General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Damnation (1988 film)

Damnation (Hungarian: Kárhozat) is a 1987–1988 black-and-white Hungarian feature film directed by Béla Tarr, written by Tarr and the novelist László Krasznahorkai, and centered on the doomed affair between an aimless loner named Karrer and the singer of the bar he frequents in a rain-soaked mining town.¹^•² It premiered in Hungary in 1987 and was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival in 1988, the year under which it is usually cataloged.¹^•³ The film brought Tarr international acclaim and marks the beginning of his collaboration with Krasznahorkai, which shaped the rest of his career.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Kárhozat; black-and-white Hungarian feature, premiered in Hungary in 1987, festival showings from 1988¹^•³
Director and writers	Directed by Béla Tarr; screenplay by Tarr and László Krasznahorkai, the first of their six collaborations²
Key crew	Cinematography Gábor Medvigy; music Mihály Víg; editing Ágnes Hranitzky; producer József Marx⁴
Principal cast	Miklós B. Székely (Karrer), Vali Kerekes (the singer), György Cserhalmi (Sebestyén, the husband), Gyula Pauer (Willarsky), Hédi Temessy (cloakroom attendant)⁴^•⁵
Runtime	Reported as 116 minutes (Arbelos, Time Out), 120 minutes (Loud and Clear Reviews), 121 minutes (Film at Lincoln Center), and 122 minutes (Hungarian National Film Institute)⁶^•⁷^•²^•¹
Stylistic break	Average shot length doubled compared with Almanac of Fall and nearly quadrupled compared with The Outsider and Family Nest⁸
Restoration	Restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by the Hungarian National Film Institute – Film Archive under Tarr's supervision; released by Arbelos⁶

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The story is set in a rundown mining town where it is almost always raining. Karrer (Miklós B. Székely) lives aimlessly, ending his days with a drink at the Titanik bar, where he falls in love with the singer (Vali Kerekes). The woman breaks off the affair, but Karrer refuses to accept the rejection: when he is offered a smuggling job, he passes it on to the singer's husband so that the man will leave town and Karrer can approach her again in his absence.¹ The scheme goes awry, and the characters play out their doomed destiny through rain, shadow, and despair.² Critics have described the story as a desiccated film noir, a tale of love, betrayal, smuggling, denunciation, and revenge.²^•¹²^•¹³

The Hungarian Film Institute's synopsis notes that Karrer declares early in the film that he has no illusions and expects nothing from life; in one of the film's most memorable scenes, trudging home alone through the rain and mud, he comes across a stray dog and, falling on all fours, for a few moments effectively relinquishes his humanity and becomes a snarling dog.¹⁰

Production

The film originated in Tarr's encounter with Krasznahorkai's novel Sátántangó. According to a Filmvilág account, Tarr telephoned in the spring of 1986 saying he had been reading the novel for two days and believed he could film it; after a few months of joint work on a screenplay, and once it became clear that no film would be made from the novel at that time, Tarr revived an older idea he had set aside because of Sátántangó, and the two wrote Kárhozat together.⁹ The film was the first Hungarian feature not made within the country's traditional production framework.⁹ Its production companies were the Hungarian Film Institute, Hungarian Television, and Mokép, with József Marx as producer.¹

Casting. Tarr originally wanted Nico, the Velvet Underground singer who had acted in Andy Warhol's films, for the role of the bar singer, but the collaboration fell through when Nico became ill; the part went to Vali Kerekes.¹⁰ For background characters, Tarr and his regular collaborators, including editor Ágnes Hranitzky, composer Mihály Víg, and Krasznahorkai, selected as extras actual inhabitants of derelict small towns from the country's formerly prosperous mining regions.¹¹

Style

The long take. With Damnation the average shot length of a Tarr film did not simply grow somewhat longer but suddenly doubled compared with Almanac of Fall, tripled compared with The Prefab People, and almost quadrupled compared with The Outsider and Family Nest; András Bálint Kovács, a film scholar who worked on Kárhozat as artistic consultant, puts the leap at 108 percent over Almanac of Fall.¹⁴^•⁸ The camera typically makes simple horizontal or in-depth movements through spaces in which the characters barely move; the film's two most emblematic shots are the opening in-depth tracking shot and the lateral tracking shot that introduces the ball scene, in which a man dances alone without music, stepping in puddles on a dirty floor.¹⁴

The film's sparse plot serves mainly to establish atmosphere. The Czech film archive's description notes that the thin storyline, as if borrowed from crime fiction or film noir, is used chiefly to set a bleak mood, and that instead of plot the film concentrates on environment, time, and rhythm, with slow, unbroken camera movements that make time tangible before an approaching catastrophe.¹⁵ Kovács places the film in the lineage of modernist art cinema, comparing Tarr's long takes and stylized environments with Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Hungarian Miklós Jancsó.⁸

Place in Tarr's career and Hungarian cinema

Damnation is considered the opening film of what Hungarian criticism calls Tarr's "Black Series," establishing with its rainy, muddy sets, decaying atmosphere, and placid camera movements the aesthetics of Hungary's transitional cinema of the late 1980s.¹⁶ The Hungarian National Film Institute describes it as the forerunner of Sátántangó (1994), with elements of Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse already condensed within it, and notes that the protagonist speaks the sentence that sums up the director's entire career: "Stories are always stories of decline." At the same time, the institute observes, the film is not as streamlined as its successors; here the characters still say in words what the later films only show.¹⁰

The film is also read as a document of the end of state socialism: it was made in 1988 in a Hungary one year from systemic collapse, and reviewers have connected its gloom to the social and cultural freefall that accompanied the end of communist rule.¹⁷^•¹³ Arbelos Films, its American restorer-distributor, calls it a Communism allegory that solidified Tarr's unique aesthetic.⁶

Reception and legacy

After a positive reception on the festival circuit, Damnation helped propel Tarr toward international recognition; he went on to make nine feature films, ending with The Turin Horse in 2011, and died at 70, his death announced by the Hungarian Filmmakers' Association.¹⁸ The European Film Academy lists Damnation as a nominee for the 1988 Best Young Film award, and the Hungarian Film Institute records a Special Festival Award at the Split Film Festival in 2006.¹⁹^•¹^•²¹ On Rotten Tomatoes, 94 percent of 18 surveyed critics gave the film a positive rating, with reviewers there describing it as a turning point in Tarr's career and among the first works to display his stark approach; Michael Atkinson of The Village Voice saw it as both a draining experience and a preview of moods and concepts Tarr would later develop, filled with black-and-white imagery of world-class beauty.²⁰

The 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative, supervised by Tarr and released by Arbelos, returned the film to cinemas and home video in the 2020s.⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026