Review of Satantango (1994) by Clifford H — 23 Mar 2008

All of this waiting, as in Godot, is already arrival in itself. The suspense of something coming is already the arrival of the thing, and where does one find this best? In the fact that Bela Tarr traces out for us the fact that he is constantly cutting with his camera within these scenes--the camera begins to sculpt and accrue more space for itself--shots become shots become shots.

And all of this occurs without one's complete knowledge that there had been a cut, almost as if the question becomes, how did I arrive at this place? This, however, becomes the more interesting questions, is there montage at all? And I might have to agree with Godard on this: no montage, no division of place, there is only one total thing.

Yes, there is a kind of addition going on in any film with the plus sign as the juncture of the edit, but Tarr shows for us is that that plus sign has always been completely and significantly fluid, that there is no difference in a reframing or a cut to another thing because it all belongs to the same world.

When Eisenstein writes and lecture with Bezhin Meadow or his dissected Japanese tree example, one should not think that he is cutting into every branch with a new kind of space, but rather those cuts are this continuity of that same tree, a continual turning around of that same tree.

Montage is a sculpting, a dancing around of the subject...a celebratory flow rather than a leaving out of things.