Damnation

by Janice Lee

No technique of cinema is as royal and as risky as the Long Take—audacious in its promise of unified time and space, terrifying in what that might imply. Inspired by the films of Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr, famous for his long take, and the novels and screenplays of Tarr’s great collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Janice Lee’s Damnation is both an ekphrasis and confession, an obsessive response, a poetic meditation and mirror on time; time that ruthlessly pulls forward with our endurance; time unleashed from chronology and prediction; time which resides in a dank, drunk, sordid hiss of relentless static.

As declared in Tarr’s film Damnation, “All stories are about disintegration.”

Genres: Film

168 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

JANICE LEE (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations bringing together elements from several different lineages as a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine work and as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh). She also incorporates elements of ancestor work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), traditional Korean folk practices, plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

Reviews

[Elena K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't seen any Tarr films (thats a post-bar endeavor) but the Krasznahorkai influence is evident and excellent

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a fascinating pull to this book, at the same time both dark and routine. I kind of want to revisit this again after familiarizing myself with the works of Tarr and Krasznahorkai, because there seems to be so much more yet to discover in the short words herein, more that I'd get if I knew Tarr and Krasznahorkai's works. I'm sure there was so much I didn't see, but I loved what I did. Stylized yet individualized, at the edge of apocalypse but clearly never going there, these people seemed damned in the fact that they where they are isn't tolerable but they will only forever plan for something else to happen. Like the fact that the rain isn't going to end and spring isn't going to come, they aren't going to leave either. These disconnected yet connected people are forever going to be planning to pack their suitcases, staring out the windows. They're going to stay right where they are. I'm describing it badly, I know. This is definitely a book where no description of mine is going to hack it instead of the book itself. Better just to read the book.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and dark with apocalyptic poetry. Ir does remind me of Tarr, in the best ways.

It's a novel that feels ancient and fresh at the same time. Like it's written into the skin of the wind, into the bones of the earth.

It's a remarkable thing. A definite thing, and yet it's hard to put my finger on.

It's like holding a ghost.

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether viewed as ekphrasis and exorcism, Damnation impresses most as portrait of spiritual crisis, albeit one that is not colored by any theology, any moral imperative, or any transcendence.

http://quarterlyconversation.com/damn...

[Melanie Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of being a reviewer, though is having the confidence to remember that I've read a lot of books in nearly every genre and style (blank books, digital art/music/words books, books that were what the author copied from a newspaper--lots of "out there" stuff). I took on Damnation with my game face on....

Read the rest of the review here! Grab the Lapels

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watching the film is merely the beginning. Long live the film that we play back in memory, the one that does it's best to change every bit of our emotions into something far more sinister than any single piece of celluloid.

[John Trefry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple of admissions: I've never seen a Bela Tarr film; I wrote the word 'perhaps' a great deal in my own endnotes of the book.

Blank pages are numbered.

I read the contents of the book, but I was reading another book. Perhaps I read a book that contained the other book. At many points I did not know which book was on my lap.

The fact that 'the book' arrives before the book begins is essential to this. The preface is the preexistence, the outside. It is Janice Lee. 'The book' exists before preexistence. 'The book' is outside the outside.

Perhaps one of these is apocryphal.

There is no space, only time.

Perhaps the book is the inhalation of the author, drawing the contents of time back into her mind.

Darkness is the unfettered outpouring of ink though, the consummation of every surface filled in the object of the book. Perhaps this is a bleeding, a letting out. Perhaps the inhalation of time is only possible with the bleeding of content. Or, like Roubaud asserts, the act of inking the memory or the image kills it, draws it forever into the text.

[Noirscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bela Tarr, black-and-white, noir without being noir.

[Sara Gerot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn fine book.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Is it significant who pulls the cart, the girl or the horse?"

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grim. Lonely. Marvelous!