Within this fraught structure, Sátántangó wanders, dallies, and watches, exhaustively, as the individuals worry and doomsay their way into one dead end after another (alcoholic ruin, cruelty, suicide, thievery, sodden despair), a plethora of scheming, paranoid human beasts playing out their final act in a godless world. Unlike most other films of extraordinary length — Feuillade’s Les vampires, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, Rivette’s Out One, Watkins’s La Commune (Paris, 1873), etc. — Sátántangó is not made up of sections or episodes and is intended as a single, harrowing, ass-in-seat experience, a Warhol-esque marathon of endurance that may take up almost half of a waking day but in which the dark, potent imagery is worth every second of your time.
Werckmeister Harmonies spends a mere two and a half hours engraving its diagram of grimness, tracking around another post-Communist village full of hermits, drunks, and obsessives as it is visited by a largely metaphoric stuffed-whale exhibit — and intimations of other visitations too, oppressions and cultural shifts to which we, like the scrambling hero played by Lars Rudolph, are not entirely privy. There’s no denying that Tarr is something of a showman — the extravagant rigor and visual power of these three films make most other filmmakers look like entertainment-industry clowns. But it’s equally apparent that he means every frame. Politics are unarticulated but unignorable, existence is a dire farce, the earth itself is a monster too large to care about our fates. And it will not stop raining.
