THE WALTER READE THEATER

  special new york film festival encore: SÁTÁNTANGÓ

july 13th, 1996

Peter Horling as Dr. Horváth István (left) and Vig Mihaly as Irimais in SÁTÁNTANGÓ

"SÁTÁNTANGÓ has provided me with more pleasure, excitement and even hope than any other new picture I've seen this year." --Jonathan Rosenbaum

"A bleak, imposing cinematic experiment...achieves a transporting nihilism that casts a heavy spell." --Janet Maslin
"Sensationaly well staged...a bleakly comic epic...." --Georgia Brown

A seven-hour epic offering a near definitive statement about the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, this mordant and grungy black comedy by Hungarian director Béla Tarr restricts its focus to the intriuges, betrayals, boozy revels and readjustments made by several members of a farming collective after their squalid but relatively secure form of life collapses. Employing a virtuoso, choreographed black-and-white camera style suggesting despiritualized Tarkovsky, shot through with apocalyptic gallows humor, and beautifully as well as slyly structured as narrative, this stunning masterpiece paradoxically proves that Hungarian cinema is alive and well--and, in Tarr's hands, frighteningly lucid.

SÁTÁNTANGÓ Béla Tarr, Hungary/Germany/Switzerland, 1994; 420 minutes Saturday, July 13: 4 pm