A Nos Amours, Scalarama & CCA Sátántangó

Sátántangó (1994)

A Nos Amours, Scalarama and CCA are delighted to present Béla Tarr’s touchstone of durational cinema, Sátántangó.

This legendary film, running at 432 minutes (that’s 7 hours 12 minutes!) deals with the collapse of a collectivised Soviet-era farm in rural Hungary. There is the scent of money in the air, and, in chaotic and changeable times, a yearning for meaning and salvation. At such times it is inevitable that prophets and Messiahs will be longed and waited for. The question is whether they will be false prophets. In the chilly, bleak rotten world of Sátántangó , who will follow who, and why, are left wonderfully uncertain.

These are ordinary human concerns, but they are intensified by the vastness of the landscape, the flat plains and endless horizons; and an unremitting wind from nowhere, a rain that falls without end, threatening to obliterate all human hope. Signature long takes, often as long as the 10 minutes that a roll of film allows, combined with astonishing camera choreography offers a sublime cinema experience.

To commit to Sátántangó is to commit to the unforgettable and life-changing: these are the outer limits of cinema.

Screening from a 35mm film print, courtesy of the Hungarian National Film Archive.

Read Adam Roberts' excellent preview of the screening in the Huffington Post here.

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Part of Scalarama 2014. See www.scalarama.com for more information.

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