Satantango vs Sátántangó

on watching a 7.5 hour movie

The last time I was at the Point Reyes Book Store I blind-bought Satantango, the debut novel and supposed masterwork of Hungarian postmodernist László Krasznahorkai. I had read one other Krasznahorkai work, The Last Wolf, a novella that spans 80 pages in a single sentence, and you can read my friend Carl’s review of it here.

Tyler and I thought it would be a fun project to read the book together and then watch the 1994 film adaptation by Bela Tarr, an absolute monster of an arthouse film. It was lauded by the likes of Sontag, who (quite bizarrely!) remarked that she would be “glad to see it every year for the rest of my life.” Krasznahorkai also wrote part of the screenplay, apparently, so it has literary merit as well, right?

While reading the book we shared the same feeling of incredulous doubt: was this really the novel that catapulted Krasznahorkai to the forefront of the Hungarian literary scene? It is an extremely bleak and difficult novel, characterized by huge chunks of unbroken paragraphs, espousing a strange chalky flavor of nihilism. To recycle a joke I used in my Goodreads review, the book contains no Satan and not enough tango!

Satantango is a thoroughly postmodern novel, and as such has little in the way of satisfying plot. (Tyler said “every piece of Slavic art is: nothing happens, but we’re wondering!”) What little action takes place is largely set in a small rural estate in Communist Hungary, still reeling from the shocks of the disastrous forced collectivization policy that shook many parts of the U.S.S.R. We zoom in and out on numerous inhabitants of the estate, each of whom leads a bitter and hardscrabble life and cope variously with sex, alcohol, and religion. An incapacitated doctor is obsessively paranoid. A small girl kills a cat and then herself. Everyone seems to be viscerally unhappy, and they seek salvation in the sudden reappearance of a slick and savvy local who later proves to be a spy for the regime; the villagers give him all their money and end up being enlisted in his “cobweb” of surveillance and espionage.

Several critics have said that the novel’s structure resembles a dance in that the chapters are numbered 1 through 6, and then 6 through 1, six steps forward and then six steps back. But I genuinely think the chapter numbers are as far as this comparison goes. The plot does not go forward and back, at least not straightforwardly; it progresses slowly, taking deep digressions and replaying some, but not all, episodes from the perspectives of different characters. It ends where it begins, but by walking in a circle, not going backwards. The structure is not a dance so much as an ouroboros: the last chapter is literally titled “The Circle Closes.”

The unbroken and meandering structure of the text made it pretty exhausting to read, even in small increments; however, I do love what translater George Szirtes said, quoted here in the Guardian, calling it a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type;” the sentences are  “loops and dark alleyways – like wandering in and out of cellars.”

The film could also be described as a slow narrative flow, clocking in at 7.5 hours. I would have said that it is almost never a good thing when the most notable thing about a film is its length, and I will admit my heart contracted a bit when I saw the film described as a “pioneer of slow cinema.” The longest movie I had watched prior to this was Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, all four and a half hours of which I watched in one frankly excruciating sitting during a theater at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. The screening was so long and agonizing that I had time and reason to question everything in my life: my life, my relationship to art, the value of film as a medium; the experience was ultimately generative and supremely valuable, but dreadfully unpleasant in the moment.

But I will do almost anything for art, and even more for love.

And it ended up being a really great experience! We broke up the sevenish hours over two days, which I recommend, especially watching parts 1 and 2 on the first day and part 3 the next. 

I constantly had the strange new feeling of the film being exactly how I envisioned the book as I read it, the washed out road surrounded by dormant trees, the mustaches on the men’s faces. This is the first time I’ve ever had that experience, and discovering a new emotion is always meaningful. The slow structure is curiously soothing at times, it feels almost like being hypnotized. Perhaps that’s what watching a film is, voluntary hypnosis, an emptying of the mind and relinquishing of the self, immersing one’s consciousness in another world for an hour or two (or seven and a half).

I can understand why the movie has become enshrined in the arthouse canon. The long, slow shots can be beautiful: the striking expression fixed on Esti’s face as she marches determinedly towards her death, a room slowly filling with light, the patrons of a bar all sitting perfectly still to listen to a mysterious droning noise. The long scenes of the empty road as rain lashes down, especially when the mellow accordion music (composed by the lead actor, Mihaly Vig!) is playing along with it. These were stimulating and compelling, the parts I loved most in the movie.

The movie includes so many details that are either absent or glossed over in the book: the different patterns on the lace curtains in each of the villager’s homes, the textiles, the broken plaster on the houses. The visceral decrepitude is more easily apprehended. Even the relatively happy scenes, carousing and drunken dance in a bar, feel wretched. My mom peeked in and said “this is the most Eastern European thing ever.” 

The parts I liked best in the book were substantially changed. I thought the novel was most effective and interesting when it shades into magical realism or the more absurdist elements: the spiders that are never seen yet constantly covering surfaces in webs, the levitating corpse, the people destroying their furniture and houses. These had comparatively minimal roles in the movie, not lingered on at all, in some cases omitted completely.

Tyler and I talked about how film seems like a better medium for Krasznahorkai’s story: the lingering drabness; the world drained of color and, implicitly, hope; the repetition of the same event from different perspectives. It captures the paranoia and destitution of life under communism more precisely, not just by virtue of being more straightforwardly visual. It really feels like you, too, are trapped in the estate, living in boredom, with nothing to do but spy on the people in front of you.

I am glad I read the book before watching the movie, if only because I think the discontinuous chronology of the movie would be confusing otherwise. But I think the film is the stronger piece of art between the two. It better encapsulates the depravity of life under the regime; everyone is rendered a spy with nothing to spy on, even the viewer. We are all participating in the “demanding and hopeless fight for human dignity,” the spirit of the fight as indomitable as it is unwinnable. There is some pale trace of optimism in the film; the people want to continue to live, even if it means unbearable struggle in an ugly place, or if they accidentally get conscripted into serving our enemies. No matter the circumstances, life is always worth more.

Inspired by the above Chantal Akerman quote, everyone who sees the film has almost eight hours drained from their lives; such a realization could chill with grimness. I don’t think every long art house movie is worth watching, in fact, I’d say most probably aren’t. People like to say there are only 4,000 weeks in our lives or something, and there are so many books to read and bands to listen to and shows to see and art to look at. (Out of curiosity, I did the math and found that there are 672,000 hours in 4,000 weeks, which is enough time to watch Satantango 84,000 times.)

But I’ve thought a lot about this, and I feel secure knowing I am happy to spend time in my life watching strange movies with someone I love. There may not be an ideal way to spend one’s wild and precious life, but this is how I want to spend mine.