Capo
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Post by Capo on Jan 4, 2007 2:17:23 GMT
Kárhozat
Damnation
Béla Tarr 1987 Hungary
A hopeless man, distanced from society, is in love with a singer, but she's married…
Thoroughly bleak, visually gorgeous film, deliberately abandoning plot in order to allow its camera full chance to convey meaning. Its characters are captured, mostly, as secondary objects within the all-seeing frame, often obscured by walls and pillars in the foreground. It's always raining, the music is melancholic and neverending, and the dialogue is poetic and cynical, as its protagonist, a Beckett-like anti-hero, realises he would die for the woman he loves, but alas, she would not for him.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Apr 15, 2008 16:42:01 GMT
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Post by quentincompson on Feb 28, 2009 18:01:33 GMT
Kárhozat
DamnationBéla Tarr 1987 Hungary
the dialogue is poetic and cynical, as its protagonist
Really? The dialogue always annoyed me in this film, seems a bit overstated and simplstic. Me thinks the film would've been worthy of your and RNL's accolades if Tarr would've let the brilliant camerawork set the tone rather than Bergmanesque loquacity. |
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Post by Anasazie on Feb 28, 2009 20:18:46 GMT
Kárhozat
DamnationBéla Tarr 1987 Hungary
the dialogue is poetic and cynical, as its protagonist
Really? The dialogue always annoyed me in this film, seems a bit overstated and simplstic. Me thinks the film would've been worthy of your and RNL's accolades if Tarr would've let the brilliant camerawork set the tone rather than Bergmanesque loquacity. Yup yup agreed, take away the nice camera work, add even more dodgy dialogue and you have Almanac of Fall! Two extremely trite and contrived films in my eyes..... |
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Post by svsg on Feb 28, 2009 20:30:21 GMT
Karhozat is one of the best movies ever made IMO. Excellent cinematography, music, theme and tempo. The dialogue didn't bother me at all. With subtitles, I cannot even really judge the quality of the dialogues. I don't remember much dialogues from the film, except perhaps the one between the old woman and the guy in rain, which I liked and the one during the dance floor scene which I loved. That dancing scene is in itself a wonderful thing, as was the tracking shot of people taking shelter from rain. That said, it needs a revisit.
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Post by Anasazie on Feb 28, 2009 23:13:04 GMT
Surely subs make it easier to judge!
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Post by svsg on Mar 1, 2009 4:17:26 GMT
Surely subs make it easier to judge! It depends upon how well the translation is done. I have seen some really poor subtitles, where I knew the original language (but watched with sub due it being hard-subbed). Scriptwriters take so much pains in getting their dialogue believable and natural. I am not sure if so much of attention is paid while making subtitles. |
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Post by quentincompson on Mar 1, 2009 18:07:17 GMT
I think the acting and delivery of the dialogue is actually what makes it hard to assess if spoken in another language, but when it's a case of several existential conversations about the same thing throughout a film it's hard for it not be irksome in my book.
I like the part where the woman's singing at the beginning the best, beatiful.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 1, 2009 18:11:46 GMT
Yeah, the Titanik bar scene is incredible.
I find the entire thing beautiful (to look at) and despairing (to sit through); love as a means of connecting to a lonely, alienating world. I like the main actor, too. Great face.
I re-watched this recently, and thought the dialogue was minimal and simplistic, and all the better for it.
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Post by Anasazie on Mar 1, 2009 18:28:53 GMT
I love the scene at the end where he goes walking through the mud, so subtle!
AND the very stilted way of shoving the dogs in front of the camera....ah Tarkovsky used a dog, a dog's spiritual.....stick it in then!!! HA!
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Mar 1, 2009 18:47:05 GMT
And yet, the likes of this is 'subtle'?  It's really not enough, critically, to take a value-neutral (and, for that matter, very conceptually complex) adjective like 'subtle', arbitrarily assign it an inherent positive value apart from any context, and then just point out its absence in things you dislike, leaving it at that. You have to take context into account. And I don't think the dog, and his behaviour towards the dog, is intended to be 'spiritual' at all, certainly not in a Tarkovskian sense; I think Tarr's worldview is materialistic. |
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Mar 1, 2009 18:51:08 GMT
Note for those who haven't seen it, the image is from Ulysses' Gaze, and is of a giant statue of Lenin being carried down the Danube on a barge to be sold into the possession of a wealthy art collector.
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Post by quentincompson on Mar 1, 2009 19:37:10 GMT
And the dialogue? To me it just comes off as teenage goth poetry or something, Tarr wanting everyone to know he's nihilistic, the depressed man who enjoys his depression.
I just can't rate it as highly knowing I'm being manipulated when the images easily could have spoken for themselves.
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Post by Anasazie on Mar 1, 2009 19:53:12 GMT
ehh...yup....sure.....academia strikes again!
The implications and explorations based around the Lenin symbol are infinitely more subtle than the mud theores at the end of Damnation, who's taking symbols out of context now?
p.s. Tarr's work is very material in a literal sense, in terms of what's actually shown and how it's shown, unlike Tarkovsky, but it's obviously supposed to allude to higher spiritual things......as all art should!
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 1, 2009 20:07:05 GMT
Ah, the unsubtleties of sarcasm("!").
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 1, 2009 20:08:21 GMT
I've just spat saliva all over my keyboard.
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Post by Anasazie on Mar 1, 2009 20:17:24 GMT
Don't worry mate, the men in white coats will be along to help you out soon.......
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Mar 1, 2009 21:18:44 GMT
ehh...yup....sure.....academia strikes again! The implications and explorations based around the Lenin symbol are infinitely more subtle than the mud theores at the end of Damnation, who's taking symbols out of context now? p.s. Tarr's work is very material in a literal sense, in terms of what's actually shown and how it's shown, unlike Tarkovsky, but it's obviously supposed allude to higher spiritual things......as all art should! I don't think I'm taking an 'academic' perspective on this, whatever that's supposed to mean. I'm not using theoretical terminology or anything like that. I just think it's a matter of thinking things through. I'm not taking the Angelopoulos image out of context, I'm doing the opposite; using it to illustrate that describing an image as 'subtle' without taking into account its context is quite meaningless and fruitless. Subtlety is a trait of how something is conveyed, so it can't be identified without identifying that something. What is the meaning of Tarr's image? What does it convey? It can't just convey 'unsubtlety', that doesn't make sense. To identify unsubtlety you'd have to have interpreted its meaning. I would agree with you that the Angelopoulos image is a more interesting one than Tarr's. But is the image itself not quite blunt? I mean, it's a filmmaker, A (a surrogate of Angelopoulos), in search of 'history', riding a barge carrying a symbol of Left ideology into the possession of a bourgeois collector, symbolising the degeneration of the Left and its shift Rightward, its subsumation into the capitalist system. That all comes across immediately, and I don't think that's a bad thing at all... but by any dictionary definition of the word, that meaning is not, it would seem to me, conveyed with subtlety. And yet you like it. I guess I don't understand what exactly this quality of 'subtlety' is that you're looking for. Care to expand? I'm curious as to what you mean by 'spiritual' too. You hardly mean it literally, surely? I could make an assumption but it'd be better if you explained. |
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Post by Anasazie on Mar 1, 2009 22:12:42 GMT
Ah, the unsubtleties of sarcasm("!"). Capo!....I just got your Gomorrah convo reference....i've even paused Albert Serra's wonderfully elemental Honour of the Knights to come on here and tell you about it (appreciating Lovefilm!!)......I like your style and i'm loving this piece, hopefully it's that elusive masterfilm i've been waiting for. Wetdog! I love your style too, but i'll have to get back to you....Serra's enthralling me right now....... |
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Post by Anasazie on Mar 2, 2009 0:00:04 GMT
Yup...it was brilliant.....you guys have got to see some Serra.....Wetdog, QC and Michigan especially.....if you don't love it, i don't who you are!
Now i can sleep with the wind in the trees in my thoughts, no leafs on the trees round here! Fuck suburbia!
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