Damnation Bella Tarr (Hung, 1984)
Damnation Bella Tarr (Hung, 1984) Miklos Szekely, Vali Kerekes
viewer 4th Oct 2025 dvd
all tomorrow’s rain
Tarr’s Damnation opens with a wide shot of industrial desolation. We hear atmospheric music accompanied by an invariant industrial clatter, as buckets of coal dangling from wires suspended from multiple pylons, are transported endlessly through the blasted landscape. Diagonally moving through frame from right to left they appear from nowhere on their way to a distant nowhere. The opening shot of Tarr’s ‘Damnation’ in its very longevity establishes both a desolate actuality and a state of mind. It’s an image that re-appears throughout the film as leitmotif for….. …ineluctable emptiness…..
The mesmeric nihilism of the long first shot sets up a mood that pre-empts the rest of the movie, whose thematic composition adds little to the first 10 minute opener. Tarr’s movie is shot in high contrast black and white designed to draw the viewer into the darkness of its psychic vision. The imprinted aesthetic of bleakness soaks into the viewer (and on screen there is rain aplenty) folds over the protagonist ‘Karrer’ as he pursues the woman who’s the object of his obsession. She’s a singer (‘…she’s a witch, a swamp…’). In her persona she’s strongly reminiscent of Nico (of Velvet Underground fame and also had a long solo career) who in the 1970’s established herself as the embodiment of Gothic Existentialism: “What costume shall the poor girl wear To all tomorrow’s parties? “ Does ‘Damnation’ take us any further than Nico’s lament?
Besides the almost ever present image of the despair blighted Karrer, Tarr’s movie is packed with the tropes of unmitigated hopelessness. Some visual: the incessant downpouring of rain, the stray dogs, the textural quality of stained cement: some scripted, Karrer’s story of the bloody suicide of one of his previous girlfriends; quotes from the doom mongering old testament prophets; bleak self referencing drawn out monologues referencing love decency madness and tunnels.
The plot which centres about manipulation double crossing and betrayal always plays second string to film’s design, its high contrast look and its camera work, the slow lateral tracking shots composed as ‘reveals’. The arch deliberation of the camera movement is its defining quality. The tracking becomes something the viewer starts to anticipate….you know the camera is going to move; you know that it is going to reveal a different perspective; you know that the director is making a certain deliberation.
Tarr’s movie transmutes existential anxiety into an aesthetic. ‘Damnation’ is a siren call of emptiness designed to pull unwary sailors into its clutches and turn them to stone. But what if you don’t want to be turned to stone? Then Tarr’s movie will be no more than a series of overburdened familiar clichés wrapped up in a dressing of hi-art European camera work and left to stew slowly as it moves like the coal buckets steadily and slowly from nowhere to nowhere. Enjoy!
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk