A wet screen: "And that's why I don't like to go to the cinema, because filmmakers, or let's say this capitalist film business, ignore time and space. They are just listening for the storytelling. What does this mean, the storytelling? When you live your life, you are doing the same things almost every day," focused on a BFI-organised retrospective honouring 30 years of Sátántangó (1994), a Zoom discussion with Béla Tarr and filmmaker Alex Barrett that took place on 19th July 2024. The conversation includes Tarr's intention for the duration, which he considers vital to his film. The repetitive rain drives from time to time are significant in the film Sátántangó, creating texture as the water drops muddy the ground. We can even feel the character getting wet in the rain, water drops melting in the fabric, and the dry screen looks wet from the rain in the textile, making the languorous pacing much closer to real life. Sátántangó is a seven-hour black-and-white movie based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. Béla Tarr intended the film to be six hours long, but it ended up being seven hours long. Tarr has always been conscious of internal time (shots) in his films, considering the frame with paintings, said in a conversation with BFI; he composes life that is usually repetitive, intellectual discourses and emotional justifications form a communication that Tarr captures, his voice "Life as two dimensions: space and time". Slowness is built around the dynamics of human life. In the black-and-white construction of the landscape in Sátántangó, a screen feels soaked for a long time by the rain. After the rain stops, the soil reveals the wet environment in a deserted Hungarian village following the collapse of a collective farm, conveying a sense of silence in the scene. Béla Tarr says, "time is the protagonist." The dialogue brings the sensation of sketches crafted in his film and delivers a concept of duration to extend in film language.
