Last year, Spain overtook Sweden. Or at least the Formentor Prize did when it awarded the brand new Nobel Prize for Literature László Krasznahorkai. His unpronounceable last name left a sweet aftertaste on the lips of moviegoers: they knew him from having read it in the credits of The Turin Horse either Werckmeister Harmonies. But one film especially stood out, Sátántangó, available on Filmin.
Based on Krasznahorkai’s first film Satanic Tango (which, in our country, publishes Acantilado), Sátántangó is one of the gems of Béla Tarr’s brief filmography. The Hungarian filmmaker only made nine feature films during his lifeand in five of them (the five most esteemed) he was present, as screenwriter or creator of the adapted novel Krasznahorkai.
In Sátántangóthe Hungarian Nobel Prize winner plays both roles: from the meticulous demands of his literature, composed of paragraphs that stretch for pages with virtually no punctuation, he continued to a 450 minute film that every movie buff should seeor die trying.
Seven hours and 19 minutes
Cinema has become faster: films last longer, but the number of shots has increased. Sometimes, to the point of exhaustion. An average film has around a thousand shots.whereas one action can approach two thousand. Apocalypse: Judgment Dayfor example, which does not even last two hours, exceeds four thousand shots. This brings us to about four seconds per shot, which, again, is cut in action cinema: Iron Man 3 either Bourne’s ultimatum They cut the bill in half.
Satantangó It has a frame length greater than that of the entire trilogy of the lord of the rings. However, It only contains 172 shots.an amount similar to what can be found in the first ten minutes of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. That is to say that from the 3.4 seconds that a shot generally lasts in Michael Bay’s film, it increases to almost two and a half minutes. Sátántangó.
Béla Tarr’s masterpiece is the most emblematic representative of slow cinemathis cinema in which time, as Paul Schrader wrote about Tarkovsky, was not a means to achieve an objective, but the objective itself.
Tarr and Krasznahorkai’s satanic tango plunges the viewer into a frigid and desperate universe, in which only the wind flows. Unmotivated violence seems to be the only answer in this world, in which a cat is tortured and poisoned during a painful 40-minute sequence. According to Béla Tarr, the feline came out safe and sound from Sátántangó. Many viewers don’t.
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