Werckmeister harmóniák
Tags: tragedy, allegory, psychedelic, magical realism, philosophical

Plot synopsis:
Werckmeister Harmonies is an allegory of the post WWII Eastern European political systems told as a b&w filmmatic poem with 37 long single camera shots.The film was made post the end of the cold war in Hungary 2000 it is based on a 1989 book "The Melancholy of Resistance" written during the time of the iron curtain by László Krasznahorkai. It examines the brutalisation of a society its political systems and dogmas through the metaphor of a decaying circus whale and its star performer. It is set in a desolate, isolated small town in Hungary during Soviet times.The film starts with János Valuska, a simple citizen, conducting a poem and dance with drunken bar patrons. The dance is of the total eclipse of the sun, which disturbs than silences the animals, but it finishes with the grand return of the warm sunlight.A reoccurring theme is the transitions from darkness to light. In the opening scene the light represent the warm sun of self determination which transitions to the people thrown out through a door in to the dark of night. The circus arrives like a Trojan Horse in the darkness of night. There is a wonderful poetic scene were the lead character walks in and out of the shadows .The film is in b&wHis uncle György is a composer, and therefore one of the elite. György observes the imperfection and compromise of the musical scale (as defined by Andreas Werckmeister a historical theorist). György proposes changes to the scale to make it more harmonious. György's utopian approach to music represents a flawed naive idealism that never can be achieved, it is not developed any further in the film or the book. It is just a statement that human governance will always be flawed. A less cryptic name for the film might be The Inevitably Flawed Paradox of Human Governance but that would destroy the enigma that this film is. It is an acknowledgement even when light of self government comes there will still be flaws because we are human.György's estranged wife tries to leverage her political and social status by giving György a list of names to sign up for the "clean up the town movement", this with the blessing of the police chief.However a stuffed smelly circus whale and its star performer, Prince, comes to town this is used a metaphor for a bloated political system and the unseen Prince who represents the power of politically inspired, emotive dogma.János philosophises about God and the beast (each viewer will interpret this differently).The post office workers are unsettled by the ominous disturbing signs of the circuses arrival and are disturbed by the cloud that settles over each town it visits (a reference to the spread of the externally imposed centralised monolithic government system onto the Soviet buffer nations, just after the war).György's struggling cobbler brother gets the list and passes it on to the agitated throbbing masses in the town square who are unhappy at public services failing.György's former wife sleeps with the drunk gun toting chief.The presence of the whale and the Prince stir up the masses.
János overhears the circus master losing control of his faceless Prince, who is becoming drunk with his own voice of revolutionary dogma. The circus master disowns him. The Prince, now free, inflames the masses.The people riot.The film is shot as a beautiful but disturbing visual poem. Long single shot scenes with a hypnotic and rhythmetic pace build up to the disconnected yet peaceful observation of the thuggish destruction of the hospital and its patents and the brutal inhumanity of the rioters, which almost seems normal and natural. You almost become one of the rioters as you get swept up in this pointless crowd-think not knowing or caring where it is going. Social upheaval does not always need a reason.When the rioters finally come to beating a helpless old naked patent they see their impotent sad and powerless selves. The sick helpless patents in the hospital are a mirror of the rioters themselves.After the riot János comes across the diary of a rioter it explains that the rioters did not know what they were angry with; so they were angry at everything, than it recounts the mobs horrendous rape of two working class post office girls.János comes across his killed cobbler uncle who got naively involved in the riot. János is told, by his cobbler uncles wife, to leave town for his own safety.He is intercepted by a helicopter. He finds himself committed to a mental institution with caged beds (a tool of the time for dealing with political dissidents). János appears drugged and broken.György his composer uncle is evicted from their society house but gets to live in a shed in the garden whilst György's former wife, with her new status as a collaborator, now occupies the big house with the police chief. The intelligentsia is displaced by political opportunism.György tells a vacant János, in the ward, that IF he is released from the mental institution they can live contentedly together in the shed with his piano, János just stares.It finishes with György looking directly into the eye of the whale than, walking away and looking back at the now sad and dishevelled whale, destroyed by the rioters the night before, its rotting carcass slowly enveloped by the fog which gets whiter and brighter.The camera pans up as warm bright sunlight returns............The director worked closely with the author. The book looks at the myopic petty interpersonal effects at roots of the situation however the film instead examines the overview of the forest. Like the film the book has paragraphs a chapter long. It spends 5 pages on a decaying corpse but not that of the whale.Gerard Hosier

Review: 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.
(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.
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.
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.
Also director Gus Van Sant is highly influenced by the films of Bela Tarr and it's apparent in his more recent work like "Gerry" and "Elephant".
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.
The event that starts to build up the atmosphere of suspicion and unrest is the arrival to town of a circus consisting of only one giant lorry containing a huge, maybe the largest in the world stuffed whale and a mysterious figure who is called the Prince, is never seen except as a shadow on a wall and who possesses the sinister powers of making people act like a mob.
We don't know, for a total eclipse has come upon us..." When there is a failure to understand, the fear may cause the descent into cruel and senseless violence and turn the decent people in the merciless monsters.As a director, Bela Tarr is extraordinary.
I understand that it is not easy watching, it does require an active participation but I found it extremity rewarding because it introduced me to the master with the unique style, obvious talent and the interest to the eternal and difficult questions that may not have easy and immediate answers.I am skeptical when critics announce every new interesting Eastern European director "New Tarkovsky" but I should say Tarr is the closest to him I've seen so far.
The plot and the story were a little too easy and too obvious for me to follow but Tarr's ability to create an unbearable tension and atmosphere without any special tricks is amazing."Werckmeister Harmonies" is a masterpiece of melancholic resistance.
Tarkwosky for example also used very long shots, but what he never did was filming 5 minutes of the exact same image of two people walking (and I mean just their heads, because in this movie there are a lot of those shots, but sometimes it IS effective), the general result is plainly boring, even with the intelligent undertones (which are done in a way that, while intelligent, is above all very pedantic)you also always feel that the director is making some of the long shots not for the aesthetic, or symbolic effect, but just to spare on budget....I'm very disappointed in this film, because I really liked the first 30 minutes or so, but it just went on and on, without even keeping the same level as in the first scenes....While reading the very praising comments on this page, I also get the feeling some people just try to see much more in the movie than there is to it...when a movie is slow and arty, it doesn't necessarily mean it is very profound....yes it is an allegory on musical theory placed in the context of a small town, which is quite interesting on itself, but it does NOT make a profound movie....except for people who absolutely want to make some sort of intellectual masturbation out of it, but then it's not what you find in the movie, but what you find in yourself....an exercise that, in my opinion can be made much more effectively while watching "Stalker" or "Solyaris" than Werckmeister Harmonies, that owes much to Tarkowsky, but cab never equal it's level.....
Asked once why the scene of villagers marching towards the town square in Werckmeister Harmonies lasted as long as it did, the director answered, simply, "that's how long it took to get there." As simple as this is for an answer, there is something else at work in Tarr's camera work.
And this is what they do throughout the rest of the film: bodies move and are moved, they plod along empty roads by night; they gather in tedious crowds; they assemble for a march on the town square; they pillage a hospital; they walk adjacent to one another (there is a two minute tracking shot for which the director laid down over 300m of rail).
Because in this movie there is no reason for slowness: there are no details, the story doesn't change, the characters are uninteresting and are never seen in a different way during the film, there is no sense of humour...
I think that in dreams the events don't happen so slowly, we don't need to dream every second that we are eating in the dream, or walking, and there is a kind of brutal presence of the unexpected, of elements that break the "artistic direction" of the dream, something that Mr.Tarr will surely not find "cool" enough.I didn't like it very much..
are so overt, that it's not much use to dwell on them yet again in a short review.(Also, I agree with those who think that the symbolism doesn't quite gel into a cohesive whole -- if we're trying to read a consistent symbolism structure under the plot, which maybe we just don't have to.)But it may be of some help to those who haven't seen the film, or those who have and seek a structure on which to hang their analyses, to mention some apparent influences or connections.Tarkovsky is an often-mentioned one.
(I don't believe "Harmonies" ever shows them in the same shot, by the way.) Even Jonas plays the next-generation counterpoint and intermediary that often pops up in Bergman's movies (as in "Saraband," for instance).But beyond these generalities, there's a specific and pretty decent reference: Bergman's "Shame," in which a pacific village is ripped open by the intrusion of war -- for no reason, to no end, and with profound effects on the lead characters.
(Even though "Harmonies" doesn't pretend to occur in any era but our own, it's carefully presented in an antiqued and rarified manner until the coming of the "war".) There are probably many similar movies in which Eden is rent by sin, but "Shame" for me remains the most upsetting and direct -- and this movie more than any other captured the same jarring sense of intrusion and catastrophe.Also, on the same tack, I'm a bit surprised that no one (as far as I noticed) mentioned possible parallels to World War II: the sudden invasion of a foreign entity, the decimation of an innocent populace, the twisted "prince" (cf.
suggests one townswoman), and numerous other scenes.Lastly, oh doom-n-gloom wooers, there is a sneaky final hope in the film -- though it's sneaky because it comes at the very beginning: though the sun's light may be eclipsed from the earth, and though a shadow shall fall over life and love, there will (we must believe!) come the sun again.
In short, despite all predictions of the apocalypse, tomorrow is another day after all.In some ways, "Harmonies" may be a far easier picture for some to understand once the thick smear of Artsiness (which, though very beautiful, could be pared a bit without any loss) is temporarily ignored for the sake of the traditional narrative in the film.And now I've certainly gone on far longer than my promise to be brief....
You see I am not religious at all but this film was the one that brought me closest to becoming a believer in God. To make it simpler than it is: according to the story of Werckmeister harmonies, the simple people of this small town are offered a choice of seeing one of God's perfect creatures - the giant whale -, or to follow someone - a weird, mystical little dwarf (?), the Duke -, who is spreading some rumours and agitating the people.
A carnival comes to town under the cover of night, with the giant carcass of a whale, and a mysterious character called the Prince, who rumor has it has a devoted following of worshippers who follow his every word as he incites riots and stirs up violent sentiment.
We discover that Janos has been watching them, or perhaps participating.Werckmeister Harmonies' beautiful compositions, deliberate lack of story telling and existential themes blend to create a film that is outside of time.
The final shot of the film lands us back in the town square as Janos's uncle finally goes to see the whale his nephew has been begging him to see, the whale which lead to Janos's intrigue, what got him caught up in the events of spawned by the Prince.
The scene lasts for the first 10-12 minutes and ends with a melancholic, haunting score by Mihaly Vig. This single scene is so beautiful, it sets the tone for what's to come.There is a shroud of ambiguity over Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies" (co-directed by Ágnes Hranitzky).
Tarr simply answered "that's how long it took to get there!" "Werckmeister Harmonies", like any other Bela Tarr film, is surely not for the impatient viewer.
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.
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.
However, after watching some interviews from Mr Béla Tarr I have the sense that 'making a statement' out of his stories is never his purpose, perhaps he's just trying to portrait life as he perceives, and being not only factual but also sincere in how narrative tends to display in real life.I'm sure I will be trying to watch Werckmeister Harmonies for a third time, trying to catch more details, trying to pin things out even when Béla has already said that's not his idea of cinema...The only "flaw" I could think of is that in catching moments on camera, and getting the audience (me) immerse in the story was a task better achieved in Sátántangó, it was easier for me to enjoy and lose myself in the moments captured in Sátántangó than in Werkmeister..
What a drawn out painful experience.That's over two hours of my life I will never get back.This Film Festival Director's delight - is awash with overuse of the long slow shot....however - that's not the only thing that makes a script.Avoid this movie at all costs..
A respected pianist, György believes that music has somehow been corrupted by his predecessor, Andreas Werckmeister.A new exhibit has arrived in town, featuring a great whale and a foreign prince.
And thus the young János sets out to see a whale, but what he'll get is a glimpse of an alienating apocalyptical eclipse happening right before his eyes..."Werckmeister Harmonies" is another highly politically, philosophically, existentially, even religiously charged work, depending which way you want to see it, made by the visionary Hungarian director Béla Tarr.
"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.
Like much of Bela Tarr's work, it comes enshrouded with a controversy in its native Hungary, its release considered difficult due to its political commentary.The simple plot, in line with the director's belief in the minimalisation of storyline, offers us a Hungarian village suspicious of a circus boasting a stuffed whale and a rebellious orator, known only as "The Prince".
Quite simply, Werckmeister Harmóniák is a deeply beautiful and often moving film, many of its scenes steeped in mystery and allegorical explorations of themes, particularly the nature of humanity.
Béla Tarr's 2000 film "The Werckmeister Harmonies" deals with troubling events in a small town in Hungarian's eastern plains.
Lars Rudolph, who plays János, and Fassbinder mainstay Hanna Schygulla as the sinister "auntie Tünde" give physically commanding performances, but they were presumably speaking in German while acting, and Tarr has had them clumsily dubbed into Hungarian, no synchronization between their mouths and the voices.However, if you are interested in auteur cinema, and certainly if you have enjoyed other films by this director, then I would recommend seeing "The Werckmeister Harmonies".
Seen through the eyes of one János Valuska (Lars Rudolph), we see the town become almost a different place, particularly in terms of people's relationships.I spent a lot of the movie wondering if it was trying to say something, or if the whale and the Prince were a metaphor.
It tells the story about a local postman named Janus who lives with his uncle in a Hungarian town where the residents are awaiting the upcoming arrival of a traveling circus which main attractions are a giant whale and a speaking figure called The Prince.Distinctly and precisely directed by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, this quietly paced fictional tale which is narrated from multiple viewpoints though mostly from the main character's point of view, draws a moving portrayal of a compassionate man whose faith is challenged when he begins to realize what is actually happening to the human kind he so firmly believes in.
While notable for it's distinct milieu depictions, black-and-white cinematography by four cinematographers, production design, long monologues and use of time and sound, this character-driven story which bears a title that refers to a composer and musical theorist from the Baroque era named Andreas Werckmeister (1645-1706), depicts an in-depth study of character and contains a profound score by Hungarian poet, songwriter and composer Mihály Vig.This contemplative, somewhat surreal, existentialistic and heartrending drama which is set in a remote provincial town in Hungary and where a man walks through the streets of his hometown looking for signs that may confirm his believes, is impelled and reinforced by it's cogent narrative structure, substantial character development, subtle and distinct continuity, minimal humor, opening scene which is a striking example of the art of cinema, rare characters, atmosphere which becomes a character in itself and the brilliantly understated acting performance by German actor Lars Rudolph who expresses a wide range of emotions with his mysterious face.
As a metaphor for this concept we are shown a small Hungarian town in mid-winter under the threat of civil chaos, The catalyst that brings this about is the arrival in the main square of a circus consisting of only one giant lorry containing a stuffed whale and a mysterious figure billed as the Prince who occasionally speaks but is never seen except as a shadow on a wall.
That the film works as an intensely human document is due to the fact that the director has given us a character with whom we can identify in the form of Janos, a young postman, whose odyssey throughout the wintry town we follow every step.
A figure of innocence and perhaps naivety, Janos watches as the circus causes violent gangs to form, some taking advantage of the situation and seizing power, others attempts to restore "order and cleanliness".The film begins with a beautiful sequence.
The old order has been destroyed and a new era has begun, Janos, the boy who believed in apocalyptic whales and the mysterious beauty of god, ending the film in a sterile hospital ward, misdiagnosed by science and branded an insane criminal.8.9/10 – Though comprised of only 39 shots, this is perhaps Tarr's most accessible film..
We don't know." Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies seems to me to be a great combination of allegory about human beliefs, pessimism about human behavior and extraordinary movie making.
In what might be the most humane and heartfelt moment I've seen, everyone just stops in their steps and walk out at the sight of the frail old man, as Vig's score emerges to underline the beauty of the scene.I recalled most of Tarr's movies being the mundane things I mentioned before; people walking and eating, but I was surprised to find Werckmeister so thematically rich.