A Harmonia Werckmeister

It is closing time in a bar somewhere in Eastern Europe. Someone says, "Show us, Janos". A blank faced young man, Janos Valuska (Lars Rudolph), begins to organize a ballet of inebriated patrons playing the Sun and the Moon turning in their orbits. Valuska pleads, "All I ask is that you step with me into the bottomlessness." As the dance continues, the men are spun. They stop suddenly as the orchestrater tells us that "in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, everything that lives is still…" Then, with a push, the dancers carry on until the Earth emerges from the Moon's shadow. The eternal conflict between darkness and light begins again.

Containing shots that last up to fifteen minutes at a time, Werckmeister Harmonies, the latest film by Bela Tarr (Satantango, Damnation), is a nightmarish vision of a society duped by political demagogues and distracted by circuses, being led into a cycle of violence and despair. Based on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, it is a powerful and disturbing film that, in its surreal depiction of growing madness in an unnamed town, is reminiscent of Roy Andersson's Songs From the Second Floor. The film takes its name from the theories of Janos' "uncle" Gyorgy Eszter (Peter Fitz), a musicologist who tells him of his obsession with the legacy of Andreas Werckmeister, a 17th century German musician who created the twelve-tone scale. Eszter believes that perfect order does injustice to the holiness of music, and says that the heavens move to their own music.

As Janos leaves the bar and walks through the cold and half-deserted streets, streets that in T.S. Eliot's phrase "follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent", an enormous van drives up the main street and comes to rest in a great empty square in the town center. A circus is in town. The exhibit contains the world's largest whale, dead and stuffed with tiny staring eyes, and The Prince, a shadowy figure that we never see. The town is full of rumors of impending violence. Janos sees the whale and watches a growing group of seemingly unemployed middle aged men gather silently around fires in the square. He seems to know everyone in the town. To further her political agenda of "town cleansing" (read ethnic cleansing), Eszter's estranged wife, Tunde (Hanna Schygulla), sends the compliant Janos on errands. He is told to put the children of the police chief to bed but, as if presaging the coming violence, they stomp on their beds to a cacophony of noise while one shouts at Janos over and over again. "It will be hard for you". "It will be hard for you." He is also asked to listen to conversations in the square and report back to her, but he only hears the Prince saying, `What they build and what they will build is illusion and lies. What they think and what they will think is ridiculous'.

When the signal is given, the men in the square come together and march towards us with growing anger in a hypnotic parade lasting five terrifying minutes. They go on a rampage, setting fires and ransacking a hospital, beating the sick in an unbroken orgy of violence. Patients huddle by their beds in silent fear. Suddenly a door is opened. Confronted by the menacing faces, an emaciated old man stands naked in a shower bathed in an amorphous light. Transfixed by what they have seen, the men abandon their task and retreat silently into the street. On the morning after, order is restored. The van is broken down and the whale is exposed as little more than an overstuffed balloon. The Sun emerges from behind the Moon to the swell of ineffably beautiful music. We have reached the end of the cycle only to begin dancing again when the next Prince calls the tune.

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.

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.

Imagine it. You spend four years on a project, with big funding hassles and changes in crew; and then, finally, after your film is very enthusiastically received at Cannes, the lab goes and destroys the only English-subtitled print before it's shown at the Edinburgh festival. Obviously Bela Tarr doesn't have his sorrows to seek.

Some might accuse the film--which centres on a rural town riven by the arrival of a "circus" consisting only of a dead white whale in a corrugated iron trailer and a character called "The Prince" whose nihilistic and inflammatory remarks incite riots--of veering very close to a parody of miserabilist cinema. Okay, so it's in black and white; there's a lot of mud, rubbish, smoke and wetness; there's not much dialogue between not very attractive people; every take lasts between five and ten minutes; and there are many scenes of people trudging through cold and bleak landscapes. (You'll never see so much trudging in a film.) Lars Rudolph, as the hero Janos, looks like a cross between a young Klaus Kinski and Frasier's brother, Niles, and spends most of the film wild-eyed and harried.

However, Tarr's distinctive style--exceptionally fluid and intricate tracking shots rendered in beautifully sharp monochrome--perfectly matches the grim story, which, as the director pointed out, explores the "boundaries between civilisation and barbarism". Any seemingly parodic moments are far outweighed by extremely powerful ones, notably the opening scene in a pub where the hero explains what an eclipse is using the sozzled bar clientele; the hero's deeply unsettling encounter with the "Prince"; and the mob's attack on a hospital.

Although the narrative falls apart a bit in its closing scenes, the film's images stay with the viewer in ways unmatched much recent cinema. This film demands your time and concentration, but rewards them; it has a unique and mesmerising rhythm. And the music, by Mihaly Vig, is simply beautiful.

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.