a whole because he brings it back later as a coda in revised form.
And lots more besides, but I just wanted to plant my flag in that scene for now.
Dan, having finished the film, as well as having written his review, which follows somewhere below, returns to Ben’s earlier posts and responds with:
I believe that I have a comment about Tarr's adoration of the long take in my review below (slipping us into real time, not film time), but I'd also like to point out that there might be something else at work here. This business of how the film is edited together, with many of the storylines overlapping in time, is kinda interesting, particularly when you consider how audiences of this same year were had their socks knocked off by Tarantino's loopy narrative in Pulp Fiction. Whereas other more conventional directors (and editors) would cut back and forth between different scenes occurring at the same time, Tarr abjures such editorial choices, instead creating these LOOONG uncut scenes; consequently, he has to occasionally loop backward in time and revisit a moment or a scene from a different pov. This serves dual purposes; Tarr's able to create these (yes, slow) cyclical rhythms, and he's able to show us these moments from slightly different perspectives, in a cubist-like study of these villager's reality.
Ah, yes, I see what you mean about our convergence of opinion now. Good call on that moment. The pair braving the storm as the refuse refuses to leave them alone. With so many scenes of people walking walking walking, it IS interesting that this scene stands out. Could the garbage be symbolic? This is, after all, how they view the villagers they are about to scam. And, like all good con artists, he knows the target is best left to con himself. Shit, the whole village is giddy and terrified of this pair's return--they know they're gonna be duped, and in some perverse way they're looking forward to it.
Then Ben engages:
Yes, but the recursive tactic from an alternative angle in SAN is used so sporadically. It's not so much random as it is seldom. It's not consistently cubist. The narrative is mostly chronological; at least I think it is. This is what led me to suggest that Tarr doesn't really care that much about telling the story in a linear way, or not, whatever. The whole thing just sorta sits there like a dead duck anyway, except the events featuring the little girl, but even these are not genuinely catalytic for the plot. Hence, I agree that the relationship between one scene and the next is perhaps best grasped as a spatial relationship (as I tried to explore before) but I don't think it is quite right to designate this spatial relation as cubist. It's rather "one scene to the next" in a relatively atemporal row. Time only becomes a big (big!) deal once we are committed to a particular scene, inside a given shot.
I suspect that it may prove impossible to sort out these compositional issues because the basics of character motivation that are usually front and centre is drama as an explanatory mechanism are null and void in SAN. We can speculate on the objective circumstances conditioning the characters, but we really haven't got a clue as to their subjective thought processes. Maybe we have a handle on their behavior (maybe), but what are they thinking? Tarr doesn't show us what he shows us to answer this question. So why he shows us what he shows us the way he does is that much farther away from our comprehension.
What I'm calling the tumbling tumbleweed scene stands out in the film a number of ways. It is an urban street not a rural road. Perhaps related to this but definitely what makes the scene so dynamic, they are moving fast, unlike the painfully slow crawl to the horizon line in the other scenes. Add the detritus blowing every which way but loose (hey if you can squeeze in Blondie, I can make room for Clint), it's a strong pulse of action in a film that tends towards stasis. The coda of this scene - not as im
pressive with the addition of the teenage assistant to the duo and rain to the wind - is a bit less blustery with the garbage. Does any of this mean anything? Don't ask me, phone Homer Simpson. I will only venture to repeat that I am disinclined to see symbolism anywhere in the film.Now, back to our regularly scheduled program. Ben, on Satantango, pt. 2:
Dan, I've tried, honest I have. I spent the day doing laundry and getting my tax slips together for the accountant and fixing my mother-in-law's doorhandle, just as a diversion from writing this email. But I did there and done that and even the brilliant sunshine cannot stop me from giving in to my impatience. WARNING: Free-associative rambling below.
I couldn't believe it when the credits rolled and informed me that the film is based on a book. Wonder what in hell the book is like. Mike Nichols' Catch 22 took Joseph Heller's cubist narrative and made it linear, a big reason why the film didn't really work. I can't imagine how strange the book of SAN must be. Or did Tarr do the opposite of Nichols, take a relatively straight-forward tale and turn it into a weird (very weird) assortment of large (very large) snapshots? This assortment is certainly odd and yet, it's not really the editorial arrangement of the film's chapters that makes SAN's plot so challenging to grasp. This is to say that the chronology of the narrative is only partially jumbled. Far from being radically random with respect to time, the temporal dimension is merely askew, and I guess this has something to do with the story being presented as if it were a dancer crossing the room. Most ot the moves are forward but there are a few side steps and even a bit of backward motion. But I really think the arrow of time in the film as a whole is not such a big deal for Tarr. Rather, over the entire seven and a half hours, the chapters are perhaps better received as different spatial takes or alternative visual perspectives of a collapsing framework or decomposing social situation. It is at least clear that the film is about Hungarian society falling apart in the immediate post-communist period. This is conceptually approached ahistorically to the point of Tarr entering into an almost (almost, bit not really) atemporal narrative aesthetic. The ideological ramifications of this sort of thing tend to be politically conservative if not outright reactionary in most cases, Tarkovsky may serve as exhibit A. I am not quick to paint Tarr with this political brush, however. SAN is bloody ambiguous, at least for me, as not the plot itself but rather its meaning is not clear in my eyes. In particular, what purpose is Eric Clapton pursuing? Sometimes he appears to be the nemesis of the village and sometime the saviour. The flip-side of this coin is that sometimes he appears to be an enemy of the state and sometimes an agent of the state. Frankly, for much of the film I thought he was little more than the ring leader of a lame gang of petty thieves who had pulled a big heist. Eventually though, I realized that the village was close to a ghost town because the entire system was in crisis and the government was not so much administering authority as merely presiding over the ruins as the society self-destructs. The village would have once been the infrastructural center of an agricultural collective that ceases to exist and the disoriented motions through which the characters go are the movements of individuals who are truly lost in the emergent privatization. This is presented as disorganization to the nth degree, taking the term literally, the social organism is undergoing a biological breakdown; the walls of the barns are rotting, the land gives up nothing but mud, the cows are wandering loose, the horses in the provincial capital (those of the police perhaps) will trot wild in the plaza before the film is done. So all of this is pretty clear. What is not clear is the meaning of all this as it is given to us in the plot of SAN, especially, as I mentioned, with respect to the central conflict between Eric Clapton and the others. Is he trying to reunite them all, form a new association in radical opposition to the regime change taking place? Or is he an opportunist manipulating them for his own selfish agenda? When he has that great conversation with The Man early on, he appears to be an outlaw with some sort of Robin Hood potential, but near the end when the two secretarial cops write up that report based on his testimony, it looks as if he has sold the others down the river. In all of my confusion about this, I refused to attempt an interpretation of two key items that kept coming up, the money (where did they get it? why do they give it to Clapton? what is he going to do with it?) and the explosives Clapton speaks of needing to acquire (what for?). Frankly, I just regarded these as McGuffin-type devices, not because I think Tarr and before him, whoever wrote the book, employed such devices but simply because they were beyond me. At the same time, I think it would be wrong to compensate for the inability to make sense of these features in particular and the plot in general with a fancy symbolic reading. Indeed, I am adamant that looking at SAN symbolically or even semiotically is a dead letter. Unlike Tarkovsky for whom symbolism is pervasive, albeit symbolism of an excruciating private nature, Tarr's Tarkovskian cinematic aesthetic is symbolically inert. Tarr's whole project, it seems to me, is phenomenological. What I mean by this now is not the tendency of phenomenology to disregard so-called objective criteria in favour of personal consciousness in describing experience. This tendency can quickly become idealist and I'm not accusing SAN of this. No, the strand in phenomenology I am applying to SAN has the potential for a materialist orientation insofar as it is all about attention to the concrete character of experience. Tarkovsky is much more abstract than Tarr. No doubt, this is ultimately because he is coming from a wacky blood-on-the-cross mystical zone. My present point, however, is to distinguish the aesthetic meaning of the long long takes these two directors take. Tarr is certainly more realist than Tarkovsky, but to say this begs the question as to how so. It's not that freaky and magical events transpire in Tarkovsky's universe but not in Tarr's. Again, this speaks to Tarr's spiritualism, which is not my point. It's that Tarr keeps us in a scene for ten or more minutes and from the same point of view too in order to absolutely submerge us in the concrete. This phenomenological priority is not Tarkovsky's. From a fully Tarkovskian position this is actually rather prosaic film-making which has not entered into The Image as a certain kind of poetic abstraction. Be this as it may, Tarr's concreteness achieves its own kind of power and beauty. And it just bizarre and inexplicable enough that the otherwise prosaic and realist aesthetic takes on a mantra/pedal-tone/white-noise/dirge head trip of its own. Bear in mind that I am only dealing with the matter of the long shot now. None of what I have been groping for here has addresses Tarr's obviously unrealistic script, dialogue interaction, sound effects, music or even some of the other visual issues at stake. Tarr is psychologically and metaphysically superficial compared to Tarkovsky but his aesthetic is not just an idiosyncratic obsession of a non-conformist, unconventional, not-commercial artist. I have offered this notion of phenomenological concreteness as a first approximation of his aesthetic and I have given this a specifically spatial application. In my next installment I want to make use of Henri Bergson's concept of "duree" in order to come at this from a temporal consideration, because as I indicated parenthetically, Tarr is not really atemporal and I think Bergson's concept applies to Tarr's aesthetic to the extent that Bergson insisted that his notion of the experience of duration was not a purely subjective affair and I am trying to understand Tarr in non-idealist terms.
I am just rambling anyway and I have to pick up my kid from baseball and then go to the opera.
Dan, Part 2 to Ben’s Part 1 or some such nonsense:
Here's my part one to your part two [ed: see!] This will be a free association post, as I just can't seem to get my thoughts to cohere in any uniform way. The film's still kinda fucking with me, I guess.
First off, I'll start with what I didn't like.
The doctor sequences. That smug, corpulent prick bored the shit outta me. I know that he's intended to be an in-village mirror of the law enforcement types, always surveilling the village, taking notes, keeping records, passing judgment. But it got old very quickly, and I really couldn't wait for him to get off the bloody screen.
That's about it. Otherwise, I really dug this film. I know it's slow as shit, with shots that seem to linger on for-fucking-ever, and there were many a-time that my index finger lingered over the fast-forward button, but now that I'm done, I'm glad that I resisted the urge. There's something to be said for surviving this film, but there's something more to be said for allowing yourself to enter into its languorous rhythms, and immersing yourself in Tarr's dismal but oddly amusing world. Using the long, uncut scenes, lasting anywhere up to ten minutes without a cut, film time echoes real time, so we are encouraged to move beyond voyeurism into participation. And I also think that part of the film's perverse charm is Tarr's decision to sit on some shots long after they seem to have served their purpose, while other times cutting away from shots just as they're about to get really interesting.
Am I misguided to think that this is a pretty funny film? It's got that same deadpan wit that fellow travelers like Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki (heard of him? He's a Finnish Jarmusch, only he's funnier and darker. Which is to say, he's better.) Along those lines, the first interrogation scene with the cop (?) was quite brilliantly darkly comic, as he tries so hard to impress upon them the need for leading a responsible life, and it's like water off the proverbial duck's bath. They'll have none of that, thank you very much. And yet later they, despite having dismissed the cop's overtures, turn around and rat out every person in the village, in a lyrically dismissive discourse that the cops then have to turn into the kind of bland bureaucrat-ese that will pass muster in the department, in another bleakly funny scene. At this point, I must fess up that it occurs to me t
hat I misrepresented the film with my tag line that Satantango is Becket meets Dostoyevsky. Rather, what we have here is a continuum of sorts, with Becket, and Tarr (and by extension Jarmusch and Kaurismaki*) at one end, and Dostoyevsky and Tarkovsky (and, by extension, Bergman and perhaps Bresson) at the other.In fact, just as I might if I were inclined to produce a piece contrasting Becket with Dostoyevsky, I find Tarr's contrasts with Tarkovsky far more instructive than his parallels. Sure, there are surface similarities, such as a fascination with reproducing real time via long uncut shots, and a keen eye for the sorta cinematic candy that can be absolutely arresting. However, when you study the content and context of these striking visuals, you find a distinct separation in intention. I find a study of the walls in the manor house, vs. the walls in the Stalker's home to be instructive in this regard. Whereas the walls in the manor house are decrepit, weather-stripped st
ructures, you sense that the damage has been done here. Whereas, the walls in the stalker's house positively throb with decay. The corrosion is an ongoing process; Tarkovsky's walls are a living testament to the ongoing rottenness of life, while Tarr's walls simply remind us that time, in its inertia, has passed, and done its business. There's nothing metaphysical at work; with Tarr we are firmly in the material world. Also, ignoring the cat/kid suicide scene for a moment, Tarr strikes a much lighter tone. The deadly serious Tarkovsky clearly had his funny bone surgically removed sometime back in the Middle Ages. He is incapable of an ironic pose, whereas Tarr appears unafraid to indulge in them from time to time. Witness the funeral scene, where Vladimir/Irimias uses this most grim and tragic moment to deliver a speech that at first glance has all the fire and brimstone of an old school preacher, attempting to unite a community out of this tragedy, but really turns out exists primarily (solely even) to further his con by massaging the villager's sense of guilt and remorse.I have much more to say, but the tide is high and I'm moving on (random Blondie reference of the day.) Actually, I hafta mow my lawn.
Back with my part two to your part three later.
*some Kaurismaki quotes of note:
"Maybe my films are not masterpieces, but they are documents of their time. That's enough for me. Masterpieces I can't do - even though I try."
"The problem is, I have seen all the other films. All the serious films ever made I have seen, more or less. They are so good... and I am so bad. Very early in my so-called career, I knew I would never make a masterpiece. So I decided to make lots of decent films."
"I have two methods. If I have a screenplay, I follow it. If I don't, I improvise. Nobody else improvises - not the cameraman or the actors. Just me."
"When I write, I am sober. I can direct drunk. I can't edit or write drunk."
Ben, responding to the above:
We are going to be out of sync with all this because, of course, I can't stop myself from chewing any bone you throw me.
We are on the same page re: Tarr vs.Tarkovsky. It is precisely because I contrasted the two and found the former philosophically inferior on any count that I concentrated on SAN as a strictly aesthetic challenge in order to advance some positive theses on Tarr's behalf. The animistic and pantheistic aspects in Tarkovsky are entirely absent in Tarr and I think you are right that he confronts the banality of evil in the material world with humor.
I find your focus on Tarr's humour very helpful. I can't say I found much of anything too funny in SAN but I did grasp that it was quite often ironic, that there was a hardcore of black comedy to the film and this hooks Tarr up with Beckett and Kafka, as we've well established by now. And this goes some way to explaining your Jarmusch association too, but again, I can't say Tarr has "deadpan wit" or even a droll disposition. Maybe I'm out to lunch or maybe SAN made you a tad giddy, if you know what I mean and shit, I wouldn't hold it against you.
As for Kaurismaki, no, he is not known by me. Even if he is correct that his films aren't high art, his comments to this effect are enough to make me want to see them. Guy sounds like David Lee Roth.
You will see in Satantango 3 that I agree with you when it comes to the doctor in his den. And I thank you for providing an interpretation of him because I failed to do so, plus your reading of him as a representative of the state is convincing. Still, if we are going to hold to this, it remains for us to figure out what it means for the doctor to make that trip to the ruined church, find that maniac banging the gong there and then return home to question his own sanity with respect to the bells he hears. In addition, although far less challenging to interpret, what is the significance of his encounter with the economically depressed whores and the acknowledgement by the gang when they are splitting town for the dilapidated mansion that they are deserting the doctor to his own devices?
I am relieved to hear that I am not the only one whose head hurts after SAN. Still, you are allowed only one Blondie reference per day, unless you're not the kind of girl who gives up just like tha-at, oh no-o, oh-o-oh.
Ben, back to his original Satantango review, pt. 3:
Sorry for all the typos in Satantango 2 [ed: what typos? They’re gone gone gone, baby], I was moving fast. Can't promise that this will be any better clerically. It's past one in the morning.
Your reference to Jarmusch is astute for reasons I intuit by can't quite articulate; besides, the comparison is yours to elaborate later if you see fit. I will say though that in the profundity sweepstakes, Jarmusch stands below Tarr at a distance similar to that which Tarr stands below Tarkovsky. Seriously, only Dead Man even begins to bring the director of that film into this discussion. And speaking of heavyweights, I get the Beckett thing a fair bit but not the Dostoyevsky. The latter is always just a paragraph away from full-throttle religious anguish. This is not happening in SAN, the recurring dull roar of bells in the background, the recitation of the Lord's Prayer and the near-to-final scene of the doctor seeking out the church notwithstanding. (Great scene!) Indeed, it is Tarkovsky who goes for the jugular of ontological angst a la Dostoyevsky. With Tarr we are pathetically past all that, into the worst existential facelessness, truncated communication and ennui; hence the Beckett thing. Really, the characters in SAN are in some fundamental way without psychological depth, they are almost non-personalities. This is one of the reasons why I mentioned Kafka previously and I'm sticking with that pick. The association might seem weak at first given the rural setting on a micro-scale, but the political apparatus that treats persons like numbers is always lurking in the background, just as it is in Kafka. The fact that the bureaucratic machinery in SAN appears to be barely working, that the civil service is neither, is Kafka coming on the scene AFTER the revolution has failed, it is Joseph K hatched in a petri dish of disillusionment. Kafka himself comes BEFORE any attempt at revolution, of course, the bureaucratic machinery is working well, all too well, and the sign over the door has been nicked from the entrance to Dante's inferno, it's hopeless.
But honestly, what about the business with the cat? Fuck off! That was fucking hard to take man! Fuck! It's di
sturbing for all the obvious reasons - makes Donald Sutherland in 1900 look like Buddy Hackett in Herbie The Love Bug - but in the context of the entire film, it's insidiously disturbing by being the scene that is possibly the easiest to understand. How horrible. Yet all of it, the love, the domination, the torture, the execution, the suicide - it all makes perfect sense. The fact that it's a little kid, a girl no less, this just makes the girl's human environment that much more intelligible as a crumbling civilization. Not that we can take too much comfort from this socio-causal analysis of a child's psychology, because no sooner than we do, Tarr has Eric Clapton gives a speech which posits this exact analysis, thereby setting our interpretive security blanket on fire with an ironic match. And we can't even take refuge in the fact that the girl's death is a plot device. I mean, sure, it is, but at the same time, whatever, nothing much comes of it, everybody hits the road and heads out to the deserted mansion after she dies, but it's not like there's a direct connection between her demise and this exodus. Forget about it. The cat chapter is brutal. Brutal. I didn't know if I was going to be able to survive it. A few times I thought I might have to stop watching the film.Now, I want to emphasize that this is just like the feeling I had watching the guys walking down the street - except negatively. Whereas in that urban tumbling tumbleweed scene my submersion in its concreteness was positive and I didn't want the scene to end, in the case of the cat chapter, I was practically praying for it to stop - but I was just as submersed in the concrete; i.e., the phenomenological power of the chapter is relentless.
And it seems to me that relentlessness is at the heart of what Tarr is doing cinematically. Like I said before, he doesn't always know when to call "cut." Sometimes it just frickin' does go on too long. The drunken dancing in the bar with the obviously not ambient accordion soundtrack, sorry, crossed over into irritating tedium, (although before it did, the one guy babbling away forever about "plodding and plodding" was almost a manifesto declaration from Tarr, proof positive that he is a card-carrying member of the Beckett party). The scene of the doctor drinking himself close to death at his desk, sorry, became boring in a bad way, (although later on, interest was revived by him passing out, injecting drugs and so on). So this unrelenting aesthetic is not always successful and as I have emphasized by way of invidious comparison to Tarkovsky, I do not think it is necessarily deep.
It can be remarkable intense and effecting, however. Damn straight. The power of it does not come simply from it constituting some kind of ordeal to endure. Yet, the notion of endurance does come into play. Whether or not the viewer feels that SAN in whole or in parts is something to suffer through (endurance), I am confident that Tarr is methodological about wanting to capturing on film temporal lasting as such (endurance). But this "as such" should not be understood as pointing to an abstraction, some sort of empty time divorced from things happening. Quite the contrary, things are happening (albeit in a slow and mundane manner) and the general main "happening" is the mere and the sheer lasting-ness of the things visible on the screen, their endurance. This is what I had in mind when I brought up Bergson's concept of duree in my previous dispatch. When I introduced this I said that it can be grasped in a materialist manner insofar as Bergson held that the experience of time he theorized was not a purely subjective phenomenon. Actually, many of his critics have felt otherwise. Bergson asserted some degree of objective status to the duree that we can perceive and this has been rejected by some as being idealist, a Platonic form. Plus, Bergson was so openly hostile to the mechanical measurement of time replacing what was for him our authentically human sense of duree, it was easy to dismiss duree as a romantic norm, just another gut ache about alienation with no empirical validity. I prefer - at least for the present purpose - to value duree as an expression of the specifically temporal dimension of the concrete. In any case, I hope I have at least been able to convey a sense of what I mean about Tarr. Clearly, his cinematic conception is not just a gimmick (ha! fat lot of commercial good it's doing him). And it's not just long takes on steroids, so to speak. What is he up to and why does it work when it does? I have tried to isolate his aesthetic from any of the thematic content in SAN and I have attempting to apprehend this aesthetic as phenomenological concreteness both spatially and temporally Fortunately for you, I have to go to sleep now.
Saw Don Giovanni at the Royal this evening. I think this Mozart guy may be on to something.
Dan, still carrying on blithely ignorant of Ben’s review(s), adds his pt. 2 to Ben’s pt. 3. Whatever:
Okay, understanding that I still haven't read your massive missive, here's my pt. 2 to your pt. 3 [ed: again, see!].
More Tarr v. Tarkovsky. Journeys in Stalker v. Satantango. The first journey in Stalker, on the rails, is shot from behind, and this p-o-v is repeated many times in Satantango. Tarr really loves his rear-views. In fact, one of my favourite little jokes from Tarr occurs when he
titles one of his chapters "View from the Rear" and it opens on a shot from the rear of one of the character's rears. And soooo many shots of characters plodding plodding plodding down the road, shot from the rear. But the effect is quite different in the two films. In Stalker, the shots are taken as if we are in the railway car with the characters, and the focus is on the backs of these character's heads but more importantly, it is also on the apocalyptic countryside. What we are passing through is of vital interest in Tarkovsky. Not so much in Tarr, who presents the landscape as almost uniformly uninteresting. Hell, it's depressingly oppressively uninteresting to the point of banality. For Tarr, the world is mundane, best viewed from an ironic distance. For Tarkovsky, this world is fascinating (sometimes horrifyingly so) requiring a close study. Hence, Tarkovsky's camera gets right up in this world's grill, seeking transcendence through immersion in the gloriou
s sensuality of the physical world. Tarr is too jaded to buy into that. His world is bland, unappealing, something to be escaped or ignored.After the initial railroad trip, the Stalker's journey is a relatively short one, in a geographical sense. However, the distance traveled by the characters in Stalker is a marathon compared to the stasis achieved by the characters in Satantango, who plod, plod, plod along life's road, but never really get anywhere. Their lives are cycles of inertia; whereas, in Tarkovsky, his characters may be moving inexorably towards The End, but even in dying, they never stop seeking that transcendent moment. Signally this difference of purpose is Tarkovsky's affection for the carefully chosen close-up, as in the human face he finds all the torments and torture of existence, while in Tarr, he prefers the long shot. It distances us, true, but it also shrinks the characters, who become small dots in the vast, indifferent landscape.
All this and I've managed to avoid discussion of the girl and the cat.
Ben, responding to above:
That was excellent. Just excellent. It was so good it hurt, though. Because if you haven't noticed, I'm singing my best Jungle Book theme song for SAN, accentuate the positive and all that. I am trying to explain to myself what it is about the film that made me stick with it for an entire work day. But your glance at Stalker reminds me that for all his reactionary politics, sexual repression and twisted religiousity, Tarkovsky is a beating-heart humanist. And this now makes me wonder if Tarr is just artistically fetishistic and ideologically cynical.
Dan, responding to the response:
Yes, Kafka channeling Becket. Vlad and Est lost in the bowels of the system. Good call!
Agreed on the Jarmusch v. Tarr. I'd rank 'em Tarr, Kaurismaki, Jarmusch. Alas, I only have one Kaurismaki, The Man Without a Past, but it's pretty good. I'll make sure to get it to you. Someday.
Endurance. Yes. Surviving the cat and kid sequence, an almost intolerable experience the first time on the crappy transfer, was beyond intolerable the second time. I'd blotted out the more horrifying images, so traumatic was this the first time through, so it became an inescapable pastiche of horror. Tarr at his most unflinching, unrelenting. You are going to endure this, motherfuckers, just like that cat, and that girl. You think you know despair? Terror?
Then to have the child's death used as a springboard for Irimias's con, that was downright vile. Up until the point that his preacher's speech turned the corner and headed down that road, there was always a chance that he and his sidekick were going to be some sorta irreverent anti-heroes, putting the boots to the system. How disillusioning was that? And I absolutely concur that Tarr has nary a religious or metaphysical bone in his body. He's completely, desperately of this earth, and this scene drives that home. The moment when spiritual comfort through community appears as a possibility, it is subverted by the "preacher" Irimias into a personal grab for cash.
You got your Plato in here too, I see. In my notes during the film I wrote "If Tarkovsky=Plato, Tarr=???) Care to help me with that equation?
Ben weighs in (and if you knew Ben like I knew Ben, you’d know how impressive that can be):
Now you asked for it...
I'm going to beg off on your equation because I think your first term is midleading to begin with. Nevermind adding on Tarr and ???, Tarkovsky is too mystical to be considered Platonic. To recognize this it's crucial to consider Plato directly and not through the filter of Christianity. His "Forms" are not theistic projections, they are not gods. They are ideas ontologized as objective and transcendental. While I would certainly maintain that this idealism is both psychologically and epistemologically a theological impulse rationally transmogrified into a secular philosophic form, Tarkovsky is not this kind of head case. He's dripping irrationally all over the place, desperately hoping to feel his way to The Truth. Plato is literally the first academic, thinks he's got it all figured out.
Sorry for that, couldn't stop myself. Back to the movie. I am amazed that you are so confident that Eric Clapton - what's he damn name? (Don) Imus? - is nothing more than a rip-off artist. I am confused about his relationship to the others and the government. Is it all plain as day for you?
Where does the money come from? What are the explosives for? What is the plan? And so on.
And Dan, getting his head around Plato, tries to answer some of Ben’s questions:
Okay, I getcha. Tark lacks faith in the rational, whereas Plato's all about it.
Moving on, as to your questions about the film. The money that the villagers get would be their annual wages. One of them explicitly mentions that it's an entire year's wages out the window, down the drain, whatever. I assume they're some sorta co-operative, a hangover from iron curtain days. And Irimias knows how much they're getting and when they're getting it cuz he's one of them. Or used to be. And remember a couple of the villagers were planning to steal everyone's dough at the beginning of the film (and a third gets cut in because he overheard of the scheme while hiding in the kitchen after sleeping with Schmidt's wife) and head off to greener pastures, so the fact that Irimias is able to scam them provides a bit of karmac vengeance on them. The thieves getting scammed--right out of Chaucer. Or the Bible.
If Irimias isn't a con artist, and a police informant, what is he? He sure as hell ain't the saviour they all hope he'll be. It does kinda beg the question, though--why does he show up at the manor house, when he coulda just skipped town? Why does he give them some money to relocate? Is he hoping to rip them off AGAIN at some time in the future? And as for the guns. What the fuck? Who knows what he's trying to accomplish or who he's trying to scam with that one. Not me, that's for sure. But, without the gun scene, we don't get the Eraserhead soup. Yee-Gods.
Ben, on Satantango pt. 4:
This will be short(er), I promise.
I am feeling quite self-conscious about my SAN postings. First of all, why did I settle on "SAN" as an abbreviation? Shouldn't it be SAT? Secondly, is there a linguistic cognate between Hungarian and English in the film's title or am I just a stupid Anglo chasing after a pun when I notice Satan-Tango? It would not be too tough to think of SAN as a story about dancing with the devil, as long as this wasn't interpreted too literally along a religious line. Mind you, I am waiting to hear back from you on my contention that SAN is not especially religious. Maybe you reckon I'm off the mark. One thing is for certain, there is a big dance number in the film and the dance form called "tango" is explicitly identified in the dialogue, not that those drunken plodders pull off anthing close to a tango. No wonder I used the metaphor of dancing before to talk about the spatiality of SAN. Even though that dance scene eventually bored me to tears, it does appear to be central to the film.
But here I go rambling again, and this is supposed to be a brief statement as a corrective of all my incoherence up to this point and of what may have sounded like an argument about SAN as realism. Yes, I juxtaposed Tarr with Tarkovsky to find the former more realist and yes, I elaborated on this in terms of phenomenological concreteness. So it is on me now to balance this out a bit.
Please! This film is just too strange to sit politely in some file labelled realism. Fuggedaboudit. You mentioned Jarmusch and I thought about Dead Man and now I mention Lynch and I have in mind Eraserhead, of all things. I am hoping that you will be able to pick up my slack in this regard. I feel incompetent to put my finger on how SAN can be so persistently dull and fantastically unusual at the same time. It almost starts to feel surreal. Or is this just the impact of its marathon dimensions? No. Just like I argued about Manufactured Landscapes, the scale may be the epitome but it is not the essence of the aesthetic at hand. The excessive dimensions and excruciatingly slow pace of SAN are more the presentation and less the source of whatever the hell is at work. I believe if this were not true, the film honestly would be nothing but an unwatchable document about the drying of paint. I also think that a strong confirmation that the film is perversely compelling and oddly dynamic comes from not a realist sensibility but what I can only call a surrealist sensibility, for lack of a more precise grasp of what I am after. This is not just an instance of cultural dissonance, because Tarr is a post-communist Hungarian and all that. You can't tell me that everyone in Hungary is watching his shit on the weekend. Fuggedaboudit again. The vibe coming off SAN is sort of demented. At this point I want to bring up Fellini, Fellini at his most calm and sinister, that is. Does this ring a bell for you at all? Even if it doesn't, I'm just trying to convey my sense of how abnormal Tarr's normality is, how bad-dreamlike his everyday world feels.
OK, I think I will be able to refrain from further comment until you hit the ball back to me. I know that I have wandered long over five emails, but the blame-chain for that goes: Ben-Tarr-Dan.
Dan, his final post before going back and reading all four of Ben’s posts:
I will get to your material soon. Promise. A few final random thoughts.
The scenes of Irimias and what's his name wandering up the street with garbage flying around--did you, like me, think of Keaton or Chaplin? I know it's a most superficial similarity, but I couldn't help but think of old Stoneface and The Tramp as these guys struggled to brave the elements in an openly hostile world. But they turn out to be con men of such dubious character that I quickly disabused myself of that comparison. Still, while it was happening, I couldn't help but snicker a bit. And that gigantic breasted Mrs. Schmidt who seems to be getting it off with every one in town, is she a tip of the hat to Fellini perhaps? The gigantic breasted woman in Amarcord, specifically? Oh, and the bureaucrats who reinterpret Irimias poetic prose, a little Orwellian, but more clearly a critique of the way bureaucracies take the piss out of art. And that soup that the guys eat while talking about a gun deal; did that remind you of the baby in Eraserhead too? Really disturbing imagery, that.
Okay, now I'm off to read your review(s).
Then Ben:
Are you just pulling my leg? Are you honestly saying these things without having read any of my dispatches? I ask not because you were created by God to validate my parking, far the fuck from it. But jeez louise, check my shit out dude. All my phenomenology and Bergson aside, we got some concordance in gear.
And Dan:
I shit you not. I can show you my notes, scrawled on a message pad as I was watching the film.
Remind you of something? Remember the Tokyo Story reviews that were th
e funhouse mirrors of each other? Siskel and Ebert never reached such concurrence, I can tell you.Eraserhead. You crazy bastard, I saw it in the soup, you saw it in the cards.
I really love Satantango, both because of and in spite of its flaws. But Bela Tarr, he's no Tarkovsky.
Oh, and Fellini? Are you, to quote yourself back at you, shitting me?
And how the fuck am I gonna shape this into a coherent dialogue?
We must have our DNA tested, I'm thinking. Something's happening here. What it is, ain't exactly clear.
There's your random Buffalo Springfield reference. Over and out.
Then Ben:
Siskel and Ebert? More like Dr. Jekyll and Mr.... Jekyll.
