DB here:

I’ve enjoyed Steven Levy’s technology books since Insanely Great, his (highly favorable) history of Apple. His newest one, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness is a smooth ride, letting us in on the creation of the gadget, the rising power of iTunes, and the mesmerizing mystery of iPodolatry. I learn from Levy that people dress up their iPods, mourn their passing when the batteries die, and use them to meet strangers.

I was dimly aware of this last winter. I was sitting in my office and saw a young guy in the hall outside waiting for a class to start. He was watching a video on his pod and two young women came up to him. “Oooh, is that a fifth-generation iPod?” He showed it to them, and soon going out for coffee with them took precedence over going to class.

iPods invaded our house in two waves. Kristin goes to an Egyptian dig site in Amarna every year, mostly to work on registering statuary fragments, and as soon as she learned of Steve Jobs’ latest brain child, she wanted one. Now she could listen to her favorite music while standing for hours at a work table. I gave her a first-gen iPod for Christmas, and our computer assistant Brad Schauer helped her load it up with Handel, Mozart, and Vivaldi, mostly operas. She’s taken it over with her on every trip since.

I had no interest in listening to music as I moved through the world. I had tried a DiscMan long ago, but I didn’t like feeling insulated from the sounds around me. During travel, especially plane trips, I read. But when the video iPod came along, I thought that it had possibilities, so last winter I got one, the big mama with lots of GB.

By having Brad load Kristin’s baby, I now realize, I missed part of the fun: picking out what you’ll put on and arranging items into playlists. I also met with frustration. I hadn’t realized the dominance of pop music as a paradigm for all music until I bumped into iTunes. Of course it had no trouble with my boomer tracks (Burt Bacharach, the Drifters, Sam Cooke, etc.). But the program didn’t like art music. It chopped up operas so that little gaps appeared between tracks that should flow seamlessly, and it couldn’t read my old and obscure CDs. At one point, iTunes decided that all my Sibelius symphonies should be arranged by movement, so it grouped together seven first movements, seven second movements, and so on.

Reinstalling and upgrading the program, as well as setting up playlists, eventually solved these problems. Now my Mahler plays seamlessly and my Björk has the right pauses between songs. I still listen more seldom than most podders; not when walking around the world, mostly just in airports or in hotel rooms. More enticing has been the video function.

I’m a purist about moving images. I like movies on big screens, and grudgingly accept watching them on a tv monitor for convenience. I don’t much care for the look of images in home theatres; a lot of people, having invested so much in these behemoths, seem unable to see how mushy and artifact-ridden their systems are. (When I complained to a friend, he responded: “I like video artifacts the way you like grain.”) I often use a TV or computer monitor to study a film, but I very seldom watch a movie for the first time on a computer or other tiny display.

But my video iPod…well, I don’t love it or worship it, but I do admire and respect it and like to hang around with it.

Part of the attraction is, as Levy talks about at length, is the cool mystique of it. It is a good object. Its subtle heft and operating ease make it a pleasure to fondle. Then too, the very idea of it is entrancing. How can something so small store so many things that matter so much to us? But there’s another factor at work in the video iteration. I think that iPods also make the film viewing experience intimate in a way that other media don’t.

Levy talks about how Sony erred when it built two earphone jacks into the first Walkman. Morita believed that people would want to share the music with a friend. Wrong. Levy points out that it was all about privacy, about enclosing you in a bubble cut off from social interaction. Likewise, nobody can really watch your video iPod with you. It’s a little world addressed to you alone.

iPod version 0.0

In some ways we’re going through a period in which our audio-visual media are looking back to earlier forms. With multiplexes and Imax, big screens and 3-D presentations have returned in force; you’d think it was 1953 again. Similarly, the iPod rediscovers the Kinetoscope, Edison’s early peephole film system. Most were silent, but some were equipped with sync sound. You plugged in earphones, peered through a slot, and cranked a long film loop through. It was an arcade attraction without much of a future; large-scale success came to the system that projected images for a crowd. Now, however, we can have a portable Kinetoscope, and the fact that it’s at our command (stop, go back, skip over, shuffle) probably makes it all the more mesmerizing.

For the most part, I don’t watch fiction films on my iPod. I watch documentaries, most repetitively Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares, one of the great docs of recent years. I don’t watch TV at home, but I catch up with shows like The Shield and The Wire via my iPod. I watch some YouTube clips, especially the Two Chinese Students (aka Back Dorm Boys), which always give me a lift.

But I confess I’ve also put on films that work, for me, like favorite music. These are films I know well and love to look at in idle moments. I play the reconstruction of Eisenstein’s Bezhin Lug, with stirring Prokofiev audio extracts; Les demoiselles de Rochefort; Feuillade’s Fantomas; Akerman’s Golden 80s; Lang’s Spies; episodes of Twin Peaks. Except for the Demy, all fit nicely in the 3×4 window. All lift my spirits.

Cooler people download Lost or store their pictures or swap playlists with others, but my needs are more prosaic. This digital version of peephole cinema supplies me with comfort food.

Kristin here—

Our friend Brian Rose kindly send us a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern’s “Set the DVD Player to ‘Random’” (28 October 2006, p. 10; the WSJ website is by subscription and wouldn’t let me link to the article). In it Morgenstern claims that iPods playing songs in random order, video games offering constant choice, multi-tasking, and all the supposedly distractive aspects of modern life are wrecking movie logic. The latest evidence? A new release called The Onyx Project, an inexpensively produced interactive movie starring David Strathairn that allows its viewer to wander through the narrative in random order.

According to Morgenstern, The Onyx Project is just further indication that “The entire entertainment industry is beset by fragmentation, both economic and perceptual. Kids who used to turn out for movies every weekend now devote themselves to videogaming, instant messaging, MySpacing and YouTubeing, sometimes simultaneously, while movie executives, pacing studio corridors, worry rightly that they no longer understand how kids’ minds work.” (Haven’t studio execs always paced and worried about how to understand spectators’ minds?)

Morgenstern even cites Pauline Kael’s essay, “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” where she cited the “creeping Marienbadism” in modern cinema. If only! Yes, I can just see today’s teenagers lamenting the fact that Last Year at Marienbad is out of print on DVD and searching eBay for it. Morgenstern simultaneously cites Marienbad as having brought fragmentation into the movies and praises such art films as Breathless, L’Avventura, and Caché, as well as sophisticated Hollywood storytelling in The Matrix and The Godfather Part II. But again, if fragmentation is what kids want, why aren’t they watching Caché?

It’s hard to know where to begin.

For a start, the makers of The Onyx Project declare on its website, “But NAVworlds are not movies.” (NAV stands for “Non-Linear Arrayed Video.”) Further, “They are not ‘interactive movies.’” The site compares these NAVworlds, quite logically, to videogames, but there’s a difference: “Video games present worlds. We love video games. But video games are programmed. NAVworlds are written, directed, acted and edited.” It’s a subtle distinction, but the point is, The Onyx Project is probably closer to a game than a movie. The fact that it is available only as a piece of software playable in computers but not in DVD players should be a clue.

But whatever we call The Onyx Project, is it really totally fragmented? Richard Siklos’ more temperate New York Times review, “In This Movie, the Audience Picks the Scene” (2 October 2006) points out that The Onyx Project retains some of the traits of a Hollywood narrative. “One idea behind the venture,” he declares, “is that no two viewers may see the movie unfold in the same way, yet its basic facts, characters and message will permeate the experience.

Sounds like a type of unity to me. Moreover, “The mystery at the center of the story is not revealed until the end.” Suspense and curiosity are maintained, controlled not by the viewer/player but the makers.

Let’s go back to that “The entire entertainment industry is beset by fragmentation” claim. One of the reasons that The Onyx Project is creating a little stir is that it is so atypical. These kinds of experiments in time shifting are often used specifically for mysteries, traditionally the genre where the story starts the latest in the action and then backtracks for the final reveal. Think Memento, The Usual Suspects, or any of the neo-noir follow-ups to Pulp Fiction.

In 1985 when Hollywood attempted to introduce a mild form of forking-paths storytelling into theatrical filmmaking, they chose Clue, not only a mystery but a game. Then viewers simply saw one of three possible endings. Presumably the spectator was supposed to be intrigued by this gimmick and see the film three times. Few proved willing to sit through it even once, and the film flopped. Naturally all three endings were included in the video release, giving the viewer a mild dose of interactivity. Now the technology has caught up to make this approach far more sophisticated and intriguing.

More important, though, is the fact that most movies that young people see in theaters are not fragments or shuffled in challenging ways. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest may have been too long, but its cause-effect flow wasn’t fragmented, and it has earned over a billion dollars worldwide. Look at the most popular and/or lauded films of the past decade: Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Beautiful Mind, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo … the list could go on and on. These films are linear and causally tight for the most part, and when something is unclear, it’s a mistake, not a deliberate strategy. Even The Sixth Sense (another mystery of sorts) is easy to follow, and the twist, though genuinely surprising for most, is not baffling. A truly fragmented narrative is hard to find, in part because these sorts of films appeal to a very broad audience and have to be comprehensible if they are to succeed.

It’s easy to link the coincidence of the invention of gadgets like iPods with the trend toward Memento-like trickiness. As usually happens if one looks closely, though, complex narratives of this sort predate modern forms of interactivity. Even apart from the art cinema (whose main audiences from the end of World War II well into the 1970s and 1980s contained a large number of college students and graduates), there are Hollywood films that play with time in pretty sophisticated ways. In the 1940s there were the films noir, like Double Indemnity and The Locket, the latter with its flashbacks nested like matrioshki dolls. Later on but still in the pre-iPod era, there were playful films like Groundhog Day (1993) and Pleasantville (1998). MTV and the 1970s generation of American auteurs brought up on art cinema probably had more impact on story-telling than the iPod and similar devices have.

Moreover, even in traditional arts where interactivity would seem highly unlikely, one can find occasional works that offer choices. The Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books (1979 to the present) include numerous options about how to proceed. (Greg Lord offers an analysis of one of the books.)

Besides all that, the shuffle feature on iPods is usually used for songs, which are short, self-contained artworks. I doubt that people watching old episodes of Moonlighting on their video iPods skip among chapters randomly.

One thing most people tend to forget (if they ever knew it) is that in pre-television days, when movie theaters were a lot fuller than they tend to be now, there were continuous screenings. That meant the times when the screenings would start were not typically given in ads, and people just went to the theater, often standing in line until a seat became available. A lot of people ended up coming in in the middle of the feature and just sat through until they got to that point again. They didn’t seem to be much bothered by the fact that the film was “fragmented” in a random way. (In Storytelling in the New Hollywood I argue that comprehension was aided by a considerable redundancy in the flow of narrative information. David picks up on that idea in The Way Hollywood Tells It.) Notably, among the first theaters to list start times and sell reserved seats were early art houses, presumably because the more challenging films shown there were less easy to grasp unless seen beginning to end.

If The Onyx Project succeeds, it may usher in a new storytelling medium somewhere between films and videogames. If not, it will be the Clue of its day. Either way, most filmmakers in Hollywood and elsewhere will continue to try and make movies with stories that people can easily follow.

Kristin here–

There was a time when studying film fans was something sociologists or film-industry marketing people did. Sociologists wanted to find out why fans behaved the way they did because it was interesting and often strange, and the industry wanted to figure out fan behavior so they could sell movies to them more effectively.

Then, a couple of decades ago, a new kind of expert came along: the fans themselves. People who had gone to the university to study film, television, literature, or other aspects of popular culture gradually realized that they could study themselves, their kids, and the people they met at fan conventions and later on the internet.

Prof. Henry Jenkins did not originate the study of fandoms, but he has been perhaps the most influential “aca/fan,” as he terms himself on his blog. (The term “fan academic” also gets used to describe this new field of study.) These days books and articles and web publications about fandoms are proliferating, but just about any of them will cite Henry’s seminal 1992 book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (Routledge).

Henry doesn’t study fans to find out what makes them tick. He knows that. He’s one of them, a participant in fan cons, a player of video games, an explorer of the multimedia sagas like those of Star Trek and The Matrix that have grown up in the age of franchise culture. He received his doctorate here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where David was his dissertation advisor, and we have followed his career, as they say, with great interest. Straight out of the gate he was hired by MIT, where he is now the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. (Read more about his prolific and wide-ranging activities at his blog.)

This year two books by Henry appeared: Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (both New York University Press). Given that my The Frodo Franchise has chapters on Lord of the Rings video games and fan culture on the Internet, I thought I’d start with the first. Henry assured me, however, that Convergence Culture represented a more current and probably more relevant overview, so I started with it instead.

This terrific book uses a series of case studies to give an overview of how digital media have expanded the possibilities for participatory fan culture. It also shows how the producers of popular culture have reacted to this new empowerment of the consumers. Only two chapters focus on films: “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling” and “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry.” In the modern entertainment industry, however, films are increasingly linked to other media, and no one has a better grasp of the overall relationship among popular media than Henry.

Convergence Culture is unusual, perhaps unique, in offering an overview of the entertainment industry from the perspective both of the big corporations that control popular media creations and of the fans, who often appropriate those creations for their own purposes. Much of the book depends on interviews with fans and executives alike. Henry is evenhanded in dealing with both points of view—except when the big firms try to stifle fan creativity through intimidation and the invocation of copyright and trademark control.

Here Henry is firmly on the side of the fans. The chapter on Star Wars mentioned above reviews the love-hate relationship George Lucas has had with fan websites that post innumerable works derived from his saga. Another chapter, “Why Heather Can Write,” details how Warner Bros. attempted to squelch fan creativity based on the Harry Potter series. Henry provides a cogent argument for rewriting fair-use laws to accommodate amateur, not-for-profit activities that utilize characters and situations from copyrighted works.

So am I an aca/fan, too? I wouldn’t exactly describe myself as one, though in this new book I have dabbled in that approach, meeting many fellow Lord of the Rings fans in person and in cyberspace. One has to admire members of the various fandoms and the amount of time and effort they are willing to put into keeping themselves and others informed about the objects of their fascination. They also lovingly create their own works (fanfiction, fanart, machinema, RPGs, and so on) derived from their favorite books, games, movies, TV shows, and comics. Most of the results aren’t masterpieces, of course, but that’s true of “real” artworks created by professionals and aspiring professionals as well. If enough of just about anything gets made, some of it is bound to be good. I’ve found some excellent Lord of the Rings fanfiction among the many conventional, sometimes nearly unreadable tales I have sampled. And Chocolate Cake City’s Brokeback to the Future demonstrates what David likes to describe as “the spontaneous genius of the American people” (usually in reference to the speed with which any significant event generates a body of tasteless jokes, or, in this case, parodies).

For all the attempts to analyze audiences through questionnaires and interviews and other traditional methods, Henry shows that the best way to understand fans is as an insider. The aca/fan approach is spreading as the study of popular media and fandoms gains legitimacy within academe, and it is lucky to have an enthusiastic, intelligent pioneer in Henry Jenkins.

David here:

How often do you get four chances to see a seven-hour-plus movie? In the late 1990s I went to two film festivals that were showing Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994), and I missed it both times. Not that I don’t like long, slow movies, or that I wasn’t curious about a movie so many critics were praising, but at both events I needed to see other films, like old Hong Kong classics, that were scheduled opposite Sátántangó.

My third chance to see it was a variant of this situation. I was in Brussels at the Cinémathèque Royale watching Mizoguchi Kenji movies in preparation for what became Chapter 3 of Figures Traced in Light. I had the rarest Mizo of all, Aienkyo (The Straits of Love and Hate, 1937) on an editing table for a single day, and I knew that I would be watching it very slowly. (Normally a five-reel film takes me five to six hours.) But on the same day the archive was running Sátántangó.

What to do? I compromised and watched the first installment of Tarr’s film.

The first shot, now famous, was a stunner. Cows wander through the churned mud of a village square, amble slowly to the camera and then drift to the left, the camera sliding along with them. Eventually they shamble into the distance. All the while, hollow, bell-like chords throb on. Great cow ensemble performance and a dawdling, slightly ominous introduction to a strange world: I was ready.

What followed was nearly as impressive, with a deliberate pacing and attention to detail that overwhelmed the minimal story action. Light sifted through lace curtains, and grimy people in moth-eaten sweaters talked about a mysterious deal. In a remarkable sequence, running many minutes, the obese village doctor noted down his neighbors’ comings and goings. One shot had me gaping: the camera moves from studying a mangy dog through the window, then slips down to the doctor’s sketch pad and then follows him around the cramped bedroom with perfect fluency before returning to the window and revealing, in the distance, the repetition of an early action outdoors.

I had to leave.

I spent the rest of the day and a good part of the night in front of Aienkyo. Mizoguchi’s film hasn’t survived well, and the source material was as rainy with scratches as some scenes of Sátántangó are drenched in showers.

No regrets; the Mizoguchi was superb. But still….

Other chances came up: My friend András Bálint Kovács had sent me two VHS tapes of Sátántangó, and I bought a no-name DVD that turned out to be pulled from the same VHS source. But the lustrous black and white of the print I saw in Brussels made me feel vaguely dirty about watching the rest of the movie on video dubs.

Intrepid projectionist Jared Lewis before screening the 26 reels of Sátántangó.
Photo by Tom Yoshikami So it was yesterday that I finally had my fourth chance to see Sátántangó, and Kristin and I grabbed it. Tom Yoshikami, our fine UW Cinematheque programmer, had wanted to bring it for years, but deals had fallen through until last spring, when a small Tarr package began to tour.

It would be presumptuous to talk with assurance about the film after only one pass (okay, 1-1/3 passes). I hope to read and think about it more. There’s a lot for me to assimilate, both in print and on the Internet. So far, I’ve benefited from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s influential discussion (and his early review reprinted in Essential Cinema, apparently not available online), Peter Hanes’ enlightening career survey of Tarr, some helpful Vancouver program notes, a thoughtful discussion at moviemartyr.com, and the anthology Béla Tarr (published by Filmunio Hungary in 2001 and already hard to find*).

A DVD from Facets is scheduled for release next month, and doubtless this will trigger many critical studies. In the meantime, here are some tentative comments and questions.

1. Although the villagers in Sátántangó are united within a common project (apparently) involving the sale of cattle, other characters only tangentially connected–the doctor, a little daughter of a local prostitute–are given a lot of screen time. So the film becomes a “network narrative,” in which various characters separated by various degrees thread their way through the tale. Oblique as it is, the film obeys the conventions of this form, often set in a town or neighborhood in which people know one another. Later the characters migrate elsewhere, but the script maintains the sense of tenuous connections among the characters, like the motif of the spiderweb that circulates through the second installment.

2. The overall structure of the film, split into twelve parts, apparently derives from Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s novel, as yet untranslated into English. Each section adheres roughly to one or two characters’ range of knowledge, and as a result several events during the first couple of days of the action get replayed, fitted together as we come to understand them somewhat more fully. (The exposition is pretty stingy, nonetheless.)

It’s interesting that the film was completed in 1994, the same year as network stories became prominent with Short Cuts, Chungking Express, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, and that the replay-retrofitting tactic is seen as well in another 1994 release, Pulp Fiction.

3. The film’s pacing, very consistent in its solemnity, is accentuated by a soundtrack that is maniacally repetitive. The nondiegetic underscoring consists of drifts and whiffs of themes floating in the manner of ambient music, but more teeth-grinding is the clanging of a bell clapper in the third installment. Even cheerful music, like the accordion melodies played in the shabby tavern, rasp your nerves by being mindlessly reiterated. The endless dance in the pub, a spectacle of unimaginative drunken mirth, starts out amusing, becomes disturbing, and ends by being annoying. Maybe this is how they dance in hell.

As a minimalist film, Sátántangó seems to exploit what Minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich have found: by pushing repetition to a limit, you can negate the sense of momentum and suggest that the action is hovering in a kind of pulsating stasis.

4. Did I say minimalism? The film consists, by my on-the-fly count, of 172 shots (including the chapter titles), across 434 minutes (not counting the final credits). That creates an Average Shot Length of about two and a half minutes. Quite a comparison with contemporary American cinema! Still, people who’ve actually seen the film probably expect the average to be much longer. (Angelopoulos’ The Hunters averages well over three minutes per shot.) Some shots of course run for many minutes, but others are fairly brief.

What sheer numbers don’t capture is the surprise of a relatively fast-cut scene coming quite early. In the second chapter, “Rise from the Dead,” Iremias and Petrina are interrogated by the Captain. This sequence of more or less orthodox shot/ reverse-shot comes as almost startling after several oblique, elliptical long-take sequences. The tight facial framings as the Captain enunciates his doctrine of freedom and order emphasize a central thematic issue. At the same time, Iremias’s deceptive air of innocence prepares us for the charisma he’ll project in relentless close-up as he delivers his quiet harangue over the dead body. He is, after all, named Jeremiah.

5. Tarr’s long takes, like the one in the doctor’s study which so captivated me years ago, are often virtuoso. What’s striking, though, is that the effects are achieved more through camera movement than through staging. Whereas Mizoguchi, Hou, Angelopoulos, Sokurov, and some others often move their actors around before a static camera, Tarr usually plants his people in one spot and lets the camera spiral around and over them. The camera probes a static space rather than records a shifting one.

True, the characters may advance or retreat from us, but I didn’t notice any of the delicate crossing of character trajectories, or the almost unnoticeable blocking and revealing of figures, that we get in the masters of ensemble staging. The most obvious movement comes when the characters set off down those endless roads or across the bleak plain, and then if the camera doesn’t hang reticently back (signaling the end of a shot or scene) it will retreat from their advance or follow patiently behind as the wind and rain lash them.

These shots are surprisingly open-ended. They could go on forever. They don’t anticipate a process of development and completion, as other directors’ long takes do, and they don’t climax in the sort of visual epiphanies beloved of Angelopoulos and Tsai Ming-liang. These directors like to build the take in stages, paying it off with a monumental spectacle (Angelopoulos) or a pictorial joke (Tsai). Tarr just charges ahead, without hinting how, when, or if, the shot will end.

Miklós Jancsó put the intricate choreography of actors and camera on Hungary’s film agenda, and his films, some consisting of fewer than thirty shots, become dizzying displays of panning, tracking, and zooming. Tarr, like many successors in any tradition, may be accepting certain premises of his elders (here the long take) but refusing others. He avoids Jancsó’s “maximalist” spectacle and turns toward something more spare, discomfiting, and attuned toward details.

6. One of the great accomplishments of the film is its tactility. Not only do you feel the blasting wind and constant drizzle, but you get to scrutinize the human face with an intensity that recalls La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Persona. If it did nothing else, Sátántangó restores the specific gravity of faces to a cinema that often forgets the weight of mottled skin, graying stubble, matted hair, and baggy eyelids.

And not just faces. Light streams through bottles and dingy glasses, reveals the smudges on an appliance switch, and traces the texture of torn sweaters and cracked buttons. Flies sweep into the shot and crawl over lapels. Objects reclaim their right to exist, refusing to cooperate with characters. When the conductor tries to lift a box onto his cart, it resists his first push and he tips it awkwardly into place. I’m reminded of film theorist André Bazin’s remark that Italian neorealism discovered a storytelling form that restored the concreteness and uniqueness of things in the phenomenal world, their obstinate refusal to fit willful human impulse.

One of Tarr’s most memorable shots coasts slowly along the body of the doctor, fallen to the floor in a stupor. We move from his face to his bloated middle, held in place by a shabby sweater, and then to his legs, finishing on the heels of his boots. As the shot ends we see a straw embedded in a clot of mud. No other boots in the world look like these.

The respect for trembling surfaces recalls not only Dreyer but Tarkovsky, supreme filmmaker of water and moist earth, and the Sokurov of The Second Circle and Whispering Pages. I’m reminded, more unexpectedly, of Aki Kaurismaki, who grants his paunchy, greasy-haired losers the integrity of living in tangible, unidealized bodies. At moments, the film’s grimly comic baring of human greed and gullibility recalls Kaurismaki, although he retains a certain optimism that I don’t find in Tarr.

7. The historian in me wants to know where this comes from. Few commentators mention that Tarr is part of a broader trend that includes György Fehér, who evidently makes rather similar films. His Passion (1998), screened for the 2001 session of the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, is rather similar stylistically. It sets the situation of The Postman Always Rings Twice in a milieu as grubby and melancholy as that of Sátántangó, and its long-held takes (45 shots in about two hours) are less elegant, and carry some of the clumsiness of Feher’s overcoated, big-booted characters. At the same conference, Laszlo Tarnay of the University of Pecs also showed us a clip from Twilight (1990), which was to me even more impressive. Fehér was a producer on Sátántangó and worked with Tarr on other projects.

More broadly, it may be that Tarr, Feher, Alexei Guerman, and other post-Communist filmmakers have founded a new tradition of bleak, fine-grained realism that blends with challenging formal artifice in both image and sound.

8. There is so much to enjoy here that I hesitate to venture a qualm. I’m not yet convinced that the film needs to be so long! Some of the scenes, especially that showing the officers rewriting Iremias’s informing letter, seemed on my first look to be prolonged for the sake of filling out the pace. I’m also not sure that we need to see everybody walk into the remote distance. Moreover, I think the film (like, again, the work of Bergman, Sokurov, Tarkovsky, and so on) sometimes wobbles toward pretentiousness.

But these are very preliminary notes from a screening that was on the whole an exuberant experience. Not at all grueling!

Kristin and I went home, where I watched Inter-Pol 009, a 1967 Hong Kong James Bond imitation in lush color, with fast-cut gunplay.

It’s all cinema.

PS: Tarr has apparently resumed shooting an English-language feature with Tilda Swinton, The Man from London.

*But try the publisher: MONTAZS, Harsfa Útca 40, 1074 BUDAPEST; Tel: +36 1 461 0844; Fax: +36 1 461 0845.