To live in a remote place is often considered as a form of punishment. Those who live ‘far away from everything’ are all but forgotten, prevented from benefiting from possible future developments, forced aside, kept away from the crowd. Films have long been interested in wild natural spaces, in part because they were still ‘unexplored’; but they seldom show any interest in inhabited but debased areas, in lost and muted lands, deemed unworthy of attention or celebration.

Yet, life goes on in these ‘lands of nowhere’, in these neglected geographical spaces. Generally, whenever ‘nowhere’ is mentioned or brought up, it is in a derogatory context, as an unsignificant, negligible or even contemptible space. The word itself, ‘nowhere’, is unequivocal: it is an absence, a deficiency, a shapeless, soulless waste. It is an expanse that cannot be named, that cannot be described, an emptiness, a sterile nothingness. Nevertheless, some contemporary filmmakers, following the examples of Béla Tarr and Bruno Dumont, have turned these assertions around and produced fertile works of art. They go to the ends of the world, to places that are often disparaged for being too rural, too unrefined, and they capture their blunt light, they map out these territories where forms of existential dereliction thrive.

However, these ‘nowheres’ that appear in the films of Béla Tarr and Bruno Dumont are strangely languid; there are no explicit agonies, as if they were petrified by the banality and cruelty of human stories that occur within them. By praising the dull traces of these non-places, by giving a definite form, on screen, to defective lives, by fixing the image of a moving paralysis, they give meaning to them, even if that meaning is only a sense of despondency and exhaustion. Yet, Béla Tarr, Sharunas Bartas and Bruno Dumont succeed in giving a form to the shapelessness of nowhere, by giving their ugly paleness the quality of expressive bewilderment. How do they do it? How do they turn ‘nowhere’ into laconic loci, how do they reveal the underlying poetry? How do they represent, cinematographically, the immured, cut-off, entrenched isolation of these places?