Notes on Satantango (the Book and the Film) – Part 1/3

Jared Woodland & I meditate on Satantango, both the film and the book over at HTMLGIANT.

Read the full post here.

Excerpt:

What one can’t shake throughout the scene is the ticking of the clock, the incessant ticking that induces a strange but familiar anxiety in the reader’s body even (it almost seems as if Futaki himself is swaying back and forth to the rhythm set forth by the ticking, and then I’m reminded of the Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung movie Wheels on Meals where there is a guy who walks around ticking like a clock). The book instigates this strange feeling of protracted time differently than the film, with the description: “Time was passing very slowly and, luckily for them, the alarm clock had long ago stopped working so there wasn’t even the sound of ticking to remind them of time” (13). On the other hand, the film’s sound design exaggerates and emphasizes the presence of the craze-inducing ticking. The book emphasizes the clock’s absence. This long take also has some of the most beautiful framings of three people, where each seems to take a turn being relegated to the background as a third wheel, so to speak. How does the hierarchy of people and objects within a visual frame or space relate to the rhythm of passing time?