Naturally, most critics, even those who praised the film, barely got what the film is about, and often imbued blatantly wrong ideas from the barest of threads. Instead, they digressed on to treatises about Tarr’s conflicted take on existence, his being an anti-Communist zealot, or his merely being derivative of earlier directors, especially the nominally similar Tarkovsky. Where Tarkovsky is explicitly spiritual, Tarr is overtly materialist. His characters not only reject inner lives, but they are seemingly incapable of understanding what they are. Karrer, as example, reiterates his desires for a ‘life’ with the singer, unawares that what he has, pathetic as it is, is still better than nothing, and that if he ever got his wish, it would likely only hasten the end of that relationship. The singer cares nothing of anyone but herself, and her husband veers between testosteronic threats and an impotence of mind that equals Karrer’s.
Only the woman played by Hédi Temessy shows any depth, yet she is not only marginalized by Karrer’s lack of attention to her feelings and entreaties, but by her own inability to see that she is as rote a creature as the others are, despite her ability to see the Möbius strip life she, and the others, inhabit. In this way, Orson Welles’ The Trial is the most direct antecedent for Damnation. The Kafka tale is as circular, if a bit grander, but nonetheless fatal.
Too many critics and filmgoers (even twenty years ago) have too delimited an idea of narrative, and what it is and can do, to appreciate an artist like Tarr, who exploits those very conventions, but not in radical antitheses, but in sly digressions to the next door, so that what the viewer is left with is not a conventional tale, but a story that almost ghosts its essence upon the expected. Dourness becomes a thing to marvel, and beauty becomes a thing tossed aside, and the camera often makes the viewer question their import, something few works of art do, taking too much for granted. When the camera focuses on something, therefore, it is not the thing in front of the eyes that is the subject, but the watcher behind. This subtle displacement of the everyday is a thing that adds psychological heft to the film, even though not in a manner discernible to most arts lovers. Often, silly appellations like a ‘noir Angelopoulos’ are used, even though their utterers have not a clue what such a claim means.
Damnation is a film that achieves greatness in many moments, but sometimes does not know when its points have all been made. These slight excesses are the only downsides 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.
Article comments