Béla Tarr: Waiting behind Barricades

This chapter analyses Béla Tarr’s demonic trilogy (Damnation, Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies), and the follow-up film The Turin Horse. It shows that 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’. In both Damnation and Sátántangó, windows function paradoxically: they open the way yet block it at the same time; they transform the infinity of the outside world into a restrictive, archaic, miserable interior. This chapter further shows that places, in Tarr’s works, are damaged by fissures, they are frozen, incongruous, corrupted amalgamations of decay. Places are noteworthy because of the defects, the powerlessness, the degradation they reveal – yet these negative elements, paradoxically, become a characteristic, a quality that makes them real.