Ray Pride

Finally, and at last, and arriving on the day after filmmaker Bela Tarr's 53rd birthday, you can hold "Satantango" in your hands. Facets Video has been working on this project for ages—a November release date came and went—but this impressively rich, epic yet minute seven-and-a-half-hour accomplishment may be the week's most impressive release (although as an $80 four-DVD set than as an exhibition of the reported single copy of the incredibly expensive 35mm print). A dark night all its own (which I watched again across a hot and hyper-humid weekend), Tarr's 1994 story of muddy, rain-streaked, poverty- and booze-battened Hungarian village life works his idiosyncratic ideas about the representation of time and space through duration and it's mysterious just how the emphatic, understated grace of his camerawork affect the small shreds of story. As I noted back in November, "How can the tempo of experience be expressed in the tempo of film? Each director finds their own way, but it seems wrong to resist the pull of music, which, like other forms of sound, works directly in the mind rather than requiring interpretation the way images do." It'll be intriguing to see what those new to this beautiful and elusive film make of it.

"Satantango" is out now on Facets Video, along with several shorts by Tarr.

(2008-07-22)

Also by Ray Pride

Scarlet Diva, Scarlet Empress
A sulfurous, sexual period piece, Catherine Breillat's "The Last Mistress" (Une vieille maîtresse) is, at first glance, both her most accessible and most carnal movie. An explicit, tempestuous variation on common costume drama, this adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel plays out as a luscious melodramatic essay
(2008-07-15)

Tip of the Week
Yes, it's a superhero movie, but not the one you'd expect. "Indestructible" is a heartening, harrowing autobiographical documentary made by Chicago playwright and actor Ben Byer, who in 2002, at the age of 31, was given a five-year prognosis for survival after a diagnosis of the incurable and fatal neurodegenerative condition ALS
(2008-07-15)

Tip of the Week
One of Luchino Visconti’s masterpieces, "The Leopard" (1963,) restored to its three-hour-plus original Italian-language release version, is the kind of movie that cries out to be seen in its big-screen glory, rather than on the Criterion DVD, even if you have a screen draping an entire wall of your house
(2008-07-08)

Hancock Towers
Anticipation runs high for further blackening of Batman's soul in "The Dark Knight," but the Fourth of July weekend belongs to "Hancock," a handsomely haywire comic-tragic concoction that flies high, sideways, off course and straight up in the air
(2008-07-01)

Tip of the Week
(2008-07-01)

An Inconvenient Cartoon
(2008-06-24)

Bourne Again
(2008-06-24)

Tip of the Week
(2008-06-24)

Tip of the Week
(2008-06-17)

Love and Death Head-On
(2008-06-10)

Tip of the Week
(2008-06-10)

All the Little Things
(2008-06-03)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment