The seduction of a dancing dinosaur

hasosch

If it is true that real masterworks are reached by geniuses only once in their life, but mostly never (cf. Meyrink's "Golem", Gondjarov's "Oblomov", Murnau's "Faust"), one could say that Béla Tarr has already surpassed his horizon line. None of the movies that he made before "Sátánangó" seem to announce this gigantic film, and none of the movies that Tarr has made since reflect it even in details.

However, if one does not agree with what I just wrote, someone could say that the "Werckmeister Hármoniák" is the little brother of Satans' Tango - both formally and from the content. And perhaps, this is true. Like a gigantic black whole with its typical deafening noise the "apparatus" with the fossil fairground presentations comes into the village, a gigantic ghost train which can exist only, if a metaphor has been re-transformed into a flesh-like, nauseating, enigmatic and highly semiotic form. The same happens in "Satantango": The noise starts just at the beginning of the movie, the camera is so slow that it seems to look from where the "apparatus" is coming. Something must be coming, because something is always coming. The silence on the farmland is lethal, people hide, the air will give birth to an even more Pantagruel monster than that in the "Werckmeister". Are these Tarr's "harmonies"? The mechanical noise, creeping into ones bones with its repetitive regularity? It takes a long time until the tango will be there. People are fore-mostly concerned not with preparing the arrival of the Satan, but with trying to anticipate and therefore to inverse the order of reason and effect. Somebody has seen "Irimiás-és-Petrina" - ONE name, the two-fold Satan as opposite to the three-fold Christ. Repetitively over a dozen of minutes the drunk laborer tells one and the same fragment of his story in the local inn: "And I was plodding, and plodding, and plodding, and plodding", always 4 times, thus breaking off the trinity even in the repetition of what has not yet happened.

Like the dance, the "Sátántangó has 6 steps forward and 6 steps back to go. The structure of the movie is similar to a watch. Something must happen because there is always something to happen: (1) The News that They are Coming; (2) We are Resurrected; (3) Knowing Something; (4) The Work of the Spider I; (5) The Net Tears; (6) The Work of the Spider II; (7) Irimiás Speaks; (8) The Perspective, when from the Front; (9) Ascension? Feverdream?; (10) The Perspective, when from Behind; (11) Nothing but Worries, Nothing but Work; (12) The Circle Closes.

The film is a whole gigantic rotating monster whose epicycles imitate a full-length tango forward and backward. A dancing dinosaur represented by the highly suspect couple of Irimiás and his friend Petrina. There is no light, mostly scarce fruitless soil, loneliness in this once gigantic land called Hungary whose extension was between the Styrian Alps in the West and a puddle jump in front of the Black Sea in the East; between the Bohemian Forest in the North and Belgrad in the South. A land so wonderful to loose oneself, an authentic peace of Eastern Europe how it had been described so lovely, so patiently and so seductively by nobody else than Joseph Roth. It does not exist anymore since 1920. In films like Béla Tarr's stroke of genius, it still lives again, for 7 and 1/2 hours. Do what the director is suggesting, do not go to work, but install yourself on your sofa with enough food and most of all drinks. At last then, when the long chapter with the village doctor comes, in an Oscar-worth role played by Peter Berling, you will have this magic movie deeply in your body, you do not even want to get up anymore.

score 10/10

hasosch 17 May 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2067977/