That’s right Secret Movie Clubbers. Satantango is maybe THE ultimate “Take a Chance” cinema experience of all time. It is one of Secret Movie Club’s white whales. And this May, we willingly jump head first into the belly of the leviathan. Don’t kid yourself that Barry Lyndon at midnight is the height of punk. You want to go full Velvet Underground, Bowie, Clash. This is it. It doesn’t get anymore punk than this. Bela Tarr’s 7 1/2-hour masterpiece of dark comedy and drama tells the story of a collapsing farming collective. Members of the collective are secretly planning on abandoning the community with their money when an important member, long thought dead, returns and changes everything. The movie’s strange, beautiful, unsettling, and mysterious structure is hinted at in the title itself. Satantango follows a tango in which one takes six steps forward before taking six steps back. As such, the movie is broken up into 12 parts. On top of this, the movie’s style is a brilliant cinematic adaptation of the novel’s own style which consists of non-linear long running sentences. Here we get roughly 150 shots. But oh what shots. Full of darkness, full of light. Full of complex human emotion, hypocrisy, drunkenness, violence, contradiction. Moviemakers from Gus Van Sant to Jim Jarmusch to Martin Scorsese have all sung hosannas about Tarr’s work. Tarr himself, though he semi-retired in 2012, is still with us and has seen his own Hungary lurch between the extremes of human behavior he himself documented in his work. In a recent interview, Tarr was asked if he was surprised his transgressive 7 1/2 hour dark horror comedy of the soul would become one of the jewels of world cinema twenty five years later. He gruffly replied “I’m not prophetic. . .I was just an ugly, poor filmmaker. I still am. I don’t have power. I don’t have anything-just a f@*kng camera." Punk recognizes punk. Come to the Secret Movie Club Theater for a cinematic experience you’ll remember and feed off of the rest of your life. Everyone who makes it to the end gets a glass of champagne on us as we toast the experience.

Additional Information:

Please note entrance/parking is actually in the back of the building. Make a right on Wilson Street, then a right behind the building. We’re the first set of black steps after the big gate.

Satantango runs 7 hours and 19 minutes. Though its filmmaker Bela Tarr has expressed the wish that the movie be watched all in one sitting with no break, we feel he would understand that we want the maximum number of brave moviegoers to take a chance with some pragmatism mixed in. Therefore, we will have two intermissions and an afterparty with the following schedule:

12pm-3pm (approx) Parts 1-5
3pm-4pm Lunch
4pm-6:30pm (approx) Parts 6-9
6:30pm-7:30pm Dinner
7:30pm-9:15pm Parts 10-12
9:15pm Afterparty, champagne, hang, discussion