Moses May-Hobbs

The return to the point of departure, in Tarr’s work, is more structurally fundamental than the betrayal itself. For all their pessimism, Tarr’s films are not Hobbesian tales of universal human untrustworthiness. Pessimism, in Sátántangó or Damnation, does not concern human failures but rather the gravity of what is: its tendency to arrest change, to brutally overpower what could be. Much of Tarr’s nihilism resides precisely in his portrayal of the atrophy of causation.