Sometimes, in these days of 3-D and Imax, you just want to
see a little old black-and-white movie that makes you feel you are “at the
movies”. Such is the case with the crisp
look (if glacial pace) of the 1988 film “Damnation” (or “Karhozaf”) from
Hungarian director Bela Tarr, dating back to 1987, now from Facet video.
The film opens with a curious view of coal bin cars moving
across a landscape along high wires; the film gradually frames the landscape
from inside an office, and we see the lonely character Karrer (Miklos B.
Szekely) leaving to go home alone. It
curious that in this film we rarely get a good, identifiable look at him.
Having lost a female companion, he seeks a new one, an already married bar tips
singer (Vali Kerekes). The local bar owner tries to unload him by
directing him to a smuggling job – ever had the experience that an unsolicited
job offer comes to take you out of your game?
I have! Karrer tries to pass the job along to the singer’s husband, but
eventually betrays everyone with the police. A final scene shows a gnarlish millstone of a useless man
in a growling match with a wild dog, in a driving rain. Dissolving storms, threatening to wash away
the world in Noah-like fashion, characterize Tarr’s work.
There are some interesting existential discussions, as to
whether not having children is a form of cowardice!
The brooding, static music score Mihaly Vig features long
held dissonant chords in the strings, and emphasizes the mood of impending doom,
and sometimes imparts an effect reminding me of David Lynch. Yet, there are curious group scenes involving
the townspeople, as a square dance scene where there is some incidental (if
accidental) same-sex dancing.
I recall seeing a more complex, later film, also
black-and-white, "Werckmeister Harmonies" (2000), at the Bell Auditorium at the
University of Minnesota at an international film festival in Minneapolis in
2000. That film shows a curios view of the balance between commitment and
entropy. There is a charismatic young
man Janos (Lars Rudolph) who takes care of an aging musician who wants to
challenge the well-tempered scale of Bach.
The wintry (if snowless) barren world outside is disintegrating,
however. A circus featuring a bizarre whale comes to town. Eventually, the unpredictable disorder of the
outside world will threaten Janos and the musician, and force them to pay
attention to other people’s lives, which are not necessarily any more real.
This film is based on the novel "The Melancholy of Resistance" by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
I am still trying to get “Turin Horse” from Netflix; it
stays on short wait.
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