SATANTANGO

The story line in Satantango-- brilliant, diabolical, sarcastic--gradually unravels the dreams, machinations, and betrayals of a failed farm collective over a few rainy fall days, two of them rendered more than once, from the perspectives of different characters. But the plot operates almost independently of the moral and experiential weight given each shot: Tarr's camera obliges us to share so much time as well as space with the grubby characters that we can't help but become deeply implicated in their lives and maneuverings. Tarr has noted that the form of his film, like that of the novel, is inspired by the tango--six steps forward, six back--an idea reflected in the overlapping Faulknerian time structure, the film's 12 sections, and many of its remarkably choreographed camera movements and long takes. Satantango weaves the collective interactions of Almanac of Fall and the pungent evocations of solitude of Damnation into the same narrative fabric; though the film focuses on a community, at least three of the most remarkable sequences follow the movements of an isolated individual. The most celebrated and terrifying of these, involving a little girl and a cat, is rendered so convincingly that many viewers have wrongly assumed its violence to be real rather than fabricated. (For the record, the cat used in the sequence is now Tarr's pet.) Even more extraordinary, to my taste, is the film's mesmerizing third section, which charts for a full hour the mainly solitary movements of an old doctor lost in an alcoholic haze. It's a tribute to Tarr's singularity of purpose that at no point does this sequence--or anything else in his 415-minute film--seem tedious or self-indulgent; the breadth of his canvas suits the magnitude of what he has to say.

By Jonathan Rosenbaum


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2001

The first spoken word is almost a half hour into the film, and there's less than 40 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Much of the film is in dead silence (accurately depicting the absence of sound in space), or with the sound of human breathing within a spacesuit. Kubrick's sci-fi experiment intended to present its story almost purely with visual imagery and auditory signals with very little communicative human dialogue (similar to what was attempted in the surreal, fragmented, non-narrative imagery of the Qatsi trilogy - from 1983-2002, from Godfrey Reggio). All scenes in the film have either dialogue or music (or silence), but never both together.

about 2001: A Space Odyssey.

CINEMA IS DEAD

On the 30th of June 1952 the film Hurlements en faveur de Sade by Guy Debord premiered in Ciné-Club d'Avant-Gardes at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. The lights in the cinema were switched off and the film began. The screen went white from the light of the projectors and an expressionless voice on the soundtrack announced: "The film by Guy-Ernest Debord, Howlings in favour of Sade …" Another voice continued dispassionately, "Howlings in favour of Sade is dedicated to Gil J. Wolman". A third voice recited "Article 115. When a person shall have ceased to appear at his place of abode or home address for four years, and about whom there has been no news whatsoever, the interested parties shall be able to petition the lower courts in order that his or her absence be declared". The three voices continued reading different text fragments out loud, one after the other, for a couple of minutes. The screen remained white; there were still no pictures. After a couple of minutes with a white screen, a voice recited: "Just as the film was about to start, Guy-Ernest Debord would climb on stage to say a few words by way of introduction. He'd say simply: 'There's no film. Cinema is dead. There can't be film anymore. If you want, let's have a discussion". Following this the screen went black, and there was no sound for a couple of minutes. Already at this point the audience was getting restless - several had protested loudly, others had left, and only a few minutes passed before the director of the film club, Jean Gauliez, stopped Hurlements en faveur de Sade. Indeed, this film by Guy Debord, later leader of the Situationists, was also a provocation and an anti-film more than a film. There were no pictures in the film - the screen was either white or black. The soundtrack consisted of nothing but voices expressionlessly reciting the fragmentary sentences taken from bodies of laws, novelettes, modernistic literature and newspaper notices. There was neither music nor real sound in the film; only voices cut through the silence. The discontinuous 'dialogue' of the voices accompanied the white screen, and when the screen was black there was no sound in the film. The film lasted eighty minutes; the soundtrack lasted twenty. So the film consisted of one hour of blackness and total silence, its final twenty-four minutes taking place in black silence. However, the viewers were not interested in spending this amount of time on the premiere, which ended in chaos and scandal, the film being stopped after less than ten minutes.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

P.O.V. No.16 - FILM & POLITICS
Anti-film: Hurlements en faveur de Sade

http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_16/section_1/artc5A.html

Cinema can be anything

I don't believe in the concept that you have to sit in the cinema for two hours and watch a story that is compressed in this period of time. Cinema can be anything. My films are not purposely done for the cinema anymore. You can watch them there, or in the streets, or... on a plane!. You can watch it at home, you can make love with your girlfriend for two hours, and when you come back, the film is still running. Or you could go the farm, plough the land, and when you come home, the film is still on.

So there are different concepts of viewing now. My films are just like paintings that are just there. Nothing changes. You can watch it for eight hours, and you can have a more fulfilling experience. Or you can leave the house, go to work, and when you come home, it is still there.

Lav Diaz, interviewed by Tilman Baumgartel

http://www.greencine.com/central/lavdiaz