Toward Total Cinema: “Satantango” and the Limits of Film

Satantango (1994), the legendary seven-and-a-half-hour film by Hungarian director Béla Tarr, based on a novel by the outstanding writer László Krasznahorkai, the latest Nobel Prize winner, follows a group of villagers in a world slowly falling apart. Often seen as a landmark of “slow cinema,” it pushes time, storytelling, and perception to their limits. With its shifting perspectives, intertwined narratives, and an unreliable narrator, the film challenges what we think cinema can do. This talk explores how Satantango becomes a vision of “total cinema”—a film that, in its radical form, seems to contain all the possibilities of the medium itself.

About the speaker: Mirosław Przylipiak, professor emeritus of film and media studies at the University of Gdańsk, film critic, translator. His main publications include the books Zero Style Cinema (1994, 2016), New Cinema (1998), Aesthetics of Documentary Cinema (2000, 2004), three books on American direct cinema, over 160 academic papers on various aspects of film and media, and numerous film reviews. He has translated nearly 30 books, mostly from the fields of psychology and film, and some poetry. He also made several documentary films and series of television educational programs. He has been awarded many international and national grants and fellowships, including the Fulbright Foundation (twice), Rockefeller Foundation and the Polish Ministry of Higher Education, among others.

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