In films, waiting is usually a moment of inaction and growing exasperation, or else it is a short, insignificant instant that does not result in any introspection. Waiting is a brief pause, a respite that only exists contextually, until the action gets going again and the plot resumes its course. In other words, waiting is hollow, dead time, in the movies; it has no depth. It is just an interruption of motions and dialogues, and it must not last too long, so that active events can happen again, and so that time can become precious and impetuous again.

By contrast, in Béla Tarr’s insistently protracted narrations, waiting implies both breaking-down and self-denial. To wait is to accept that what you expect will not come, that the passage of time is really just a ‘suspended flow’. Tarr’s first films focused on social criticism (Family Nest, The Prefab People, Almanac of Fall), on stories in which individual destinies interacted with general history and, more specifically, with communism’s failed promises. But from Damnation on, the filmmaker used the towns and plains of Hungary to film ‘situations’ rather than ‘stories’. In his demonic trilogy (Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies), and in the follow-up film The Turin Horse (2011), waiting is represented as a disintegrating experience, as a confrontation with the indifferent and stolid power of places. As they wait, the characters are stuck and forced to remain ‘nowhere’.

The Window Shows the World’s Stagnation

Damnation begins in a vast, grey, muddy expanse. Several bins attached to a cable go endlessly back and forth between very high pylons, with a loud, continuous buzzing sound. As the camera moves very slowly away, it reveals a man, seen from the back, who is watching through a window the repetitive motions of the bins. Writes Andrea Del Lungo:

A window looks on. According to the old metaphor, it is the eye of the house-body, that looks on the outside world even as it probes its own inner life. Through the window, humans begin the journey of personal understanding, by withdrawing into themselves, by observing the world melancholically or by analysing their own conscience.