"It's not social, it's not ontologial, it's cosmical, the s**t is cosmical!" - Tarr
The world is hell and we're all damned, mourns Bela Tarr in "Damnation", a supremely bleak film. Bouncing from irredeemable gloom to relentless despair and finally defeat, the film paints a landscape of decaying homes, perpetual thunderstorms and dog infested streets. It's characters, meanwhile, spend all their time drinking booze and dancing listlessly at local nightclubs. They seek escape and solace, but both are temporary at best, illusions at worst. There's no running from the black.
The film's key motif is a series of cable cars which run above the town, forever extracting coal from Tarr's dying mining community. Underneath this conveyor belt, this ribbon of constant motion, humanity remains immobilised, its life force slowly sucked away. While the world revolves, humanity remains in inky stasis, Tarr's characters both tethered painfully to the past and crippled by an unknowable future; tormented by memories and regrets, but scared of hoping. Nothing survives, Tarr says, you're dying the moment you're born. Why hope?
Within this sickeningly bleak world lives a man called Karrer, a balding figure who navigates earth with a death mask. He wishes all children would die, if only to end the suffering that is the human race. The only joy he finds is in the presence of a woman, a local night club singer, but we sense that his love for her is itself selfish. She seeks to escape this hell, skipping town to become a famous singer elsewhere, but he can't have that. If she escapes then it places the blame of immobility on him. Better to keep her here, anchored, in the darkness, suffocated.
Karrer's hope, then, is to reaffirm hopelessness. Indeed, nothing scares him more than children, with their bright eyes and cute faces, "because they swindle mankind into going on with this charade and condemn us all to an eternity of horror." For Karrer, who like everyone in the film speaks with apocalyptic aphorisms, existence itself should be rejected.
The film ends with Karrer selling his soul to the authorities, before stepping back out into the rain. He picks a fight with a dog – he is one of them now – before disappearing behind a mound of dung. He's trapped, dead, his body already festering...whilst high above the village the cable cars continue their slow crawl, further and further into the air, always moving, a ticker tape to nowhere.
8.5/10 – "Damnation" contains 3 excellent, powerful scenes, but its glacial pace will irk most viewers (increase the frame-rate on your DVD player). Kicked out of his university philosophy class for being too "extreme", Tarr quickly blossomed into the most suicide inducing film-maker since Antonioni. Though few have seen his films, he's been a huge influence on late career Gus Van Sant and Steven Soderbergh. His arty black and white cinematography lures us into a world of extremely long takes and extremely slow pans, the viewer beaten into submission by an aesthetic of inaction. Makes a good companion piece to "Red Desert ". Worth two viewings.
The world is hell and we're all damned, mourns Bela Tarr in "Damnation", a supremely bleak film. Bouncing from irredeemable gloom to relentless despair and finally defeat, the film paints a landscape of decaying homes, perpetual thunderstorms and dog infested streets. It's characters, meanwhile, spend all their time drinking booze and dancing listlessly at local nightclubs. They seek escape and solace, but both are temporary at best, illusions at worst. There's no running from the black.
The film's key motif is a series of cable cars which run above the town, forever extracting coal from Tarr's dying mining community. Underneath this conveyor belt, this ribbon of constant motion, humanity remains immobilised, its life force slowly sucked away. While the world revolves, humanity remains in inky stasis, Tarr's characters both tethered painfully to the past and crippled by an unknowable future; tormented by memories and regrets, but scared of hoping. Nothing survives, Tarr says, you're dying the moment you're born. Why hope?
Within this sickeningly bleak world lives a man called Karrer, a balding figure who navigates earth with a death mask. He wishes all children would die, if only to end the suffering that is the human race. The only joy he finds is in the presence of a woman, a local night club singer, but we sense that his love for her is itself selfish. She seeks to escape this hell, skipping town to become a famous singer elsewhere, but he can't have that. If she escapes then it places the blame of immobility on him. Better to keep her here, anchored, in the darkness, suffocated.
Karrer's hope, then, is to reaffirm hopelessness. Indeed, nothing scares him more than children, with their bright eyes and cute faces, "because they swindle mankind into going on with this charade and condemn us all to an eternity of horror." For Karrer, who like everyone in the film speaks with apocalyptic aphorisms, existence itself should be rejected.
The film ends with Karrer selling his soul to the authorities, before stepping back out into the rain. He picks a fight with a dog – he is one of them now – before disappearing behind a mound of dung. He's trapped, dead, his body already festering...whilst high above the village the cable cars continue their slow crawl, further and further into the air, always moving, a ticker tape to nowhere.
8.5/10 – "Damnation" contains 3 excellent, powerful scenes, but its glacial pace will irk most viewers (increase the frame-rate on your DVD player). Kicked out of his university philosophy class for being too "extreme", Tarr quickly blossomed into the most suicide inducing film-maker since Antonioni. Though few have seen his films, he's been a huge influence on late career Gus Van Sant and Steven Soderbergh. His arty black and white cinematography lures us into a world of extremely long takes and extremely slow pans, the viewer beaten into submission by an aesthetic of inaction. Makes a good companion piece to "Red Desert ". Worth two viewings.