Béla Tarr's Damnation is maximally depressing. The entire film is done in just 20-25 shots, many of which are distanced from the action, and takes place primarily in the dark, in the rain, or both. The 116 minute duration weighs down on you like ~200 minutes. The brilliant soundtrack for the first half of the film is mostly composed of the droning environment. The passing buckets, the sound of a razor dragging across a man's face-- the sounds are amplified and interestingly arranged into concertos about dismal everydayness. Furthermore, Tarr uses the soundtrack to add a subtle twist to the overall gloomy attitude of the film. During the opening shot, a single note is held over the 10-or-so minutes as the protagonist (unnamed) plods about, suggesting an intensity of emotion or a foreboding fate. Tarr successfully achieves both perpetual suspense and dejection through the duration of the film. After a character exits the scene, the camera lingers on the door, or whatever the exit, for some 10 seconds. Another interesting decision is how Tarr leaves the dialog relatively scant, except for the protagonist's moment of philosophic despair. Such techniques endows the film with so much intensity despite Tarr's minimalist approach.
Our emotional response to the film is the primary force propelling the narrative. It's the nuances; weird shadows falling on peoples' faces, loose vicious dogs, a 10 second shot of an empty field, a highly sensitive microphone intensifying every sound, the bare narrative-- all of which envelope the audience with the environment. This film reminds me of Miklós Janscó's The Red and the White in the sense that affect moves the story. But equal to the story's presence is a void that impresses itself on us; in the sense that we don't have a typical plot structure or any familiar landmark to orient us. We must take the emptiness--the lack of obvious narrative-- and make it into something-- as enormous and universal or simplistic and minuscule as one's perception wills.
The film addresses at one point as the camera drags across a scene of people facing the camera, a couple of the eyes looking right into ours by ways of the camera. The clusters of faces, a nameless crowd staring back at us, makes us feel cornered. It's as if the nameless faces are mocking us and telling us that we are a nameless, faceless crowd too. The exaggerated cinematography compensates for Tarr's distaste for words. At one point the protagonist is talking to his love interest. He poses a rhetorical question, something like, do words make sense? He then tests this hypothesis: I hate you, he boldly lies to the woman. Maybe words don't make sense but they definitely motivate action, as the man finds out when the woman, angered, leaves him there. Conflicts with no resolve prevail. At one point, a woman is attacked by a boyfriend or perhaps pimp-- the baby we saw just before the camera entered the bedroom where the conflict arises is voiced over giving the scene a soundtrack of hysterical infant cries. Maybe Tarr is mocking us for getting upset over such an easy conflict for a film. Either way, there is a definite sense unresolved void, as if encouraging us to question the necessity of resolve. Can we just accept the sense of void in art? Do we deny our aesthetics from exploring void? Can art represent something that isn't successfully? Nonetheless, Tarr rejects standard thematic continuity.
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