#Krasznahorkai

[lamiaprigione]

Sátántangó (1994)

[nicklloydnow]

“That said, Sátántangó is a film requiring tremendous patience, with its gargantuan length far surpassing other lengthy films like Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. It’s a single movie only slightly shorter than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, only in Sátántangó, the film’s staggering length isn’t used to portray a sprawling, epic tale like Peter Jackson’s lauded films. Instead, Béla Tarr combines his film’s seven-and-a-half-hour runtime with an almost stagnant pace to express the futility and despair of his characters.

Based on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Tarr’s film focuses on members of a collective farm in the Hungarian countryside as they remain financially shattered after the unexpected closing of their sole source of revenue. It’s a film that pushes to their limits the techniques frequently found in other works of slow cinema, a sort of sub-genre that’s exactly what it sounds like: films that move slowly, often with minimal plot points. In his book Transcendental Style In Film, critic/writer/director Paul Schrader writes about Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies: “time was not a means to a goal. It was the goal”. The same can be said of Sátántangó, though its intention in capturing time is distinctly novel and vastly different from Tarkovsky’s. With the seven-plus hours of his epic film, Béla Tarr captures the futility and hopelessness of the villagers as they struggle against the indifferent waves of time. Sounds bleak, doesn’t it? Well, it is. Sátántangó is no afternoon picnic.

(…)

It’s through its unrelenting focus on the banal that Tarr’s film creates such an overwhelming state of helplessness. Many of Tarr’s shots are like moving still-life frames in which nothing remarkable is happening. Consequently, time is shown to move on and on as nothing occurs that saves the villagers from their unfortunate circumstances. Because the film is as long as it is, the time is felt rather than simply portrayed.

(…)

The fact that the villagers follow Irimiás towards his alleged promised land and never get there (since it doesn't actually exist) helps build the film's despairing view. After seven long, slow-burning hours, they aren't rescued. They remain stuck exactly as they were, penniless and without hope. By moving slowly and continuing for so long, Sátántangó lets the viewer share this experience to some degree. None of the characters' problems are ever really solved. Instead, viewers are made to wait for a release from these conditions. Expecting something to occur, for the film’s grammar to break, is futile. We’re only stuck there, much like the characters, with little hope of escaping. Sátántangó shows how its characters wait and wait (and wait) for their conditions to change, to no avail.

There’s no chance denying it: Sátántangó is a long film. It’s a really, really long film. While the length of Sátántangó (a good movie) often precedes the reputation of the film itself (often unjustly so), it isn’t too long of a film. Sure, it’s not a movie that would often be selected from somebody’s queue, but thanks to the ease with which anybody with reliable internet access can binge an entire season of their entire show in a single afternoon, Sátántangó’s intimidating length seems unconquerable than it may once have. It also helps that Sátántangó is broken up to 12 episodes that can be consumed individually. Tarr has expressed a wish for his viewers to digest the movie in a single sitting, save for a much-needed intermission between the film’s two halves. Still, a whole work day’s worth of cinema-viewing seems daunting. Should ambitious cinephiles choose to take Tarr’s challenge and watch the film all at once, however, they’d definitely be rewarded with an overwhelming artistic experience.”

“Béla Tarr’s seven-hour 1994 epic, referred to as “the Mount Everest of modern cinema”, depicts the collapse of a collectivised Soviet-era farm in rural Hungary.

The film, released in 1994, is the screen adaptation of a homonymous 1985 novel by László Krasznahorkai, Hungary’s best-known contemporary author, famous for his heavy existential themes and demanding prose. Tarr, Krasznahorkai’s long-term collaborator, took on the monumental task of adapting the complex literary masterpiece for the screen, and the result is a no less testing watch.

In an unhurried style — 432 minutes, to be precise — the film portrays a dilapidated village where life has come to a stand-still. While a group of villagers wait for a final payout before abandoning the farm, they get thrown in disarray by the appearance of a former villager, whom they had long assumed dead. With the corruptive influence of money souring the air, the chaos of change casts a strange spell over the community.

Shot entirely in black and white on 35mm film, the Hungarian movie has long been lauded by critics for its compelling story and the unwavering cinematographic beauty of its long, uninterrupted shots — some of which last upwards of 10 minutes. The film was named the 36th greatest film of all time in the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound critics’ poll, and the 65th best film of the 1990s by Rolling Stone magazine. Following its enduring critical acclaim, in early 2019 the film enjoyed a 4K restoration, and returned to cinemas across the world, alongside its first-ever VOD release.”

[majestativa]

I have seen it all in my mind’s eye.

— László Krasznahorkai, Animalinside, transl by Ottilie Mulzet, (2010)

[discoursets]

today in pixels. 🥟🌱🍜

[quotespile]

Culture, then, only truly becomes culture when it is embodied in someone.

László Krasznahorkai, Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens

[dk-thrive]

exhausted by all this lugging and suddenly looking down at his hands sees that there is nothing in them, there never was

“It was the kind of nightmare where you realize that the missing weight of things is sitting right there on your chest, like some kind of succubus, but before you can shove it off, it gets sucked away through a mysterious process into the unknowable realm of your cells, and from there on you are defenseless, your cells already weigh a ton, while your whole body is so light it almost floats, and that’s how it goes until you can only wonder how the cells could be so unbearably heavy when the body is so nauseatingly light, and in this nauseating lightheadedness things gradually recede from you just as you too begin to gradually recede from them, in a word it is like when a person lugging a load becomes exhausted by all this lugging and suddenly looking down at his hands sees that there is nothing in them, there never was, that he had been lugging nothing—that is, when you suddenly realize that something is no longer in your possession, just as nothing ever had been.” 

― László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On (New Directions, April 2, 2024) (via Alive in All Channels)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“It passes, but it does not pass away.” ― Laszlo Krasznahorkai

[addictivecontradiction]

A torinói ló, 2011

[allbuthuman]

War and War by Krasznahorkai László

charles nouette / mark rothko / kathleen graber unknown / billy collins / frank brunner / status of a steam user / michael dumontier / alex dimitrov

[garadinervi]

A Practice for Everyday Life, Mirosław Bałka: How It Is, Edited by Helen Sainsbury, Tate Publishing, London, 2009

Contributions by: Zygmunt Bauman, Paulo Herkenhoff, Julian Heynen, László Krasznahorkai

Exhibition: The Unilever Series: Mirosław Bałka: How It Is, Tate Modern, London, October 13, 2009 – April 5, 2010

[lamiaprigione]

Sátántangó (1994)

[lillyli-74]

Do you hear? Do you hear this dark strength? This terrifying beauty?

~László Krasznahorkai

[majestativa]

To resist an increasingly suffocating sense of sadness.

— László Krasznahorkai, Satantango, transl by George Szirtes, (2012)

[discoursets]

work station mess.

[quotespile]

It was the kind of nightmare where you realize that the missing weight of things is sitting right there on your chest, like some kind of succubus, but before you can shove it off, it gets sucked away through a mysterious process into the unknowable realm of your cells, and from there on you are defenseless, your cells already weigh a ton, while your whole body is so light it almost floats, and that’s how it goes until you can only wonder how the cells could be so unbearably heavy when the body is so nauseatingly light, and in this nauseating lightheadedness things gradually recede from you just as you too begin to gradually recede from them, in a word it is like when a person lugging a load becomes exhausted by all this lugging and suddenly looking down at his hands sees that there is nothing in them, there never was, that he had been lugging nothing — that is, when you suddenly realize that something is no longer in your possession, just as nothing ever had been.

László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On

[theunbearablelightnessofbein]

Ecco cosa significa vedere un film con me!