Damnation · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the buckets. The film opens on coal-conveyor buckets crawling across a grey ruined sky, hauled along their cable in a slow lateral track that has no reason to end and doesn't seem to want to. Mechanical, indifferent, going nowhere we can see. Then the camera reverses and finds Karrer at his window, watching the same buckets we were just watching. That little pivot is the whole film, and it is also the cleanest illustration you will ever get of what Gilles Deleuze meant when he said cinema, after the war, stopped being about people who act and became about people who watch.

Deleuze split the history of film in two. In the older kind — call it the movement-image — a person sees a situation, the situation calls for something, and the person acts to change it; the cut serves that chain, hurrying us from cause to effect. Damnation shows you what's left when that engine dies. Karrer perceives his world with total clarity. And he can do nothing with what he perceives — or rather, the one thing he does (maneuvering the singer's husband into a smuggling job to get him gone) corrodes him without changing anything. He is not an agent. He is what Deleuze called a voyant, a seer: somebody condemned to look. The buckets move; the man stays at the glass.

This is the time-image, and Tarr arrives at its purest form almost by subtraction. Watch what the long takes do. The camera moves at a pace closer to breathing than to action, Gábor Medvigy's silvered black-and-white registering wet plaster and crumbling concrete with the patience you'd give a face. A take will begin on a wall, a streaming window, a flooded street, and only slowly disclose that a person is in it. When there is no action to advance, time stops being the measure of movement and starts being felt for itself. Deleuze had a name for the stretches where nothing happens and the everyday is simply held: dead time, temps mort. Most films flee it. Tarr builds out of almost nothing else, and Ágnes Hranitzky's editing — few cuts, all of them enormous — refuses to rescue you. The drama plays out inside the take. The cut is just deceleration.

What you're left looking at, scene after scene, is a pure optical and sound situation — Deleuze's opsigns and sonsigns. The phrase sounds technical; the experience is simple. It is an image that hands you nothing to do, only something to see and hear. The rain (most of it made on set, since weather this relentless can't be left to luck) is not atmosphere decorating a plot. It is the content. So is the mud that seems to be eating the town, the groan of machinery, the stray dogs. Tarr filmed the place the way you'd film an event.

And the place itself has a Deleuzian name. He called the deserted, fragmented, drained-out spaces of postwar cinema any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — a space that no longer functions as the stage for an action, because there is no action it could host. The played-out mining town, the dilapidated Titanik Bar, the rain-blackened streets: this is one continuous zone of ruin, and Tarr stages human bodies inside it with near-sculptural deliberateness, small and still against indifferent vastness. The legendary dance in the bar — drunken wrecks swaying for a long, long time — turns abjection into ritual, a danse macabre with nowhere to go. It is the any-space-whatever throwing its one party.

Why does this lens earn its keep here, and not just sit on the film like a label? Because Tarr's whole formal revolution is the discovery that emptiness and duration can be a subject rather than a flaw — and Deleuze gives you the grammar for why that works instead of merely boring you. The film teaches you to watch it. By the time Karrer is crawling dog-like in the mud at the end, you have been so retrained by the tempo that the image lands as inevitability rather than event.

None of this came from nowhere, and that's the second thing worth saying. The grammar of dead time and architecture-as-feeling is Antonioni's, from L'Avventura; the choreographed long mobile take across open terrain is the Hungarian sequence-shot Miklós Jancsó codified in The Red and the White, which Tarr converts from political ballet into existential drift. The decaying industrial wet, filmed as spiritual weight, is Tarkovsky's Stalker — though where Tarkovsky reaches for transcendence, Tarr keeps you in the materials. Even the opening conveyor descends from the city-as-machine montage of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, decelerated from rhythm into a static rotting tableau. And what Tarr seeded is enormous: this is the film where "Béla Tarr" begins, the keystone of Sátántangó and The Turin Horse, and one of the founding works of what we now call slow cinema. His first collaboration with the novelist László Krasznahorkai gave the images their other voice — long, looping, apocalyptic monologues, speech slowed until it tips into prophecy, the cloakroom woman delivering judgment like an oracle.

So: go back to the buckets. Watch how long Tarr makes you stay with them before a human shows up, and notice that the waiting is not empty. That is the film handing you better eyes — the patience to find that a wall, a puddle, a downpour can carry as much as a plot. Most movies spend time to get somewhere. This one gives it back to you.