Satantango.

Released in 1994, Bela Tarr's seven-hour-long Satantango quickly joined the hallowed ranks of a particular subset of film history--those little-seen but near-mythic movies that represent an extreme challenge to the normal conception of duration in cinema, a select group whose charter members include Fassbinder's fifteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (covered elsewhere in this issue, by the same hardworking reviewer), Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (thirteen hours), and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (nine-plus hours). Of all these films, Satantango may lay claim to the most radical reconception of cinematic time, an approach that is at once expansive and collapsed, free and tightly controlled. Satantango features multiple protagonists, all inhabitants of a small, grim Hungarian village, and for much of the film Tarr follows each in turn, in separate chapters that are astounding in and of themselves--great chunks of experience in which the concepts of plot or of conventional dramaturgy fall away almost completely, the characters achieving an unprecedented presence and weight-of-being. And when, very gradually, the relationships between these open-form chapters are revealed, the complex structure of the film as a whole comes into focus. Available at long last, with a host of special supplements including Tarr's striking, feature-length adaptation of Macbeth, Satantango marked the culmination of Tarr's esthetic development away from the kitchen-sink realism of his earlier films to a heavy, formalist, Tarkovsky-inflected miserabilism. If the limitations of this new mode surface in the film's later stages, when something resembling a more conventional plot emerges, the vast majority of Satantango is a truly visionary accomplishment, a grubby, unsettling, immersive experience that explodes familiar notions of cinematic structure, characterization, and duration--not a film you watch so much as an environment, a world, which you inhabit for a time. (Distributed by Facets Video, www.faeets.org)--Jared Rapfogel