A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, September 5, 2022

Damnation (Béla Tarr, 1988)

 














Cast: Miklós Székely B.,  Vali Kerekes, Gyula Pauer, György Cserhalmi, Hédi Temessy. Screenplay: László Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr. Cinematography: Gábor Medvigy. Art direction: Gyula Pauer. Film editing: Ágnes Hranitzky. Music: Mihály Vig. 

Damnation is all about lateral movement. It opens with a long, silent sequence in which we watch carts suspended from cables travel back and forth across a bleak, damp industrial landscape. Gradually the camera pulls back to reveal the window we’re watching through, and then the man sitting there looking through the window, until finally the back of his head fills the screen. This is Karrer, who is carrying on a love affair with a married woman who sings in a bar ominously called the Titanik. What story there is concerns Karrer’s attempt to get the woman’s husband in trouble by involving him in a smuggling mission. But mostly the film is about the back-and-forth of the two partners in the affair. And Tarr’s camera continues its slow, itchy travels back and forth, moving slowly across each scene as we await what it might reveal next. Karrer gets advice from a bartender and he gets lectures from the woman who runs the cloakroom in the Titanik. But there’s not much action, apart from a scene in which people are dancing, and one in which Karrer, traveling across the rain-drenched lanscape, comes across a dog, who barks and growls at him, whereupon Karrer gets down on all fours and growls and barks back.  Otherwise, there’s only the slow lateral movement of the camera, accentuated often by the steady downpour of rain. You know from this description whether you want to watch Damnation, but I have to say I found it oddly compelling. 

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