In all our movies, the location has a face. It looks like an actor… In the beginning, we were just talking about social conflicts, and then we were opening, opening, opening. Now we had to show the landscape and the time… When we did location scouting [for DAMNATION] we kept seeing the cable cars. It was awful weather, we were very poor and just trying to do something, but one thing was sure—the cable cars kept going. The most important part of these movies is mostly the location—you have to go and find the visual elements, something which is real. — Béla Tarr
DAMNATION—starring Vali Kerekes as a married but very independent nightclub singer and Miklós B. Székely as a philosophical barfly obsessed with her—features Tarr’s signature characters and landscapes in various states of abjection and decay rendered through spellbinding cinematography and poetic resignation.
Tarr’s first collaboration with writer László Krasznahorkai, DAMNATION has been restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by the Hungarian National Film Institute–Film Archive under the supervision of the director.
The film will stream online over the next several days, presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. See link below for details.
UCLA Film & Television Archive
Through Thursday, November 5.
Béla Tarr, Damnation (1988), with Vali Kerekes and Miklós B. Székely (second from top and below). Images courtesy and © the filmmaker and Arbelos Films.
