DAMNATION
Edward Howard
Béla Tarr is often compared to Andrei Tarkovsky, with whom he undeniably shares a certain Eastern bloc minimalism, their formalist austerity expressed with a languidly moving camera that creeps through one long take after another. Tarr’s images, as gracefully slow and dark as a molasses river, owe a great debt to Tarkovsky, and his film Damnation is in some ways an extension of the moody black and white opening scenes of Stalker drawn out to feature-length. In other ways, however, the more salient reference point for Tarr is perhaps Michelangelo Antonioni, who like Tarr was concerned with the aestheticization of boredom, lending sleek, awful beauty to the dull and drab. Tarr, despite his references to scripture and an apocalyptic atmosphere of doom hanging over his characters, lacks Tarkovsky’s overt spirituality. He’s more concerned with reality, with simply staring at a scene for long enough that the viewer has time to be enthralled, bored, mystified and provoked in succession by the image. Tarr’s seemingly endless takes, his extreme patience for letting a scene’s natural rhythms play out, encourage deep concentration on the reality onscreen – a static view held for an uncomfortably long time, a slow sideways pan that reveals the blank expanse lurking around the corner, the way that characters step out of a shot only to be picked up again, long minutes later, when the camera’s gliding arc finally catches up to them elsewhere. This realist impulse cannot always be found in Tarkovsky, who despite the superficial similarity in aesthetics was often reaching for something beyond the surface image, but it is something Tarr shares with Antonioni, who saw truth, beauty and depth, paradoxically, in surfaces and appearances.
Damnation is all about surfaces, too, all about the material substance of life for a rather ordinary man in a perpetually rainy Hungarian village. Karrer (Miklós Székely), growing old alone, is disconnected from life, aimlessly wandering through his town’s muddy, puddle-filled streets. He hits five bars in a single day, drinking his way through his declining years, monosyllabically grunting in response to a loquacious bartender (Gyula Pauer). He finds peace and comfort only in his desire for a singer at one of these bars, Titanik, which looks curiously Lynchian with its neon sign glowing above a simple blank storefront. The unnamed singer (Vali Kerekes) unfortunately has a husband (György Cserhalmi), and Karrer wants only to get this man out of the way, to be able to spend time with his lover, who despite her fickle transitions from solicitous to dismissive and cruel, represents his only real reason for living.
This simple description of the film’s story is not, however, a summary; it is, more or less, the complete content of the plot. Tarr spreads this narrative material out so sparsely that it nearly threatens to vanish, to evaporate along with the rain that’s falling almost constantly in this town. The story has no forward momentum, no detail, because its characters are so iconic, so minimal: even Karrer is little more than the sum of his damp trench coat, his thin, uncontrolled wisps of hair, the hard stubble along his cheeks, the shadows that make his eyes so difficult to read. The story and the characters are apparent references to genre clichés, and specifically to film noir, with its doomed protagonists, ambiguous femme fatales, degraded urban settings and plots centered around crime, betrayal and sex. Tarr purposefully abstracts these elements, simplifying them into the most skeletal referents to the genre films they represent. The effect is like putting a noir under the microscope – or, for a more appropriately filmic metaphor, like watching a noir on an editing table, frame by frame, stretching out each scene and moment to examine the construction and arrangement of elements at length.
Scenes that would last twenty seconds or a minute at most in a traditional noir – Karrer spying on his lover and her husband, standing in the rain; the husband and the bartender meeting to arrange the details for the former’s smuggling mission – are drawn out by Tarr’s patient, watchful camera, which lingers on these scenes far longer than necessary to establish the minimal exposition they deliver. In the latter scene, especially, the exposition takes place mainly offscreen, unseen and unheard, as the husband and the bartender step outside to discuss their plans, while Tarr’s camera roams around, carefully panning from one end of the room to the other, pausing to observe an oblique conversation between Karrer and the singer. The two men are visible at some points, far in the background, standing outside the bar and only glimpsed through a window, but Tarr has shifted the emphasis away from the scene’s expected focus (and its ostensible raison d’etre) onto the more mundane goings-on within the bar. The noir elements are mostly offscreen, protruding only tangentially into the surface of the film. Somewhere in the background, a typical noir plot is being hatched between two shady characters, but Tarr locates the scene’s focus instead in the row of heads at the bar, visible through the windows of a dividing wall, and in the nonstop thunderous crack of pool balls from the nearby tables.
Everything in this film seems slowed down, stretched out, with familiar elements examined at length to draw out their hidden depths. Even the noirish torch ballad the singer croons at the Titanik bar plays at half-speed, a maudlin Germanic dirge that’s reminiscent of one-time Andy Warhol chanteuse Nico’s downbeat 70s albums – and especially her dreamlike incantation of the Doors’ already mantra-esque The End, an appropriately apocalyptic reference point – like a pop song slowed to an excruciating crawl. The music is meticulously timed to the steady pulsing motion of Tarr’s camerawork, or vice versa. The dull throb of the accordion and the blurred drone of the saxophone (which sounds like it’s being played from an entirely different room, possibly one whose walls are padded with sound-absorbing cotton) keep the beat with Tarr’s slowly sweeping camera.
As much as critical evaluations of Tarr revolve around his long takes and the deliberate way in which he moves the camera, sound is as centrally important to his films’ effects as their more readily apparent visual qualities. The sensually heightened realism of Damnation is as much a product of its dense soundtrack as of the sustained gaze of its long takes. Tarr’s treatment of sound and his treatment of images emerge from the same sensibility, the same set of concerns. The sound fields in Tarr’s films invite contemplation and in-depth study in the same way that his long takes encourage viewers to take in every inch of an image, to become immersed in the onscreen environment. The rhythmic repetition of the soundtrack often approaches the quality of electronic music, with lightly processed loops of creaks, metallic groans and shuffling noises recurring with predictable regularity. There is sometimes a barely identifiable electric whoosh on the sound floor, and the sounds of the mine cars above the town provide a consistent backdrop to the action.
The sounds Tarr selects and emphasizes are expressions of the milieu he’s depicting. In the scenes at the bar, the crack and rumble of pool balls scattering after a break is omnipresent, even before Tarr’s camera roams into the part of the room that actually houses the pool tables. The audience knows they’re there without seeing them, because their sounds inform the entirety of the scene. This use of sound is realistic in one sense: Tarr rarely if ever includes sounds that emanate from outside the immediate space. Even when he includes music, there is often (though not always) a musician, band or radio in the room to provide the in-scene rationale for the sounds. But Tarr’s reality is always a heightened reality, an exaggerated reality, and this applies to his use of sound as well.
As attentive as Tarr is to the textures of objects and faces, he applies the same observational acuity to the scrape of Karrer’s razor across his scratchy stubble, the phlegmatic wheeze of the accordion, the sleepy pseudo-jazz of the bar bands, and the various sounds of the rain falling (into puddles, on roofs, in thick sheets, dripping from windowsills – one gets the sense that in this town there should be as many distinct words for rain as Alaskans have for snow). The noise of the pool table has a crisp, clean quality that is unlikely to be a true indication of the sound in the room. It is, rather, enhanced, amplified, each impact given the heft and intensity of a gunshot or a car’s backfire. By the same token, he reduces the prevalence of those incidental sounds that likely would fill a room like this, notably the murmur of conversation that always takes on the quality of a dull roar in a room filled with a substantial number of people. This noise is de-emphasized, creating an eerie stillness and silence that only further accentuates the clarity of the pool balls spinning off with each shot.
The soundtrack presents a surface naturalism that, on closer inspection, reveals very careful manipulation and alterations to the quality of the sound. In this, Tarr’s commitment to duration is also a critical factor: scenes begin as quite naturalistic, but as the moment is held for longer and longer periods of time, one begins to notice that certain sounds are being looped, used like samples to provide an industrial background, and that there is an intangible artificiality at work here. In this respect, Tarr’s treatment of sound is most akin to Bresson or Rivette, directors whose soundtracks could be called naturalistic if not for the inordinate emphasis given to each individual sound, the sense that every least rustle of fabric, every footstep, has a devastating effect on the film’s environment and mood.
This kind of sound world is in line with Tarr’s general aesthetic, which is somewhat detached and abstracted from the characters and situations he is depicting. This is not to say his films are cold or unemotional; quite the contrary, they are often profoundly affecting and emotionally intense. But it is undeniable that Tarr maintains an objective distance even at his films’ most emotional moments. His roving camera, which is never particularly loyal to any given person or event, gives the impression that no image is so important that the camera cannot wander away from it to look at something else instead. The central characters are central because they appear frequently, not because the film is wedded to their narrative arcs – Tarr will often let his camera pan slowly away from the main characters to observe the many other unnamed characters who exist in the town, or even to gaze at empty space. Karrer and the people who have an impact on his story are no more important, no more sacred, than any other person in the town, or indeed than any piece of furniture, muddy patch of ground, or rain-streaked windowpane that Tarr’s camera captures.
This is a marked contrast to most fictional films, in which, by virtue of the way that narrative structure dictates following one character or several characters through a series of events, the filmmakers must confine themselves largely to perspectives that advance the narrative or provide information about the characters involved in the narrative. Tarr, by housing his narrative within the framework of the mundane, frees his camera to take in other perspectives, to observe unrelated incidents and people, to treat the central narrative characters as only elements in an overall design whose nature the film suggests but never fully limns. The general fluidity of the perspective in Damnation – and the willingness to abandon the main characters for long periods of time or to submerge narrative incidents within prosaic stasis – only enhances the impact at those moments when the film’s narrative details are more concentrated, like the scene where Karrer delivers his monologue about communication and relationships, ostensibly speaking to the singer but with his body oriented more directly toward the camera’s fixed low angle. This scene hits so hard in part because there is nothing else like it in the film, no other scene where Tarr confines his perspective so directly to character and narrative detail.
With the conspicuous exception of this one scene, Tarr seems unconcerned with deep characterization. Karrer remains as much of an enigma as any of the other characters, most of whom go either unnamed or introduced so casually and obtusely that they might as well not have names. This long and heartfelt monologue is the only moment at which Karrer opens up to another person, when he tells the singer that she is the only one who inspires him to speak, the only person who convinces him that communication can be worthwhile. And yet what she inspires him to relate, as it turns out, is mostly a lengthy description of an old affair, a time when he tormented and ridiculed one of his lovers until she committed suicide. Why he tells this story – either to the singer or to the film’s audience – is unclear, except as evidence of his profound lack of ordinary morality, his disinterest in his fellow human beings. Tarr presents this shocking monologue with characteristic straightforwardness: an unmoving single take of Karrer and the singer sitting at the breakfast table, while above the ubiquitous mining cars, hauling coal from a nearby mine, creak by on overhead cable lines.
Even at this point, when Tarr’s commitment to traditional cinematic qualities like narrative and characterization is at its peak, he seems as interested in the rhythmic, mechanical sound of the cable cars, or in the bemused expression of the singer as she munches her breakfast, as he is in the actual content of Karrer’s speech. This scene should be startling, horrifying, emotional, something. Tarr places it at such a cold, static distance, however, that it’s simply numbing, just another unpleasant tangent in the story of an unpleasant life.
For much of the film, in fact, Tarr seems unconcerned with pleasure of any kind, perhaps because there’s so little of it to be found in Karrer’s life. Even lovemaking is boring, just something to do to fill the time, and in that respect no better or worse than Karrer’s more common habit of hanging around behind walls on rainy afternoons, voyeuristically peering out into empty space. While Karrer and the singer are having narcoleptic sex at one point, the camera grows bored and wanders off in a 360-degree spin around the room instead, crawling over the surface of the objects in the woman’s room. When a mirror catches sight of the couple for an interval in the camera’s circuit, they seem to have just barely picked up the pace a little, so that from a distance it might even be thought that they were actually enjoying themselves. Tarr’s camera simply meanders on, past the mirror to rotate through the rest of the room.
The film is intimately involved with its location, with the objects and atmosphere of its place, in ways that it is not with any of its human characters, who serve more symbolic functions. Tarr betrays little interest in their individual psychologies. It is a cliché to say that the town itself is a character; perhaps not as much of a cliché to point out that in this film, the town is the only real character. Tarr is tracing out, through Karrer, the story of all the town’s inhabitants, charting the town’s moods, which based on the amount of rain that falls and the mud and muck it produces, are mostly black, foul moods. The references to Biblical plagues and destruction sent down from God do not mark out Karrer as Lot or a similar figure of Biblical misfortune. It is more likely the town itself is Gomorrah, smote for the sins of its inhabitants, plagued with gray ugly weather and congenital ennui and smile-less faces. At one point, Tarr pans across a blank exterior wall that is every so often interrupted by a door. Inside, crowds of people, their hard faces as expressionless as the wall, stare disinterestedly out at the pouring rain.
And yet, strangely enough, Tarr’s vision is not entirely bleak, not as long as he has room for such images of surrealistic joy as the long shot of a man dancing manically in the rain, playfully splashing in puddles and creating rhythms with the slap of his shoes on the watery ground. The film culminates with a group version of this solitary celebration, a typically languid and pedestrian dance that nevertheless offers a vision of community solidarity, of fun and pleasure. It is a moment of respite, an escape from nothingness, a chance to seize something good. Tarr shoots this scene from the same anesthetized distance with which he captures the more prosaic events of the rest of the film. The image is static, the perspective as disinterested as ever, and yet the light and motion within the frame, the sense of measured excitement and understated happiness that’s as close as these people get to celebration, communicates that this is a special moment for the village.
This communal togetherness is tempered by the film’s overall doom-laden atmosphere, and by the especially bleak tone of its denouement. Betrayed by his lover, Karrer betrays his friends in turn, and in an image of startlingly direct symbolism, literally descends to the level of a dog, getting down on all fours and barking and snapping at one of the mangy, ferocious-looking black mutts that roamed the town’s rainy streets throughout the film. Forsaking his fellow humans and the shabby but nonetheless sincere solidarity they offer him, Karrer chooses to isolate himself for good, becoming in the process less than human, an animal fighting only for itself. This ending suggests Tarr’s overriding philosophy of humanity, his belief that what truly separates us as a species is not any of the ordinary signifiers of human uniqueness, as important as they can be – not our capacity for speech or complex thought, nor our ability to build and design (industry serves as a grim backdrop in this film, not a sign of progress), nor the institutions of government and order we create, which Karrer ultimately turns to only as a hypocritical tool of revenge – but our ability to socialize, to form connections, to exist as true communities rather than mere packs of wild dogs. When this communitarian impulse breaks down, when the bonds of human solidarity are severed, then humanity, like its symbolic representative Karrer, descends to growling in the streets, running wet and angry through the harsh elements with no protection and no hope.