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 derelict building he turns his camera on.
The DVD, put out by Facets Video, has a good transfer, although here and there, there are some flaws and splotches. The film’s subtitles are in white, but unlike the often unreadable subtitles the Criterion Collection uses on black and white films, Facets uses a black outline around the white lettering so that the words stand out very well. There are no features to speak of, and the only extra is a small booklet that features some pretty good essays on Tarr and his canon.
The film’s screenplay, by Tarr, adapted along with László Krasznahorkai from Krasznahorkai’s novel, is the sort that most critics would not rave over, because it is not larded with dialogue that sets the mind ablaze, nor is its pacing something that most video game addicted Americans will find stimulating. But like Last Year In Marienbad or 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film’s screenplay is key to its greatness, for it holds together the often conflicting images, which would fall to anomie without the script. The pair, Tarr and Krasznahorkai, have become Europe’s latter day film-novelist equivalent to the 1960s pairing of filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara and novelist Kōbō Abe.
The cinematography, by Gábor Medvigy, is superb. Often in black and white films, especially those of recent decades, the use of that palette has no real significance, for all it does is present a blanched world. Tarr and Medvigy, however, make full use of total blackness, and its interruptions, as well as the plenum of grays that run between it and its antipodes, showing the superfluity of color in many films, and just how effective black and white cinema can reflect dreams, their lack, and the horror that fact can present. In this sense, Damnation truly is a horror film, with its desolated urban landscapes (which were a set, not real), often shown at odd angles, often reminding a well rounded cineaste of earlier horror films like Vampyr, Frankenstein, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, or many other German Expressionist films from the silent era.
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