Satantango

Bela Tarr - 1994
It is, of course, a masterpiece. Let's look at particular visual style. Tarr in fact quite often compartmentalises his images, quite perpendicular (and horizontal), with little overlapping. This means, though there is usually depth of field in the lens, that their are a lack of depth cues. This leads to pictoral abstraction, wonderful, almost comic plays with scale and so on. Their are often only two planes in the staging, and movement across them passes quickly.
As for the film, this is clearly low-key, with the particular tone of the sky used so as to avoid overexposure. With the dispersing clouds light is rarely harsh. Perhaps their is a certain degree of sidelighting, to accentuate the shadows. Their is, I suspect, a filter (red or blue?) used here. Also note how frequently the pallette changes; in the pub, well-lit, for one remarkable shot, the characters appear as merely sillouhettes.
Talking about depth makes it sound like the camera is still; indeed it is, for long periods, but there is also a lot a lot of precise, nerver unsteady, movement. This circles, reframes, in its stately manner, in the long, long, beautiful and long, takes.
Despite what this may sound like, I find this very different from Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky essentially pans and scans, using the camera to capture an event. Tarr's camera is autonomous for long periods, moving past static people, avoiding the source of dialogue (which Tarkovsky obviously does as well), moving on its own way. The above comments on depth are more to do with when it settles in.
This sounds like Tarr is after 'the' perfect image, a kind of Herzogian ecstacy. But this kind of postcardism doesn't seem at all Tarr's point; he is after 'a' image, 'a' framing, rather. He isn't trying to aestheticise what he sees, but just capture it in a certain way.
Nevertheless, for all the movements in the quagmire, Tarr's camera has a seperation from its village that raises it above any talk of 'realism', or indeed Tarkovsky (excepting 'Andrei Rubelev'?). The village is a slightly unreal place, almost abstract, a universal, not in a negative way, but in a king of Kafka-esque way. This is art, not reality, to put it in a vulgar way. The rythmic repetition of lines, the lack of an outside world, the circularity of the place, all enhance this feeling.
The 'action' is a creation of the world, several individual stories woven into a loose, and not entirely clear, one, about false promises, redemption, people's unsuitability for utopia, feat of utopia, misery, sordidness, laughter. It requires closer attention than I surely paid it; for now I can say that Tarr seems to possess a deep intelligence, an ability to balance various aspects of the juncture.
The remarkable way that we watch people doing things, actually walking, not eliptically flying from location to location. The old stick is right; we have a real sense of time passing. But this isn't of a tense time; there is a world here we can enter, feel our way around, not worry about the next point of narrative.
This is blatantly one of the great films of the 90's, and a monument of recent cinema. I look forward very much to seeing it again.