Kárhozat (Béla Tarr, 1988)

Opening take: A bleak industrial landscape with the background noise of a coal power plant. The camera slowly zooms out and we see how some guy is witnessing the daily industrial process from his room. It’s a take of a couple of minutes where basically nothing happens but it sets the tone if it comes to the mood of the movie and the environment we are in.

With this scene I started watching my first Bèla Tarr movie called Kárhozat or Damnation. It is black and white, has long takes with an extremely slowly panning camera, no establishing shots, making the images fascinating and even though it may look empty at first, there is so much to see. I wouldn’t call it beauty, the movie is not an advertisement for Hungary, but the cinematography is awesome!

The plot is absolutely not important but I will try to summarize it. We see a somewhat depressed recluse in his local bar Titanik. He falls in love with a blonde singer. The owner asks him to participate in a smuggling scheme. He asks the husband of the singer to do the job so he has his hands free with her. We see how the protagonist is trying to get to her, sometimes subtle, sometimes violently, sharing his deep and philosophical insights with her and the viewer.

Again, this plot is just a means for the director to give us an impression of the bleak circumstances of a country in the last years of a Communistic regime. The movie puts its viewer in a depressive mood with ease and hypnotises with beautiful images and camerawork. Tarr chooses to repeatingly focus on rain (in both dialogue and visually), stray dogs and sad surroundings. I believe that he deliberately chose for a black and white movie to make it as bleak as possible.

Kárhozat was the first Tarr movie I watched and it was exactly what I was expecting. It is not digested lightly and the images contain so much sadness in every detail that I will wait a while before I’ll watch another one. The director does not use establishing shots but positions his camera close to the objects or characters he is observing resulting in some surprises when he slowly pans to a different corner (for instance the off-screen diegetic music, there always seems to be a musician in every corner). This unconventional trademark technique makes every take interesting and creates an undefinable suspense.

This filmmaker got my attention and I will try to watch more (his next one Sátántangó has a runtime of 450 minutes, so I may have to schedule….) but I will make sure to be in the right mood and circumstances. Definitely not your conventional popcorn film!

8/10