On what Béla Tarr's Sátántangó (1994) demands and what it provides in return.

Sátántangó runs seven and a half hours. It was shot in black and white over four years in the Hungarian countryside. It follows the inhabitants of a collective farm who are awaiting the return of a charismatic figure they have both revered and betrayed.

The film's long takes — some lasting twenty minutes — are not trying to make you comfortable. They are trying to make you feel the duration of a world that has collapsed into waiting. The Hungary Tarr depicts in the early 1990s is a landscape of mud, rain, and exhausted expectation. The camera's patience is the landscape's patience.

Tarr has said that he does not believe in story. What he believes in is the texture of time and space. His films are not about events. They are about the weight of existing in specific conditions over specific durations.

The experience of watching Sátántangó over two or three days — which is the standard approach — produces a form of attention that normal filmgoing does not. You begin to see things in the long takes that you would have edited out mentally in the first hour. The film trains you to watch it, and what you're watching, once you can watch it, is genuinely extraordinary.