BELA TARR
A LOVE VISIONARY OF OUR TIME

The Devil Probably

There were extravagant, irresistible rumors, spreading like wild fire, about Bela Tarr's Satantango. Rumors about a seven-and-a-half hour epic that constitutes a transcendental experience for the participants in an allegedly raptured mass of a screening; about a Hungarian masterpiece that goes far beyond Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Antonioni and Jancsό, in its embodiment of the time-image; about a bold redefinition of the narrative language, inspired by the steps of the tango; about a black and white image that has been transubstantiated into gray organic matter; about the hypnotic power exercised by its travelling shots on a transfixed audience; and about a new kind of cinema that collapses the distance between spectacle and spectator, while demarcating it as the only possible space left for him/her to exist, that of sublime inferno.

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