A Harmonia Werckmeister

"Werckmeister Harmonies" is one of the most challenging films, with the greatest payoff, of any movie I've ever seen. A visually stunning adaptation of László Krasznahorkai's novel "The Melancholy of Resistance", this film tells the story of a sleepy Hungarian village over the course of about a day and a half when the circus rolls into town. With the circus come two main attractions: the body of a giant whale, and a 25-lb circus freak known only as "The Prince". These two attractions have profound, shocking effects on our hero Janos (excellently played by the boyish Lars Rudolph) and the inhabitants of the entire village, if not the entire country.

The story presents a powerful allegory, every bit as biting and accusatory as Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", exposing the nature of human folly and the reason why society does, did, and always shall suck. I've found that the people who most enjoy this film are those who are moderately to extremely cynical; it shows us a very dark, nihilistic, nightmarish world similar to what we've seen in the classics "Brazil", Orson Welles' "The Trial" and basically every Herzog film ever made.

But what makes this dark film enjoyable to watch is that doesn't just show us that humanity is flawed; it seeks to explain *why* humanity is flawed.

I'll warn you up front, this is a very slow moving film with seemingly pointless, indulgent scenes of people silently walking down the street, eating a can of soup, or walking down the street in the opposite direction. Something to bear in mind is, just like in the epic "2001: A Space Odyssey" which has scenes of, say, an astronaut running on a giant hamster wheel for a painfully long time, these scenes are there to convey the monotony of existence. Even beyond that, these scenes are supposed to convey the comfort humans feel with tedious & ritualistic behavior. Order vs. chaos.

The second thing that might help is the meaning of the title "Werckmeister Harmonies" which is the key to understanding the film's message. It's explained in a scene near the beginning, but I'll try to explain it in simpler terms here. In western music, we have a particular tuning system for all instruments. This system was developed by Andreas Werckmeister around the year 1700, and centuries later we still use it. The problem is, in a nutshell, it's wrong. Werckmeister's "well tempered" tuning is a compromise that allows instruments to sound good in a variety of keys, but it sacrifices the purity of sounding perfect in any 1 particular key. Pure, "natural" instruments such as the recorder flute sound great but they are limited to 1 key, 7 notes per octave. When western music took on complex instruments like the piano & guitar which play in every key, 12 notes per octave, a certain degree of fudging had to be made in their tuning. This is because in the natural world, the diverse frequencies of music don't add up to neatly repeating 12- note octaves as we want (for some reason we lose about 1/5 of a note every octave). Thus the music we know today, while not necessarily being unpleasant, is not as pure & simple as true "naturally tuned" instruments of yesteryear.

How does this relate to the movie? The movie is about humans' need to quantify the unquantifiable, our need to create artificial order that suits us, even though it may be an aberration of nature. If you grasp this idea, along with the metaphor of the Werckmeister tuning, as well as the creative story that unfolds in the film, all augmented with intelligent cinematography, you will adore this film.

Congratulations, you have successfully read through the driest & most boring IMDb review I have ever written. I have no doubt that you will enjoy solving the philosophical puzzle of the film "Werckmeister Harmonies".

Similar, challenging films include: "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1969), "Aguirre the Wrath of God" (1972), or the more recent Coen brothers' philosophical "A Serious Man", or the brain-blasting Kaufman dark comedy/mindbender "Synecdoche, NY" (2008).

My Rating : 8/10

Béla Tarr, Hungarian filmmaker - known for philosophical arthouse cinema delivers a mystical mad tale (that will require immense patience, I think I did 10 household chores while watching this movie) that is original in content and absurd yet meaningful.

37 long takes make up this oeuvre of world cinema and a black-and-white palette works best for such kind of art - colour would distract from the cinematic experience.

Watch it and absorb the melancholic background music - images and sounds melt so beautifully in this arthouse venture.

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.

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.

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.