Sátántangó

The Superbowl of Cinema

Introduction by Steven Kovacs
Steven Kovacs is an Oscar nominated producer and director of feature films and documentaries. Professor and Chair of Cinema at San Francisco State, he is an expert on Eastern European cinema, particularly of his native Hungary.

Rest in peace Béla Tarr, the Hungarian filmmaking hero whose meticulous mise en scène, real-time, stolidly-paced, black & white epics focused assiduously upon the quotidian of the human condition.

For you Magyar-o-phile, football-phobic mourners of this master, The Roxie proposes one of the greatest achievements in recent art house cinema. A seminal work of “slow cinema,” Sátántangó, based on the book by László Krasznahorkai, follows members of a small, defunct agricultural collective living in a post-apocalyptic landscape after the fall of Communism who, on the heels of a large financial windfall, set out to leave their village. As a few of the villagers secretly conspire to take off with all of the earnings for themselves, a mysterious character, long thought dead, returns to the village, altering the course of everyone’s lives forever.

Shot in stunning black-and-white by Gábor Medvigy and filled with exquisitely composed and lyrical long takes, Sátántangó unfolds in twelve distinct movements, alternating forwards and backwards in time, echoing the structure of a tango dance. Tarr’s vision, aided by longtime partner and collaborator Ágnes Hranitzky, is enthralling and his portrayal of a rural Hungary beset by boozy dance parties, treachery, and near-perpetual rainfall is both transfixing and uncompromising. Sátántangó has been justly lauded by critics and audiences as a masterpiece and inspired none other than Susan Sontag to proclaim that she would be “glad to see it every year for the rest of [her] life”. Based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Hungarian novelist and Nobel Prize laureate László Krasznahorkai.

Presented with 2 intermissions.

Section 1 (chapters 1-3) = 2h 17m
15 minute break
Section 2 (chapters 4-6) = 2h 4m
25 minute break
Section 3 (chapters 7-12) = 2h 57m

Sátántangó was restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by Arbelos in collaboration with The Hungarian Filmlab.

#36 on the Sight & Sound / BFI’s Critic’s Poll of the 100 Greatest Films Ever Made.