Damnation

A sense of quiet desperation pervades Damnation, the 1988 movie by Béla Tarr, Hungary’s world-renowned director of films that feature long takes and philosophical themes. A new restoration by the Hungarian National Film Institute premiered at the 2020 New York Film Festival and is now available to screen in virtual cinemas. A good entry point for anyone new to Tarr’s exacting filmmaking techniques, Damnation (which previously has had limited availability in the U.S.) is also essential viewing for those more familiar with Tarr’s work since the film marks a key evolution in the filmmaker’s career.

Even though Damnation is the first of Tarr’s six screenwriting collaborations with László Krasznahorkai, you’ll quickly realize the director is no big fan of plot and narrative intrigue. Filmed in black & white during the waning days of the Soviet socialist occupation, Damnation is infused with a gloomy fatalism. The setting is a small unidentified Hungarian town where the atmosphere is drenched in constant rain and mist and underfoot lies nothing but mud and puddles. Crumbling, war-scarred buildings adhere stubbornly to their foundations, and packs of dogs roam the streets looking for scraps.

Karrer (Székely B.), Damnation’s central character, also haunts the streets, but instead of food scraps he’s in search of the next bar and his amour fou, a nameless but married chanteuse (Kerekes) whose droning tunes express repetitively downbeat lyrics such as “it’s over” and “never again.” Karrer lurks outside in the rain until he sees the singer’s gruff husband (Cserhalmi) leave before banging on her apartment door to plead for entry. He haunts the Titanik bar where she performs to a gin-soaked, affectless smattering of patrons. Her husband tries to run Karrer off, and the coat-check woman ominously warns him of the troubles that lie ahead. In a self-serving move disguised as compassion, Karrer passes on to the cash-strapped husband an unspecified smuggling job that will take the man out of town for a few days and leave Karrer’s paramour unguarded.

If plot is not Tarr’s primary concern, the way he conveys his story is. We hear the plaintive sound of the singer’s tune long before his camera moves through the space to match her image with the sound. Blackness takes over the screen as Tarr’s camera moves behind columns and posts or an umbrella blocks out the entire view of the scene on which Karrer is spying. The long takes root the characters in the locale, and the creaking sound of the buckets that carry black coal back from the mines is pervasive and perpetual. The break with narrative formulas in Damnation begins a journey that only deepened through Tarr’s career, while the filmmaker’s formal explorations have only ceased with Tarr’s declaration that 2011’s The Turin Horse would be his final film. His is an arthouse aesthetic grounded in keen but timeless observation.

Damnation is available now as a Virtual Cinema release.