Damnation by Bela Tarr

I first heard of the avant garde Hungarian film director Bela Tarr early this year when his mammoth masterpiece (it runs over seven hours) Satantango was being shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The New York Times had an ecstatic write up about the film and somewhere else the MOMA screening was called the "cultural event of the year". I was intrigued after reading about the film and his other work. So, I was naturally very excited when our film society decided to show Damnation this Friday and after seeing it, I don't hesitate a bit to call it a Masterpiece (yes, with the capital 'M').

This article in Kinoeye website has an excellent overview of Tarr's career so far. It also has this following plot summary of the film (although the film is essentially experimental, it also has a fairly conventional, if pared down, plot):

Damnation is close to being a genre film in its story of love and betrayal, a theme that Tarr has described as being very simple, —even "primitive." Karrer lives a withdrawn life in a mining community where his evenings all end up in the Titanik bar. He is offered a smuggling job by the bar's owner but passes it on to Sebestyn, husband of the singer at the bar. In Sebestyn's absence, Karrer and the wife sleep together and Karrer seeks a lasting relationship. He considers denouncing Sebestyn to the police. On Sebestyn's return, there is a confrontation between the two men and the bar owner takes the woman to his car, where they have sex. The next day, Karrer denounces them all. In the final scene, Karrer approaches a waste tip in the pouring rain where he confronts a barking dog. Getting down onto his hands and knees, he barks at it until it is forced into retreat.

What is most remarkable about the film is its style. It is shot in long, really long takes with the camera always tracking in extremely slow motion. And what exactly does the camera capture? Well, it is very difficult to say in words. Suffice to say that the end feeling is of relentless despair, defeat and irredeemable gloom. In fact Tarr's pessimism is so deep and his sense of futility is so profound that the film overall doesn't depress at all. Rather, it makes your own sadness look petty, boring and unartistic! There are few dialogues in the film but whenever some one speaks, it is some apocalytic aphorism. At one point Karrer confesses that "nothing scares him more than children with their bright eyes and cute little faces, because they swindle mankind into going on with this charade and condemn us all to an eternity of horror." A little later, in the same scene he muses, "if it made any sense to speak at all". Moreover, he is disgusted by the will to survive that animals, including human beings, show and condemns love as "that pathetic clinging"!

It is really very difficult to write anything about this film. It is incredibly rich in visual detail and it is not easy to reduce its subject matter to few thematic issues either. By the way, this was also one of the favourite films of Susan Sontag, the great American critic, who championed Tarr's films in her essays and lectures calling them, "some of the very few heroic violations of cinematic norms of our times".

I will just point to some articles on the net. Other than the kinoeye article, here is an overview by Jonathan Rosenbaum and a capsule review of the film here. Another review from the Guardian website (from where I took the quotes) here. Link to Tarr's interviews here and here.

I can't wait to get my hands on Werckmeister Harmonies and Satantango. The later though is still unreleased on DVD.