Pál Czirják: Made Endless. Space Construed in High Noon and Damnation

 

If we juxtapose the space conceptions in High Noon and Damnation, we notice a unique reciprocal relationship between the two. For while space in the western by Fred Zinnemann is open on the level of the story (in the end, the lead character can leave the town that had meant mortal danger for him shortly before), the non-symbolic space of the action is rather delimited, repetitive and predictable (in part because of characteristics of the genre itself). By contrast, in Béla Tarr’s film, it is the story world that closes in on itself (the actions and motivations of the heroes close into each other in a circular way), while the visual world of the film forcefully opens up space.

High Noon provides a thorough reworking of the all too familiar topography of western films, lining up typical scenes for each classical piece within the genre: the train station, the pub, the sheriff’s office and the main street of the small town. But while at the level of the narrative, the film is supposed to create the illusion of delimitations, in fact, it only gives a sequence of a few spatial motifs. In Damnation, the picture is the reverse of this. The film is symbolic, its philosophical space is what quintessentially closes into itself. For it is impossible to break free of a world in which everyone betrays everyone, in which defenselessness is the only opportunity for a relationship between humans, and in which erasing is the logic that moves everything. But this perpetually repeating, circularly flowing sequence takes place in a space with an open end. The space in which the atemporal but thiswordly hell materializes is borderless; so it is, oddly enough, on this point that the endlessness of space and time might slide into one another. Tarr’s cinematic language implements this endlessness through the extended shot technique as well as through internal montages, by opening and emptying the visual spaces, through depictions of space based on slow camera movements and shifted foci, through space exploration.

At first glance, two movies could not be any more different than Fred Zinnemann’s western and Béla Tarr’s drama. The fundamental mode of editing and film historic position of each also set the two films wide apart. Still, why do we juxtapose them when analyzing how space is construed in film? On the one hand perhaps precisely for this reason: the two rather distinct narratives represent two markedly different strategies for construing space, and this way, the differences between them are readily illustrated. At the same time, at a deeper layer of the use of space, we might also find unexpected parallels. Both films offer criticisms of interpersonal relationships and the world state resulting from these (with the intention to provide a more general overview of them than those of “everyday” social problems). Also in each film, this perspective is in no small part about the narrative’s spatial positioning, along with its reinterpretations.