Béla Tarr and the moving camera: slow noir in Damnation and The Man from London

ABSTRACT

In the history of film studies, few developments have proven to be as fascinating as film noir, while few aesthetic devices have proven to be as perplexing as camera movement. In this article, I articulate the terms of a unique noir aesthetic predicated on the moving camera in the films of the Béla Tarr. A renowned exponent of what is known as slow cinema, Tarr’s work has captivated scholars interested in camera movement and long takes. However, for as much attention as Tarr has received for the style of his films, their substance has received scant attention. To redress this, I elaborate on Tarr’s unique style, and in particular his inspired use of camera movement, by considering it in conjunction with his equally unique noir sensibility, and in particular his thematic interest in classic noir themes such as fate and free will. In films such as Damnation (1988) and The Man from London (2007), Tarr provides profound meditations on enduring noir themes, and by virtue of detailed analyses of these exemplary slow noir films, I demonstrate the uniqueness of Tarr’s films while also contributing to greater understandings of the power of the moving camera and the vicissitudes of film noir.

KEYWORDS:

• Béla Tarr
• camera movement
• film noir
• slow cinema
• slow noir

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Zoran Samardzija and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their insights and encouragement during the writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Characteristically caustic and dismissive, Tarr once made a joke about his films bearing the traces of film noir that speaks to the perfect suitability of post-communist Europe to the cynicism and bitterness of film noir: ‘If you go to a small Hungarian town, a miner’s town, you don’t need American film noir. You have the real thing’ (Tarr 2012). In this way, Tarr is a living example of the way that, in the words of James Naremore, film noir ‘became a mirror in which European [viewers and filmmakers] could see their own faces’ (Naremore [1998] 2008, 27).

2. Tarr himself has corroborated this picture of his filmmaking: ‘I was making films for more than 34 years [when] I stopped. 34 years is a long time. I was doing my first movies when just one or two of my friends would be punching me and telling me how fucked up my work was. And how fucked up society was. Then, step-by-step, film-by-film, I went deeper and deeper and I tried to understand more and more. At the beginning when I was 22 I believed our problems were only social problems. But later I understood [there] was a [deeper] problem’ (Tarr 2014).

3. Even speaking of his earliest films, Tarr refused to consider them political films or himself a political filmmaker: ‘For me, they [were] not political movies. The real art is to show real human conditions and relations, and that’s all I try to do’ (Tarr 2012).

4. The present consideration of camera movement is part of a larger project begun in Barrowman (2020) and continued in Barrowman (Forthcoming). For a broader consideration of camera movement beyond the work of individual filmmakers, meanwhile, see Barrowman (2022b).

5. This is significant since there is a femme fatale in the original story by Georges Simenon which Tarr adapted for his film. In fact, in one of the two previous film adaptations of Simenon’s story, the British film noir Temptation Harbor (1947), Simone Simon plays the femme fatale character and makes of her quite possibly the most sympathetic and least villainous femme fatale in the entire film noir canon. Tarr, by contrast, completely eliminates this character in order to focus solely on Maloin as a man undone by his own actions.

6. There is also, of course, something implicitly political at play in these two films. If the post-communist ruin in Europe created the sense of an apocalyptic end, capitalism represented to some the sense of a utopian beginning. Interpreted thus, Karrer’s arc in Damnation – from despondent, to hopeful, to bitter – serves as a remarkable analogue for the arc of many in post-communist Europe; as Žižek described this sociopolitical picture, ‘Europeans didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism and were full of immature utopian expectations. The morning after the enthusiasm of the drunken days of victory [over communism], people had to sober up and undergo a painful process of learning the rules of the new [capitalist] reality … It [was] as if [they] had to die twice,’ first as utopian communists and then again as utopian capitalists (cf. Žižek 2021, 214). Uniting politics and philosophy, then, Tarr’s late films can be seen as thoroughgoing critiques not simply of communism or of capitalism, but more fundamentally, of utopianism, of the idea that there is some magical, external thing or idea which in itself, absent our own (responsibility for our own) efforts, has the power to radically transform the world. Characters from Karrer in Damnation through János Valuska (Lars Rudolph) in Werckmeister Harmonies up to Maloin in The Man from London are all, in their own ways, dreamers, and they all delude themselves into embracing a view of the world and of their agency in it which clashes (often violently) with their lived realities.

7. Unfortunately, slow cinema scholars often create a false dichotomy between the narrative and the non-narrative, and, what is worse, they often valorize the non-narrative over the narrative (cf. Rancière [2011] 2013, 26–27; Flanagan 2012; de Luca 2014). The result, no less regrettable for being so predictable, is the inability to comprehend the specific narratives of specific films.

8. In the realm of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock is not surprisingly the master of this technique. From the tense dolly shot in on the knife which Alice (Anny Ondra) will use to defend herself from her would-be rapist in Blackmail (1929) to the interminable tracking shot of rapist-murderer Robert ‘Bob’ Rusk (Barry Foster) leading the oblivious Barbara Jane ‘Babs’ Milligan (Anna Massey) to her death in Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock has expertly used camera movement to amplify and dilate suspense. Cf. Barrowman (Forthcoming).

9. I am referring here to Stanley Cavell’s ethical distinction between knowing and acknowledging (cf. Cavell [1969] 1976; see also Cavell [1972] 1981, 1979, 1986).

10. This line of argument owes much to Donato Totaro, who has already devoted considerable energy to exploring how time functions in long takes (see Totaro 2001, 2020).

11. Once again, there is something implicitly political at play here. To the extent that slow cinema can – and, in the opinions of some fans and scholars, should – be thought of as contemplative (cf. Tuttle 2010; see also Çaǧlayan 2018, 4–17), the slowness of Tarr’s films offers spectators more than just interminable, emotionally charged sequences of suspense and dread: They also afford us the opportunity to contemplate the plights of the protagonists, the merits (or lack thereof) of their dreams and their plans to realize them, and the state of the societies in which they live and try to pursue (what they think will bring them) happiness. Compared to Damnation and The Man from London, the political valence of Tarr’s slowness is, of course, more explicit and more charged in Satan’s Tango and Werckmeister Harmonies – in the two of which we are afforded opportunities to contemplate the ideological presuppositions which impel the characters to act, often to their own detriment – but the ability to sit in a scene and contemplate its (emotional, psychological, and ideological) implications is yet another of the salutary benefits of Tarr’s films specifically and slow cinema generally.

12. I discuss ethical agency in the context of film noir at greater length in Barrowman (2011). However, for the most sustained and intriguing consideration of ethical agency in the context of film noir, see Robert Pippin (2012), who even includes Scarlet Street as one of his case studies.

13. Despite the dearth of analyses of camera movement as a unique aesthetic device, tracking shots of characters walking, be it from in front of them, alongside of them, or behind them, have elicited a rather surprising amount of scholarly attention (cf. Brooke 2009; Colvin 2017; Schonig 2018).

14. Though I am not including in this explicitly auteurist analysis of Tarr’s work any theoretical considerations vis-à-vis authorship and critical practice, see Barrowman (2018, 2021) for the theoretical presuppositions that subtend my author-based criticism.

15. On this noirish aspect of fate and the root of such fatalism being psychological, or rooted in the subject, I am reminded of Carl Jung’s observation that ‘when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of [what Jung came to call the shadow] the world must perforce act out the conflict’ (Jung [1951] 1969, 71). A similar intuition was also voiced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thought that ‘the secret of the world is the tie between person and event’: ‘[A person] thinks his fate alien because the copula is hidden. But the soul contains the event that shall befall it … We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us’ (Emerson 1860, 33–34).

16. Film noir as a genre has also historically proven capable of providing similar cautionary tales. From classical noir films like Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, in which the flashback structure allows the protagonists to reflect on their situations and (re)examine their actions, to contemporary noir films like Drive and Broken City (2013), in which the protagonists struggle to emerge from the darkness of their crime-filled lives into the redemptive light of morality and good deeds, the genre of film noir by no means consists only of sad, cynical stories devoid of happiness or the possibility of redemption.

17. I have argued elsewhere that just as Wittgenstein thought of philosophy as the assembling of reminders, so film-philosophy can be thought of as the assembling of cinematic reminders (cf. Barrowman 2022a). In this way, Tarr’s films can be thought of as reminders of what terrible fates await those who allow their demons to get the best of them and who blame the universe for their own shortcomings.

18. I am referring here to Emerson’s observation that ‘the world I converse with in the city and in the farms is not the world I think’ (Emerson [1841] 1950, 363). Though I hesitate to call Tarr a perfectionist filmmaker in the way that perfectionism has been articulated by Stanley Cavell (cf. Cavell 1988, 1990, 2003, 2004), I do think that in his films Tarr asks each of his viewers – and he asks at least as polemically as Emerson asked each of his readers – ‘Why not realize your world?’ (Emerson [1841] 1950, 364). Tarr’s cinema may appear to be a cinema of failure and futility, but, to quote Emerson (who emphasizes time in a way that Tarr would no doubt appreciate): ‘Far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism; since there never was a right endeavor but it succeeded … We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life … In the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat. “Up again, old heart”, it seems to say, “there is victory yet for all justice” … Patience and patience, we shall win at the last’ (Emerson [1841] 1950, 364). At the risk of painting Tarr in too optimistic a light, I confess to hearing faint Emersonian echoes in the following words: ‘I am not living in the darkness. I’m working now with a lot of young people. And we are all really optimistic because we believe in our power. We believe our energy, and we believe our fantasy. We don’t have reason to be sad or depressed or to be waiting for the darkness because that’s what they want – to push you to the dark! We are not going to be pushed there. We want to be happy, we want to have energy and we are going to have it. We don’t care about the darkness even if we know it exists’ (Tarr 2014).

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Kyle Barrowman

Kyle Barrowman is a media and cinema studies lecturer in Chicago. He received his PhD from Cardiff University. He has published widely in and between film studies and philosophy, on subjects ranging from authorship, genre theory, and camera movement to skepticism, perfectionism, and ordinary language philosophy. His work can be read at the following address: https://depaul.academia.edu/KyleBarrowman.