DVD of the Week: Sátántangó

The Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s 1994 film “Sátántangó,” which I discuss in the clip above, is based on the first novel by László Krasznahorkai, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tarr, and who is the subject of an article by James Wood in the magazine this week. As Wood explains, “Krasznahorkai pushes the long sentence to its furthest extreme, miring it in a thick, recalcitrant atmosphere, a dynamic paralysis in which the mind turns over and over to no obvious effect.” And, referring to Tarr’s adaptations of the writer’s works (which also include “Damnation” and “The Werckmeister Harmonies”), he adds, “For all their daring and austerity, these works cannot replicate the peculiar engrossment of Krasznahorkai’s prose (nor, of course, do they exactly seek to).” Judging from the way that Wood characterizes the writer’s work—as “mental fictions” with “abysses” that are “bottomless and far from logical”—I agree. “Sátántangó” isn’t a mental film or even a psychological one; rather, it’s rather a historical and a metaphysical one, in which the concentration of vast political and social forces on a small village drive the residents to despair, violence, and folly. For Tarr, the paradox of tangled distraction and bewildered rootlessness coinciding with a way of life that’s inseparable from the grimy facts of the mucky earth—one that he gets at with immensely long, sinuous takes that might superficially resemble Krasznahorkai’s stretched-out sentences—is the human condition.