User Reviews

I have been meaning to get around to seeing some work by Bela Tarr for a while, considering the collective international fangasm this guy is receiving. I certainly see the attraction: Bela Tarr has learned his craft from some of the best, notably Andrei Tarkovsky, and is capable of turning every element of the landscape and setting into a character in and of itself. He is also really good at using sound editing and music to add an extra dimension to the already almost three-dimensional fluid motion of the camera, which typically tracks along a single access back and forth constantly revealing another angle. One of his best shots in this film is an exterior where an old woman approaches and cuts off the frame with an umbrella, showing that Tarr even uses props and costuming to create simple, effective compositions.

The movie follows a small community of Hungarians, especially Karrer, as they live out the misery of their stolid existence but manage, by the end, to find some form of redemption in each other--sorta. The dance sequence near the end is a real moment of transcendence, but the scenes immediately following indicate a return to hopelessness and despair. Tarr is smart and keeps the actual story completely to the visual elements, leaving the dialog to be long and exhaustive character analyses and themes about Judgement Day, et al. After all, the movie is called Damnation. Anyway, it can be distracting to follow one thread of thought in the foreground while in the background the actual story is happening, but on one hand that is sort of the point, and on the other hand the nature of Tarr's long takes are such that he is capable of revealing exactly which element you are supposed to be paying the most attention to. I particularly liked the scene where the bartender confronts Karrer about his self-involvement, as it is one of the aspects of the character that really drags the movie down.

The best praise that I can give to this movie is that I did not feel the two hour playlength, despite the long takes. I give the biggest credit to the use of sound, much background noise of which helped psychologically move the spectator into the frame of the movie. Ultimately Tarr echoes one of his own character's statements, "I love watching rain," and invites the viewer to share in the pleasure as well, as most of the movie is sort of like watching a storm through a window and allowing yourself to go into a daze.

--PolarisDiB

Bela Tarr became the most well known Hungarian director of films with the 1987 release of Damnation (Kárhozat). And, it's no wonder. While not an inarguably great film, it is certainly close, and a good case for its greatness can be made. More cogently, the film showed Tarr as a filmmaker who is singular, despite some manifest parallels to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos. This 117 minute long black and white film, shown in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio is similar, in structure, to Tarkovsky's Stalker, and in pacing to Angelopoulos's films, although its visual imagery is straight out of the Italian Neo-Realism of the 1940s and 1950s.

The film opens with a long slow pullback from a hot of a tramway of mining buckets moving back and forth, suspended over a bleak landscape, part of a small mining town. The sounds of the mechanized drudgery set the tone for the film, and as the camera pulls back from the buckets we see that we are inside an apartment, looking out the window at them. The camera then pulls even further back and around the silhouetted of a man's head. The slow reveal moves from almost a documentary-like feel to one of utter expressionism, as it finally ends, and we see a man shaving with a razor. This break, several minutes into the film, ends a shot that is almost a mirror image of the final shot of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger. Antonioni, of course, is another filmmaker that Tarr is often compared to, and without a doubt, there are also similarities. Like the Italian cinematic master, Tarr's shot is, at once, the essence of simplicity, but also complexity and duplicity, for, while we start out with what seems an objective documentary shot of an industrial landscape, suspended in mid-air, it soon morphs into what seems to be a subjective shot of a character looking hopelessly out of a definite place. But, then, as the camera pulls back behind the putative eyeline of the silhouetted figure, the shot again becomes objective and omniscient, then switches to a more conventional shot of the main character, whom we learn is called Karrer (Miklós Székely), shaving. Then, we see, as the camera, again pans behind him, how his reflected image disappears behins the imposition of the darkness Karrer's body casts, until his face is swallowed by his body's darkness.

The film is, despite its black and white, dark and sodden landscapes, amazingly beautiful. Rarely has the geography of the human mien been captured so wrenchingly, whether in the faces of the main characters, or in shots that seem to be social commentaries that underscore and play out against the main narrative, and featuring people who are never seen again. There is almost a clinical aspect to the way that Tarr pores over not only the human aspect but also the ruins of a small town. Yet, never is it technically clinical. The slow motion of camera movements away from the seeming center of the story is something that few filmmakers do. Yet Tarr does so, not only with ease, but a purposiveness that hints at the fact that the putative focus of that is just that, putative, and of no more genuine interest than a small portion of a derelicted building he turns his camera on.

Damnation is a film that achieves greatness in many moments, but sometimes does not know when its points have all been made. The slight excesses of lingerance are the only down sides to a film that is a terrific document of the human creature; one that still has relevance to its viewers, as well as its viewed.

This is my second Bela Tarr movie, and I think I'm getting the idea here. The plot, what of it there is, concerns a local barfly who has become obsessed with a singer in a band which plays some of the bars he frequents, he drags the singer and her husband into some poorly defined subterfuge involving the picking up of a 'package' for some bar owner. Something goes not quite right with the scheme and the main character ends up reporting one or more of the other characters to the local police, the end. The whole thing is set in an unremittingly bleak Hungarian town where it's either raining or night (or both), once again Tarr seems to set up an interesting premise, then takes it nowhere. Every single shot is a long tracking shot, I mean, every single God dammed shot, in the end, the repetitious and unimaginative nature of the shots becomes wearing. No character development is attempted, the main character bores various other random characters to death with sub Nietzschean rants which should appeal to angst ridden teens. The movie picks up a little in the latter half with a local dance, as other reviewers have noted, little effort is made to synchronize the actions of the 'band' with the music, the locals drink and party looking like extras from a Bruegel painting. In the end, the movie simply has no emotional resonance, one is in no doubt that this is an attempt at art, but it's firmly in the 'toilet in the Tate Modern' category. All technique, no heart.

"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.

Bela Tarr's mediation on interpersonal relationships (and perhaps, the end of the world). In a small town a man is obsessed with a singer in a night club. She's married but doesn't completely deflect his advances. Dark brooding tale filled with long takes seems to be taking place in another world or another time (perhaps it's an after life). It's a hypnotic trip (if this clicks with you about the nature of obsession and how we view ourselves (if not it's a pretentious and tedious exercise).

I've read that director Bela Tarr insists that the film (as he insists about all his films) is a portrait of life as it is but I would be hard pressed to say that this is any sort of reality except perhaps a reality of the internal. The film's stark and beautiful black and white photography creates a world that seems forever in a mist or rain. It is a place like our own and yet different. People speak in ways that don't seem wholly normal. Verse is quoted and is the bible. No one speaks that way. Musicians play music but how they play doesn't quite match up with the music we hear. The mine carts that we see over head seem to be moving the damned to and from this place and not ore (indeed we never see either end of the line). Tarr says there is nothing allegorical or metaphoric implied or intended but I would argue that the film doesn't function as a straight narrative. Too much is off kilter, too much fails to connect for this to be real life. I'm not saying that the story of obsession, of a man doing what he feels he must to obtain the object of his desire doesn't work if it's taken as straight tale, it does, but at the same time the film becomes a battle with tedium. There becomes no reason for the film to run two hours, for the odd passages of dialog or the long takes. Frankly if the film is taken as the director intends it to be, then the film is a crashing bore and a failure on anything but a basic level. The film only works on some other level that isn't straight reporting, certainly the much used term 'apocalyptic' that I've read and heard connected to the film is inappropriate. Having been a creator of various things I know that sometimes the works we create change or become not what we intend. I understand that the creator of say a film is the one to ask what he intended but at the same time that doesn't mean what he intends is what is there on the screen. I think Tarr thinks he made one thing however I think he ended up with something else instead. I think as a film that is open to our own interpretation, being real world or not, the film is a masterpiece and a trip ripe with possibilities. I think as a straight tale of souls locked in a straight battle of possession it's a crashing bore filled with WTF moments. As something else of souls elsewhere or even inside of themselves it's a trip. See the film, take it for what it is, or what ever you take it to be and be carried away.

"Kárhozat" or "Damnation" is a Hungarian Hungarian-language film from 1988, so this one has its 35th anniversary this year already, but I don't think this was really the reason why they showed this film again on the big screen. It simply happened at a movie theater linked to film history in general and they are often showing films away from the mainstream. The room was also not empty at all, approximately a quantity I expected, but also not super full. The main attraction here was the name Béla Tarr as writer and director. He was in his early 30s at that point, so still in the widest sense on the newcomer side, even if he had directed full feature films before and was already part of the film industry for a decade if we also count his early short films. This movie here was also the first occasion on which he collaborated with his co-writer László Krasznahorkai, who is 1.5 years older than Tarr or I should maybe say that Krasznahorkai often the novels wrote the novels too that Tarr's films were based on, but they also worked on the screenplay together and this includes "Werckmeister harmóniák" as well, the film that is maybe Tarr's most known and might stay this way. But they even collaborated on a 2011 film then, so their cooperation lasted for many decades. Since then, Krasznahorkai seems retired though and has not worked on anything new. You could say the he deserves the rest with the reception of all those movies that the two worked on together. I mean critics loved them and they have really high ratings on imdb and any other film side you may be looking at. The fact that you maybe will not find one of these in the highest-rated list is only because not enough people have seen and rated the movies. So it is nice that here and there they return to the big screen even and also not only in Hungary itself, but here in Germany for example too the other day where I got to watch this film.

Sounds all good and promising, doesn't it? Well, sadly I cannot keep going like that because with this film here, just like with everything else I have seen from Tarr I realized again that I just cannot find a connection to his approach. Which is extremely slow, in black-and-white and absolute not plot-focused in the sense of stuff happening. This may sound superficial, but I need more and better story. I mean if you look at Haneke's "Das weiße Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte" /"The White Ribbon", that is a film I really adore and it is also super-slow, very long and in black-and-white, but with Tarr I just cannot find any appeal really. I am a bit sad it is like this because I know many really adore him, but for me he falls in the category where there is also Tarkovsky for example. Praise by critics, but does almost nothing for me. The runtime is not helping either. This one here goes on for roughly two hours or slightly shorter, which means that it is not even among Tarr's longest works and yet it felt to me as if you could fit the story into 30 or 40 minutes perhaps if we are only talking the segments that are linked to the plot and are something different than style over substance. The one thing you always find in Tarr's film's is slow camera movements throughout the entire room or also outside of course while we are watching what happens. Or if something happens at all. One example would be the football match on television that we are quickly getting away from and of course no goal happens this very short moment. These movements are frequently accompanied by music, which makes clear that Tarr's films here and there have lengthy segments without dialogues at all or where really little is spoken. I am still hesitant to call this a non-dialogue-driven approach as you can probably find more in the talking between characters here than in the non-verbal interactions between them. Said music can be pretty beautiful at times I will not deny it, but honestly I would have liked it more I think when listening to it simply on a record instead of having it accompany a film. The whale scene from Tarr's aforementioned most favorite film will always stay in my mind, there the music was downright breathtaking. For this one here, we do not have a similar moment or scene.

The lead actor is Miklós Székely B. Whatever the B. May mean and I see he is still alive. Good for him. I really cannot say anything about the cast here as I don't remember the actors from anything else, so I will leave that to the Hungarian film buffs. The female lead is played by Vali Kerekes (finally somebody without accents!) and I thought she was fairly attractive in here. I can see why the male protagonist fell for her, even if the stalking component right at the very start may be a bit much and in general it was difficult to really root for the protagonist here. But he was toyed with anyway by the female protagonist here and there as she rejects him initially, but eventually still gives in to his attempts and they have sex at least once. Problem is she is married and her husband will be back soon and the possibility of her leaving her man wo be with the protagonist was never an option here at all I must say. But it was different times anyway, especially in Eastern European countries. Divorce was still a critical issue, even if there was no love left between the two spouses. And we do not even know if this is the case here anyway. How the female protagonist really sees the male protagonist and what she feels or doesn't feel for him. There was one scene when the man is confronted by another and I assume that was her husband? At least he tells her to stay away from his girl and I suppose the man did not approach any other female in here, especially as he is really just crazy for Kerekes' character. One thing you will never find in Tarr's film is comedy of any kind. I don't think I have laughed or smiled once while watching one of his works and this film here is no difference. That does not need to be a negative thing either though, at least it is better than try-hard comedy that is not working, but of course the film still needs to deliver in other areas. There weren't many scenes here that stayed in the mind though. One is maybe when one supporting character tells the male protagonist that this woman is no good for him. But this was the exception. Tarr's works being mostly (more than merely) a bit on the depressing side is not an issue for me either as I do love some films that take this approach. A they let me really feel something, which is honestly the most important thing about a film I would say. No matter if it is joy, despair or regret or whatever else. Anything is better than indifference, but I did not really feel anything with this one.

I often do when there's animals involved in movies, but the (whale from another film and) the dog from this film that was out there in the rainy cold fighting for survival every day did not have as much of an impact on me as I would have liked it t have. I guess it was also meant as some kind of build-up to the final scene in which the main character is depicted as some kind of equivalent to the stray dog and they are growling at each other and he also howls like a dog a little earlier, so yeah he is depicted there really at the bottom as low as it gets when the chance at further romantic interest coming his way from the female lead has passed. That's how I would interpret it at least, so you can say that, even if it is on a low scale overall, Tarr ended the film on one of its highest notes in terms of how memorable the scene was. I am sure people who appreciate Tarr and his works more than I do will see a lot more/different in this scene and also in many other scenes throughout the movie. A lot of it may be linked to the amount of water you often see in Tarr's films and with the heavy rain here on many occasions, especially towards the end where it is pouring in a really loud fashion in terms of sound effects, this is certainly also the case for this film we have here. There is also the brief depiction of a river or pond towards the end. But these inclusions also could not turn this film into something I enjoyed watching. No chance for a positive recommendation from my side for this film that is probably not among Tarr's most or least famous works. Somewhere in the middle. I give it a thumbs-down. Watch something else instead or I assume you can decide this very well for yourself then too as you have probably seen another film from him already (or more than one) when you get here to decide if you should see this one too. If you (dis)like one, you will probably (dis)like all. The style is just so similar every time. For me, it is a no though and I am pretty convinced that I will not watch this one ever again, more likely one or several of the Tarr films I have not given a chance yet. Not looking particularly forward though. That is all.