Werckmeister harmóniák

Put it simply, "Werckmeister harmóniák" is one of the most beautiful and haunting European film of the recent years, and maybe the best Hungarian film in decades. After the breakthrough of the acclaimed 7 hours long epic "Sátántangó" in 1994 it took 3 years to complete this masterpiece for Tarr Béla. "Sátántangó" and 'Werckmeister harmóniák" made Tarr one of the most acclaimed and adored directors of the contemporary film making. This mind-blowing story is told in only 37 shots (I counted it myself) some of them lasts for 5 or 6 minutes. Despite the small number of the shots, this film has one of the most effective editing of all time. Every edit is perfectly timed and has a meaning of its own. Kudos to the editor.

The stark black-and-white camerawork is by Medvigy Gábor, and the melancholic music is composed by Víg Mihály. The most harrowing scene is the raid on the town hospital, the longest scene of the film, shot in complete silence. Frightening and senses-staggering, the picture of the naked old man burns into the soul. Highly recommended, a must-see for anyone who is interested in the recent history of Central-Eastern Europe and wants to understand it.

What is perhaps one of the best beginnings to a film helps lay the foundation for the rest of this film. Janos is brought to the center of the room being told that, "it is time." From here Janos begins a remedial science lesion on the cosmos. He begins by using a drunken bar patron as the sun. Then another as the earth. Finally, another as the moon. He explains the rotation of the three celestial bodies in what appears to be a drunken daze. However, Janos stop the rotation of the bar patrons and begins his monologue. Janos' language changes; the music resonates throughout the scene. Janos gives the patrons an allegorical tale of the eclipse; stating the sense of unrest that the animals and people experience as this sudden change shadows the earth. However, the chaos is only momentary. Order is soon restored. Shortly after his speech, Janos and the drunken patrons begin to dance at which point the barkeep kicks Janos out of the bar. In a rather ominous tone, Janos exclaims to the barkeep that "it is not over." I summarize the beginning of this spectacular film because the magnificent Bela Tarr has laid out everything we need to know in these short 11 minutes to understand his work. We are told that the story is going to be an allegory; an allegory of great chaos brought upon a population of the ignorant (The eclipse frightening the animals natural order of life). We are told that most everything in the film will be symbolic (The earth, sun, and moon acting as natural life with disorder). We are given the weather conditions and the dereliction of the town which further sets the tone of the film. Finally, we are given the pace of the film. Patience is needed. A film captured in a mere 39 shots in what feels archaic black and white (Again acting as a symbol for the Post WWII desolate town and its intoxicated population). The film follows our protagonist, Janos, as he meanders through his life playing an oxymoronic archetype of the wise fool. His small Hungarian town is awakened from their inexorable lassitude by the arrival of a circus attraction. This attraction is a giant stuffed whale and accompanying the whale is The Prince; a mysterious and shamanistic disturbance to the town's feeling of unrest and neglect. The Prince then capitalizes on the ignorance of the town, leading them to form a mob and storm the hospital. Janos is forced to play the unifier and bring the town out of the eclipse. Tarr has created literature in motion with this masterpiece. Harmonies is more of an experience than anything else. I watched this film maybe 10 years ago and am just now writing this review. The film resonates and challenges our ability to interpret. It is almost like we as viewers would wish to have a SparkNotes page for this film, so we could understand the symbolic nature of the whale, the prince, and so much more. Yet, we are given no interpretations; just as I will leave you with no further explanations. Just a recommendation to find this film and let patience truly be the greatest virtue of them all.

A wonderfully balletic and poetic film, built on long, long tracking and steadycam shots (thirty-eight for 2hrs 25mins). A study in pervasive yet neutral melancholia; the main character, who accompanies us through the whole film, is a simple, dreamy yet quietly optimistic postman, if one were to interpret his wide-eyed stare and unquestioning attitudes in such a way. One is drawn in from the very beginning, via the evocative music and camerawork. It is rare these days to see European films that take so much time and care as they progress. Watching it I was reminded of Aleksei German's Khrustalyov, My Car! - 1998, Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor - 2000, Fellini and of course Tarkovski. I don't think that all cinema should be 'easy' or well wrapped up. Indeed, I often feel that I am simply not in the mood for seeing a particular film, or experiencing a particular atmopshere. After all it is fairly easy to tell from even short descriptions or reviews the kind of thing that is in store. So I was somewhat surprised to see one previous reviewer here describe this film as "dreary drek". Well, perhaps, but if they wanted to go and see a comedy or redemptive drama, why didn't they go see one already?! I may have had the odd moment of wishing certain shots were a tad shorter, but all in all I was mesmerised, from beginning to end.

How to engage emptiness, visually? This is the most tasking difficulty that I know of in film, for both the filmmaker and viewer. You cannot merely look - sitting still is not meditation - it needs to be a particularly sharpened but effortless way of looking. Seeing things without the person that sees obscuring the view.

Only the Buddhist have adequately solved this to my mind, by tying into an actual practice of purging the self so that we got a work, a painting, poem or flower arrangement, that was itself an act of meditation. But they had centuries ahead of them to refine.

In film, I can always count on Bela Tarr for a vision of formative emptiness, and ways to engage that emptiness as a space for contemplation.

No doubt he has studied Mizoguchi for the 'mono no aware' of a transient sorrowful world, itself derived from the Buddhist eye. And even more Tarkovsky, in more explicitly adopting his omniscient camera for the reflections. The gloomy darkness he surrounds it with no doubt comes from Eastern Europe as churned from the broken machinery of decades old communism. It is implicit in everything he does, always iron cast in punishing ways. At least this part doesn't require any more comments I feel. The impressions of abstract horror are from a life lived.

So it is a dark world rolling into the night that we are given here, from the memory of it, a kind of nightbound universe. How to struggle from our end? Why, most importantly, why even admire the great whale, if the whole is nothing?

Of course, it is nothing less than simple honesty on Tarr's part for presenting a world as he does, as we know historically up to now. For the most, it is the Prince that humanity has been the most eager to hear, someone to incite change. There is no time to see the great whale whose body encompasses the world, the wonder of that emptiness that can generate form of such awesome beauty. The only thing that has power to halt the rampaging mob then is a vision of their own mortality.

So in several ways, one is tempted to imagine a kinship between him and Trier; an encounter with the void, and human wretchedness in the face of that encounter. But I posit Tarr to be a wiser filmmaker, especially here.

Look how he opens the film for example, a magnificent round-up even more pertinently addressing now, our microcosmic cycle mirrored from above, with humans dancing into position of the spheres. This is a filmmaker who understands.

The only problem; the Nietzchean dismay he seems to have resigned himself to. The last bit of news is that he has decided to stop making films altogether. His worldview is a bleak one, no doubt.

But it's an honest dismay, a way of confessing that he knows there will be light again in principle but can't seem to see any. It's a profoundly human despair, how he wearily examines the broken whale at the end. So the problem remains, one of embodying a world where, by simply existing, we are negations of that primal void. Isn't that what we're taught? So how to embrace the great whale then?

The film ends here. It falls on us to see beyond the dark, and see if we can embrace the whale by seeing that the whole and nothing is the one.

This is as bleak a film as I have since for a long time. Seen mainly through the eyes of a 'holy fool', played by German Lars Rudolph, it may be allegorical, it may be a horror story or it might even be a distinctively Hungarian very black comedy.

Bela Tarr's direction is stunning. The lighting is brilliant throughout, but none more so than when the circus comes to town in the middle of the night. The care and patience with which scenes are built greatly enhances the intensity of the most violent moments. The scene, for example, when a mob march down a long street before attacking a hospital matches the greatest moments of black-&-white silent cinema.

The film retains a disturbing ambiguity throughout, right up to its powerful ending. What is the significance of the whale and its owners? And is Valuska (Lars Rudolph) as innocent as it seems on the surface? The result is a long (140 minutes), gripping and exciting film that leaves more questions than answers at the end.