Matters of Time in László Krasznahorkai’s and Béla Tarr’s Satantango 213

Alexandra IRIMIA

Matters of Time
in László Krasznahorkai’s and Béla Tarr’s Satantango

Abstract: This paper attempts to draw an intermedial comparison of László Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel Satantango
and Béla Tarr’s 1994 eponymous adaptation through the perspective of their treatment of time and narration, by reflecting
upon the specificities of their respective media. The two works advance the hypothesis of a circular experience of
temporality defying the linear flow of literary and cinematic discourse. Aesthetically, their approach is characterized
by a strong emphasis on seemingly meaningless and bleak contingency, in an atmosphere of claustrophobic closure
shaped by the dance metaphor already transparent from the title, which is also central to the structure of both the novel
and its cinematic adaptation. In exploring the various cinematographic and typographic mechanisms through which the
tango sequence of steps configures the imagery and the sensorial landscape of the two works, our analysis refers to a
multi-modal, comparative usage of key concepts such as narrated time, narrative time and Gilles Deleuze’s time-image.
Keywords: time-image, intermediality, adaptation, Satantango, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Gilles Deleuze.

“He felt that what the rain was doing

to his face was exactly what time
would do. It would wash it away.”
(Krasznahorkai, 13)
Alexandra IRIMIA, PhD student
Western University, London, ON, Canada It rains a lot in Satantango, both on page and
University of Bucharest, Romania on screen. Not much else happens. Somehow,
airimia2@uwo.ca though, both prose and cinematic narrative
manage to keep the reader and the spectator
EKPHRASIS, 2/2018 arrested – on condition that they are willing to
Cinema, Cognition and Art dance.
pp. 213-225 This paper attempts to draw an intermedial
comparison of László Krasznahorkai’s 1985
DOI:10.24193/ekphrasis.20.13 novel Satantango and Béla Tarr’s 1994 epo-
Published First Online: 2018/11/20 nymous adaptation through the perspective
214 Alexandra IRIMIA

of their treatment of time and narration, by reflecting upon the specificities of their
respective media. We deem this criterion relevant insofar as, challenging the genre of
cinematographic adaptations and contemporary film industry in general, the movie’s
disproportionate length (7h30’) is a bold artistic statement able to rekindle discussion
on the interplay of narrative and narrated time in literature and cinema.
Another point worth mentioning in the case of this specific adaptation is that the
novelist worked along with the director in elaborating the screenplay. It was not their
first, nor their last experience of the kind: Krasznahorkai and Tarr wrote together
the screenplays for Damnation (Kárhozat, 1988) and The Turin Horse (A Tórinoi Ló,
2011), as well as for Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmonóniák, 2000), the film
adaptation of another Krasznahorkai novel, The Melancholy of Resistance (Az ellenállás
melankóliája, 1989). After The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr announced the end of his directing
career and, therefore, their 23 years long collaboration is likely to have been brought
to an end. However, as Tarr declared in an interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum, the
novelist was not involved – partly because of his lack of interest in doing so – in any
other part of film production than screenplay writing:
ROSENBAUM: […] It makes the relation between cinema and literature so close, when
they’re usually at opposite ends. You somehow bring them together.
TARR: Yeah, sure, because Krasznahorkai’s language is absolutely impossible to adapt
for the movie…
ROSENBAUM: Because it’s stream of consciousness, partly …
TARR: Yes, but our point of view is similar, how he watches the world and how I
watch the world. That’s the reason why we are sitting together, we can talk about life.
When we are writing the script, we are talking about concrete things…
ROSENBAUM: Is he around during the shooting at all?
TARR: No, no. He is a typical writer from the 19th century. He was on the set two or
three times in the shooting, and nobody listens to the writer, everyone has practical
work. He just wanted to sit and say this is a very primitive job […] because you
never talk about the art, you never say nothing to the actors, you never say any
intelligent things, only practical things. And he always escaped from the shooting.
(Rosenbaum, 2001)
It seems that the process of adaptation, once the work with words is done, presents
little interest for the novelist. Conversely, the director is not interested in stories;
what he aims to adapt from a novel, instead, are the compositional principles that
translate a certain Weltanschauung, “a general process of unstoppable degradation”
(Bálint-Kovács 2004, 240), a sense of time as accurate as possible. He rejects the use of
stories in movies (Jaffe, 27) and motivates with a concern for truth and authenticity: “I
despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened.
In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another... All that
remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine – time itself; the
years, days, hours, minutes and seconds” (Ebert, 343).
 Matters of Time in László Krasznahorkai’s and Béla Tarr’s Satantango 215

Satantango has not been translated into English until 2012 but once it was, it gained
wide recognition. The translation, signed by George Szirtes, had been long awaited
and largely so due to Tarr’s provocative adaptation. The resulting book was awarded
The Man Booker International Prize in 2015, which added to Krasznahorkai’s recognition
as a unique voice in the contemporary literary landscape:
Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago, W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño,
David Foster Wallace, James Kelman, and László Krasznahorkai have used the long
sentence to do many different things, but all of them have been at odds with a merely
grammatical realism, whereby the real is made to fall into approved units and packets.
[…] But the reality that many of them are interested in is “reality examined to the
point of madness.” The phrase is László Krasznahorkai’s, and, of all these novelists,
Krasznahorkai is perhaps the strangest. His tireless, tiring sentences—a single one can
fill an entire chapter—feel potentially endless, and are presented without paragraph
breaks. Krasznahorkai’s brilliant translator, the poet George Szirtes, refers to his prose
as “a slow lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” (Wood, 71)

The Tango Steps of the Eternal Return

The film takes on the novel’s structure. Both are divided into two parts, with
six chapters for each part. The numbering of the chapters (called “dances”) is
meaningfully unconventional, going from I to VI in the first half and, in reverse, from
VI to I in the second half. This arrangement hints at the sequence of steps in classic
tango – six steps forward, six steps backward. At the end of such a sequence, the
dancers progressively return to the point of their departure, cancelling their own
movement. In more than one sense, this is what happens with the characters in the
novel as well:
Krasznahorkai structures Satantango as a Möbius strip, rendering topologically the
movement from isolation to a more collective identity in the middle of the novel,
hinging on Irimiás’s return and young Esti’s tragic death. The story buckles and
spirals back on itself while still remaining intact — frayed, perhaps, chaotic, in as well
as outside of time, maddened and utterly exhausted, yet somehow stoically in one
piece. […] A drunken dance, a Satanic tango, prefaces the backward structural twist in
Satantango’s Möbius strip. In the space of the dance, the community comes together
to experience the trauma of Esti’s death and the return of Irimiás; with the backward
spiral in the second half of the narrative, we see the individuals revert to their prior
state of isolation and alienation. The dance embodies Krasznahorkai’s mix of dark
comedy and crippling sense of anxiety: the dance is celebratory and funeral, hopeful
and despairing. (Kahn)
There is a technique of pairing and counterpoint in the titles of the chapters, as
well, which makes the book not entirely unaware of the possibility of its adaptation
into film. This is what happens, for example, with the chapters V and III from the
216 Alexandra IRIMIA

second part called, respectively, “The Perspective, as seen from the Front” and “The
Perspective, as seen from the Back.”
As a backup plan, mainly for financial reasons given the uncertainty of receiving
funding for a 450 minutes long feature film, Tarr’s cinematic interpretation conceives
the “dances” as potential standalone shorts. Each one ends with a sentence from the
corresponding chapter in the book, which helps maintain the literality of this ambitious
adaptation. The film plot – critiqued as either maddening or mesmerizing, too
minimalist or too elaborate, depending on the reader – remains largely the same as in
the novel. If for Krasznahorkai “the unit of composition is the chapter which unfurls as
a single block of text” (Thirlwell), with no paragraphs, encompassing in coarse realism
the perspective of one character at a time, Tarr preserves this uninterrupted narrative
flow using extremely long, fixed, black and white takes. In James Wood’s words,
“These are bleak, cavernous works, which in their spectral black-and-whiteness,
sparse dialogue and reticent scores, seem to want to revert to silent pictures, and they
offer a filmmaker’s analogue of Krasznahorkai’s serpentine sentences in their tracking
shots, which can last as long as ten minutes […]” (Wood, 72).
The story opens one rainy morning in late October in a desolate setting. Somewhere
in the “damp and dull Hungarian Lowlands” (Dietrich-Trummer, 72), a man wakes to
the sound of bells. Only that there are no bells in the proximity of this village, former
“home of a thriving industry, now nothing but a set of dilapidated and deserted
buildings” (Krasznahorkai, 4), whose several inhabitants lead miserable lives in a
general atmosphere of depravity, scarcity, and betrayal. We soon discover an intricate
web of mutual cheating that summarizes the social relations between the villagers.
Some of them plan to run away with the entire pay for the collective work (throughout
the novel, allusions to the communist Hungary are frequent both in style and in
content) and there is a permanent sense that something important is about to happen.
The novel’s epigraph (“In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.”), taken out of
Franz Kafka’s The Castle, points at this paralyzing wait that haunts all the novel. As
the betrayals unfold and the secluded village doctor sits by his window inscribing in
his diary everything he sees, two major events occur. Firstly, a young girl called Estike
Horgos (see Annexes 1, 2) goes missing and nobody seems to care. At the local, spider-
infested bar, the villagers abandon themselves to a grotesque scene of drinking and
dancing, culminating in a slow, inebriated performance of the dance that gives the
title of the novel. The only sober, yet not very lucid mind is Mrs. Halics, who has just
forced her cheating husband to read the Book of Revelation. She watches the dance in
disapproving expectative “only wondering why judgment was so slow in coming”
(Krasznahorkai, 155). Eventually they all fall asleep and wake up in the presence the
second major event: the return of two crooks, Irimiás and Petrina, who are also police
informants. They are held by the naïve villagers in high esteem as messianic figures
that have come to save them from misery. The two were believed to have died and
their unexpected return rekindles a great flame of hope in the villager’s minds.
 Matters of Time in László Krasznahorkai’s and Béla Tarr’s Satantango 217

As everybody discovers in the morning, the naïve Estike, a half-wit ignored

(when not mocked by all the others) is dead. Deeply affected by the surrounding
indifference, avarice, and decay, the girl had poisoned both her cat and herself.
Irimiás takes advantage of the strong emotional impact of the moment in a speech
that will ensure the success of his next trickery played on the unsuspicious villagers.
He easily convinces them to hand in all their savings, leave their homes, destroy all
remaining possessions, and follow him toward the promise of a new, wealthy life
in the nearest town. The secluded, unnamed doctor who transcribes everything he
sees at his window (in a now deserted village) is the only one that remains in place.
Feeling remorse for Estike’s death, yet hopeful in their promised bright future, the
rest of the villagers crawl through mud and incessant rain (see Annex 4) and spend
cold nights in a ruined castle on the way. Shortly before reaching the town, Irimiás
postpones the fulfillment of his inflated promises and blames the delay on a change
of plans “from above” Only of course, “the above” does not point to some sort of
transcendental entity, but simply to bureaucratic, anonymous “authorities”. The
villagers are left puzzled, yet somehow confident in Irimiás’ next implausible return,
in an even worse situation as they have previously been.
Irimiás, the con-man, is successful with those living in perfect uncertainty, because his
angelic face, his earnestness and prophetic speeches discover the last remnants of faith
and trust in them. He is a real fake prophet; he sucks the blood of the most desperate,
most defenseless people, who still have something to lose, who still have dreams and
who are therefore happy to grab all the possibilities that might promise a better life.
(Bálint-Kovács 2004, 241)
As the novel ends, we are taken back to the doctor’s writing and we are allowed
to peek at his scribblings. After many unsatisfactory drafts, he nails his door shut and
returns to his desk by the window:
He reached for the pencil again and felt he was back on track now: there were enough
notebooks, enough pálinka, his medication would last till spring at least and, unless the
nails rotted in the door, no one would disturb him. Careful not to damage the paper,
he started writing. “One morning near the end of October not long before the first
drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil
on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render
footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells.
[…]” (Krasznahorkai, 272)
The long phrase begins to sound more and more familiar, as the reader realizes
that the doctor begins to write Satantango itself. What we read at this point is exactly
what we read 272 pages ago. It is, of course, not by hazard that the last chapter – also
numbered Chapter 1 – is called “The Circle Closes”. In order to prolong the stupor
of the reader, the beginning of the novel is copied extensively (for almost two pages).
218 Alexandra IRIMIA

The metafictional finale is preserved in the film. Satantango, as the dance cancelling its
own steps, proves to be an endless loop in both media.
This circular structure recalls Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, sustained
by the “monotonous repetition and infinitely slow and ruthless seclusion” (Bálint-
Kovács 2004, 239). According to the Hungarian critic:
Krasznahorkai’s novel was special in that it depicted the process of deterioration rather
than the static condition of misery. Not a disrupted world, but a continuous disruption.
This became the key for Tarr. Monotonous slowness is the time of this ruthless crash,
the form of inevitability is the eternal return, which became the basic element of the
three great films Tarr made with Krasznahorkai. (Bálint-Kovács 2004, 239)
Other critics have responded in similar ways to this Nietzschean influence:
There are various ways of philosophically finessing this metafictional finale. The most
immediate is to see the novel as a dark statement of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return
(or, as Samuel Beckett once described James Joyce’s similarly circular novel, Finnegans
Wake, a Dantesque purgatorial process). The true referent of the title’s “Satantango”
isn’t therefore the villagers’ drunken dance but all existence—a repetitive, vacuous
dance directed by the devil. But it also creates an even more disturbing effect. It might
be possible to recuperate a prosaic rational frame, if the reader assumes that everything
up to the moment when the doctor is found delirious on the road is real, and that
the novel’s subsequent events represent his imagined attempt to explain the sudden
emptiness of the village on his return from the hospital. […] So, while the doctor
imagines his account of the village as a bulwark against the world’s disappearance, it
becomes in fact a form of that disappearance, a literary illusion. The novel eats itself
up in its own construction. And yet, on the other hand, there it is—and the aura of the
supernatural that the story has created is still real. (Thirlwell)
András Bálint-Kovács also suggests that the hopelessness that haunts Satantango
is not a product of political, financial, or social factors (even if, by all means,
these are all present), but the symptom of a universal moral degradation. For this
reason, he places Tarr in the tradition of Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni,
and Andrei Tarkovsky, a tradition featuring “the almost real-time representation
of the disappearance of human contact, or the representation of the psychological
recognition of this disappearance.” (237) Unlike these other directors, however, Tarr
is – and here his views overlap with Krasznahorkai’s – more concerned to show the
lack, rather than the presence of a metaphysical dimension of the world.
Well aware of the emptiness of his promises, Irimiás sees humankind as trapped
in an unpromising present of rain and mud, depravity and decay. We hear him
admitting that not in front of the villagers, but in front of Estike’s miraculous ghostly
appearance (or the hallucination thereof):
It doesn’t matter what we saw just now, it still means nothing. Heaven? Hell? The
afterlife? All nonsense. Just a waste of time. The imagination never stops working but
 Matters of Time in László Krasznahorkai’s and Béla Tarr’s Satantango 219

we’re not one jot nearer the truth.” Petrina finally relaxed. […] “OK, just don’t shout
so loud!” he whispered: “Don’t we have enough troubles as it is?” “God is not made
manifest in language, you dope. He’s not manifest in anything. He doesn’t exist.”
“Well, I believe in God!” Petrina cut in, outraged. […] “God was a mistake. I’ve long
understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or
a river and a voice shouting above it. There’s no sense or meaning in anything. It’s
nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It’s only
our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the
false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp
of decay. There’s no escaping that, stupid.” “But how can you say this now, after what
we’ve just seen?” Petrina protested. Irimiás made a wry face. “That’s precisely why I
say we are trapped forever. We’re properly doomed. It’s best not to try either, best not
believe your eyes. It’s a trap, Petrina. And we fall into it every time. We think we’re
breaking free but all we’re doing is readjusting the locks. We’re trapped, end of story.
(Krasznahorkai, 219-220)
The novel may certainly be read in a transcendental key, even if such a reading is
ostentatiously taken into derision with every possible occasion. After all, there is a
demonological allusion in the title. Mrs. Halics reads the Book of Revelation and awaits
the coming judgment (however, the entire episode is comic, not spiritual). Estike
thinks of an angel while taking the poison and the levitation of her body could have
been something other than a hallucination. Moreover, the post-apocalyptic scenery
resonating with implausible sounds of church bells hosts the return of Irimiás, a false
Messiah preaching a false salvation. On the other hand, if Irimiás is Satan alluded to in
the title, one may conclude, along with Adam Thirlwell, that “then he is a very minor
Satan, just an everyday Communist atheist, terrified of what he has seen” (Thirlwell).
In Jacques Rancière’s view supported by Tarr’s systematic rejection of an
allegorical or metaphorical reading of his work (Rancière 50), “the devil is ultimately
nothing but the fog, the wind, the rain, and the mud that penetrate walls and clothes
in order to install themselves in hearts. It is the law of repetition. […] And one does
not win against rain or repetition” (29-31).

Narrated Time, Narrative Time, and Deleuze’s Time-Image

As we have seen in the previous section, the lingering monotony and the incessant
repetition of time are central principles of composition in Krasznahorkai’s work
that Tarr’s translates into cinematic language. Some of the motifs he deploys to
achieve this end are the multisensory perception of the drizzling, never-ending rain
infiltrating all frames, extremely daring long shots, and the dullness of mechanical,
repetitive gestures (such as the dance or the walks) against a dull background, shot in
black and white. This kind of visual syntax belongs to what Christian Metz called “the
nondramatization” (Metz, 193) tendency in modern film, characterized by making the
narrative secondary and highly dependent on the subjective perception of objective
220 Alexandra IRIMIA

time. Here’s what we read in Krasznahorkai and is rendered perfectly intelligible in

Tarr’s adaptation: “Time was passing very slowly and, luckily for them, the alarm
clock had long ago stopped working so there wasn’t even the sound of ticking to
remind them of time” (Krasznahorkai, 13).
As Metz puts it in Film Language, one of the greatest challenges of film is “to inject
the reality of motion into the unreality of images” (15). For him, this attempt defines
the process of constructing the narrative as “a closed discourse that proceeds by
unrealizing a temporal sequence of events” (28). This un-realization is both painfully
slow, yet always unstoppable in Tarr’s Satantango: “The question therefore is not how
to stop or avoid this process, but what we can do in the meantime. […] There is no
escape: time is empty. It is an infinite and undivided dimension, in which everything
repeats itself” (Bálint-Kovács 2004, 242). Seen in perspective, the circularity of the
story and of its treatment of time hints to a repetitive history haunted by disappointed
dreams and failed hopes. In Jacques Rancière’s words, “there is an exact alignment
between the circular form and a story of disillusion” (37-38).
Another reason for Tarr’s unusual temporal stretches is, as András Bálint-Kovács
suggests, “the emptying of time-experience” (242). Unlike Tarkovsky’s use of slow
motion to render visible a transcendent experience, Tarr’s instrumentalization
of lingering narrative time aims to dismiss the possibility of transcendence. His
characters are prisoners of an earthly, “human, all too human” grotesque and
miserable imagery; their flickering hope and faith in redemption only springs from
their egoist concern for their own interest. There is no possible advance, be it called
“progress” (in communist terms) or “salvation” (in Christian rhetoric). The real
subject of both Krasznahorkai’s novel and Tarr’s film are disenchanted fables. Every
attempt to make sense of the world is as empty as Irimiás fake promises. The time
is emptied, too: “Tarr empties the time by creating the constant illusion that what is
happening moves the plot forward” (Bálint-Kovács 2004, 241). Understanding this
aspect is crucial in Satantango, where the emphasis falls so heavily on “the conceptual
unity of duration and image” (Bálint-Kovács 2000, 154).
In his book on Béla Tarr, The Time After, Jacques Rancière speaks of this conceptual
unity in strong Deleuzian terms:
A Béla Tarr film will be an assemblage of these crystals of time, in which the ‘cosmic’
pressure is concentrated. More than all others, his image deserve to be called time-
images, images from which duration is made manifest. […] There are no pieces, no
demiurge of montage. Each moment is a microcosm. Each sequence shot has a duty to
the time of the world, to the time in which the world is reflected in intensities felt by
the bodies. (Rancière, 34-35)
For Gilles Deleuze, the time-image – as opposed to the movement-image – does not
depict an action, but a description. It is a cinema-specific regime of representation,
constructed through montage; its specificity lies in that it escapes narrative (and
 Matters of Time in László Krasznahorkai’s and Béla Tarr’s Satantango 221

linguistic encoding in general), by rendering time perceptible through the subordination

of movement to duration. In the time-image, the “the time is out of joint. […] It is
no longer time that depends on movement; it is aberrant movement that depends on
time” (Deleuze, 41). Through a similar technique of montage, Krasznahorkai manages
to create the literary equivalent of this cinematic time-image. To give just one example
of his mastering of temporality, let us look at the disproportionate intensity taken by
a few moments of silence after the famous opening scene where one of the characters
wakes to the improbable sound of church bells:
At first it had been the ghostly bells that had frightened him but now it was the
threatening silence that followed: anything might happen now, he felt. But he did not
move a muscle, not until the objects around him, that had so far been merely listening,
started up a nervous conversation (the sideboard gave a creak, a saucepan rattled, a
china plate slid back into the rack) at which point he turned away. (Krasznahorkai, 5)
Satantango is constructed almost entirely of such moments, “crystals of time” as
Rancière called them in Deleuzian descent. Just a page before the disquieting silence
described above, the time of a simple gaze through the window is stretched to
encompass the “greater spaces of eternity” marked by the endless repetition of the
seasons, in comparison to which “the whole of time”, to say nothing of a lifetime,
seems “a frivolous interlude”:
He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued
summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of
spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in
the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something
apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might
begin to look like necessity ... and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle
and coffin. (Krasznahorkai, 4)
Such hallucinatory visions often occur “to the man at the window”, a figure typical
for the universe of Béla Tarr’s films (see Annexes 1, 5). Damnation famously opens
with the protagonist’s minutes-long gaze through a window. The scene is repeated
many times throughout the film and is also recurrent in Krasznahorkai’s novels. In
Satantango, the events unfold as they are captured by the doctor’s observant stare (see
Annex 5); they are recorded in real-time in his scribblings, consubstantial with the
text of the novel. Before her suicide, Estike glances through the window, with eyes
expressing her silent disapproval of what she sees (see Annex 1). This “world-forming
contemplation and meditation” is, according to Bálint-Kovács (2004, 242) a motif
that Tarr shares with film-makers such as Yasujiro Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni,
Andrei Tarkovsky, and Jim Jarmusch. However, he opinates, from a strictly technical
viewpoint, “Tarr went the furthest and reached an unsurpassable point” (2004, 242).
In all certainty, “the man at the window” reflects and repeats the spectator’s gaze
on the screen, trying to make sense of what is on display. The film image becomes
222 Alexandra IRIMIA

thus interchangeable with the outside reality, and the distinctions between the “seer”
in the fiction and the one outside of it begin to blur. Krasznahorkai’s reader and
Tarr’s spectator are both entrapped in the duration of the characters’ feelings and
perceptions:
The rain that had been gently pouring till now suddenly turned into a veritable deluge,
like a river breaking over a dam, drowning the already choking fields, the lowest lying
of which were riddled with serpentine channels, and though it was impossible to
see anything through the glass he did not turn away but stared at the worm-eaten
wooden frame from which the putty had dropped out, when suddenly a vague form
appeared at the window, one that eventually could be made out to be a human face,
though he couldn’t tell at first whose it was, until he succeeded in picking out a pair of
startled eyes, at which point he saw “his own careworn features” and recognized them
with a shock like a stab of pain since he felt that what the rain was doing to his face
was exactly what time would do. It would wash it away. There was in that reflection
something enormous and alien, a kind of emptiness radiating from it, moving toward
him, compounded of layers of shame, pride and fear. (Krasznahorkai, 12-13)
This claustrophobic closure is formulated both typographically (in the novel,
each chapter consists of only one, overwhelmingly-long paragraph in which the
story-telling is done through a single perspective) and cinematically, through the
use of very demanding long takes. Contingency infiltrates the events in the same
way the rain penetrates and soaks every dry surface in the village. “Every story is
a story of disintegration,” we hear Tarr and Krasznahorkai saying through the
voice of the protagonist in Damnation. In Mary Ann Doane’s view, the “fascination
with contingency raises the specter of pure loss, the possibility of pure obliteration
of the passing moment, the degradation of meaning” (Doane, 140) and this aspect
becomes problematic in the analysis of the film as an alternation of ‘events’ and ‘dead
time’; even the more so in the rain of acid sarcasm that drowns this seven-hour – or
274-pages – long dark tragi-comedy.
For Béla Tarr, just as for László Krasznahorkai, time is no longer made of seconds,
minutes, and hours. Their uncanny form of temporality takes on the liquidity of rain,
the persistence of someone’s glance through a window, and the eternal return of a
drunken dance.

Works Cited
Bálint-Kovács, András. “Sátántangó.” The Cinema of Central Europe, edited by Peter Hames.
London: Wallflower Press, 2004, 237-244.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema II. The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta. London: The Athlone Press, 2000 [1989 for the English edition, 1985 for the
original French].
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Filmography
Damnation. Dir. Béla Tarr. Screenplay by László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr. With Mihály
Vig, Hungary, 1988. DVD.
Satantango. Dir. Béla Tarr. Screenplay by László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr. With Mihály
Vig, Putyi Horvath, Laszlo Lugossy, Eva Almassy Albert. Vega Film, Hungary, Germany,
Switzerland, 1994. DVD.
The Turin Horse. Dir. Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzy. Screenplay by László Krasznahorkai
and Béla Tarr. Hungary, France, Germany, Switzerland, USA, 2011. DVD.
Werckmeister Harmonies. Dir. Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky. Screenplay by László
Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr. Hungary, Italy, Germany, France, 2000. DVD.
224 Alexandra IRIMIA

Annexes
Annex 1

Estike (Erika Bók) at the window. Screenshot from Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)

Annex 2

Estike (Erika Bók). Screenshot from Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)

Annex 3

The dance scene. Screenshot from Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)

 Matters of Time in László Krasznahorkai’s and Béla Tarr’s Satantango 225

Annex 4

Irimiás, Petrinas, and a villager walking to town. Screenshot from Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994)

Annex 5

The doctor sitting at his office, contemplating through the window the lives of the villagers.
Screenshot from Satantango (Béla Tarr, 1994).