Rancière proposes that there is a tension between film and literature in Satanic Tango: "Bella Tarr constructs a visual scene that will survive a situation from a looping narrative (which tends to pull these scenarios together) with great power." But at the same time, this visual scene also breaks the narrative cycle because it translates the potency of these scenarios into many straight lines, pursuing shadowy, positive lines of escape. This straight, circular narrative completes its nihilistic logical chain.
Undoubtedly, the circular narrative in the original Satanic Tango symbolizes the repetitive movement of history and the disillusionment of social ideals, but Bella Tarr's film presents two opposing but complementary movement structures: in a claustrophobic space, and escape along a straight line.
The circling movement here can be understood as a hopeless quagmire of life, where farmers on collective farms form a circle in a tavern and dance numbly to the accordion. They are the spiders in the tavern, playing tricks and cheating each other over the money division. The relationship between them is woven into a web, everyone collides with everyone, and all selfish actions will eventually backfire on themselves. But Estike's suicide opened the web.
Rancière writes that Estike is a fool, but her stupidity is not reflected in mental retardation but in a combination of two qualities: the ability to fully accept the environment and the ability to completely reject it. She completely believed her brother's words and killed her cat according to the winner theory, and then killed herself after finding out she had been tricked. In Bella Tal's world, the structure of these two qualities is also manifested as "the inertia of things" and "the failure of inertia," the existence of the latter creating an obsession with an idea or a dream. Here, the "inertia of things" refers to the claustrophobic movement in circles, and the "failure of inertia" is the act of escape, presented as Estike's figure marching in a straight line toward death.
But Bella Tarr is not concerned with the end of death, because there is no end to death or the disillusionment of dreams, and disasters are endless. Estike's suicide leads to another escape and the beginning of another new lie. The scammer Irimiás offers farmers a promise to build new collective farms together. A new line of escape emerged, and the peasants began to evacuate, only to fall into another trap. The power of Bella Tal's long shots comes from this tension between movement and stagnation, circulation and escape. He is concerned with the pose of the characters in the environment, what they are looking at, listening to, and doing. How they spin around in life (totally accepting circumstances), and how foolishly they believe promises given by others, and go head-to-head toward vain dreams (totally rejecting circumstances).
"The combination of these two stupidities is the very essence of the existence of the image, which is entirely established in a gaze, a gesture, a gait, and then completely erased." The film is built on this tension between life and death inherent in the image itself: photography freezes real time and space into a dead afterimage, and then the cyclic motion of the film machine resurrects the dead. The body is no longer what it was. "That's the virtue of the image, to bring the body back into motion, to change the influence of the environment, to put the body on a trajectory that disrupts the circular motion."
Cinema is such an art that in the illusion of movement we rediscover the meaning of our existence, even if only the unknown or nothingness awaits. What Bella Tarr cares about is "situation and movement", because only by constructing the movement of the body in space and time can there be the production of emotions that accompany it, and the two movements that accompany it—circling and escaping—the resulting emotional adjustment. In Bella Tarr's films, the influence of the external environment on people is recorded by a realistic mise-en-scene that is completely faithful to the environment, but more importantly, how people fight against the "inertial law of rain and suffering", how they reject exposure to the environment, and how they re-establish their bodies from the act of escaping.
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