Published: 2019-02-061

Sátántangó by Béla Tarr: Image – Time – Restlessness

Sebastian Brejnak
Media - Culture - Social Communication
Section: Articles
https://doi.org/10.31648/mkks.2978

Abstract

The thesis of this article is an ascertainment that the experience of restlessness is the foundation of the universe in Béla Tarr’s film Sátántangó (1994). This mental state is also a mode of being the motion image which was called by Gilles Deleuze “the time image.” The meaning of “restlessness,” “time,” and “image” is based primarily on the sense of the interpreted work, secondly on works by Gilles Deleuze (Cinema; The Logic of Sense; Difference and Repetition), Martin Heidegger (particularly the term “anxiety” included in Being and Time), Jacques Derrida (Specters of Marx), Walter Benjamin (On the Concept of History) and the other philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists (especially the theoreticians of the affective turn). The context of the graphic arts (Paul Klee and Imre Ámos) is used in this dissertation, too. In the study five idiomatic figures of restlessness were extracted connected with time and image in Sátántangó: boredom, expectation, specter, potentiality and affective neutralizing (quieting). They correspond to the levels of diegetic structures and the sphere of perception-reception as well. This dissertation in an attempt at analysing the way, which the affects and problematic aspects of time-image’s structure are represented in Tarr’s film poetics. The unrest’s authenticity is opposed the false state of calmness that causes the distorting mediation and the compulsory suppression of the authentic experience. The aim of that study is also to show the turning point that has taken place in the postmodern and neomodern cinema, which concerns the main changes in the (re)presentation of film action and the cinema’s influence on viewers’ sensations.

Keywords:

Sátántangó, Béla Tarr, restlessness, image, time, Gilles Deleuze

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Citation rules

Brejnak, S. (2019). Sátántangó by Béla Tarr: Image – Time – Restlessness. Media - Culture - Social Communication, 3(13), 139–153. https://doi.org/10.31648/mkks.2978

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