Review: Werckmeister Harmonies

Béla Tarr’s precise yet effortless long takes are so transcendent as to suggest God’s presence.

Werckmeister Harmonies
Photo: Menemsha Films

In Béla Tarr’s epic Werckmeister Harmonies, a nameless European town is the center of a cosmic struggle. Throughout, Tarr’s precise yet effortless command of the long take is so transcendent as to suggest the presence of God—every stoppage point within each shot akin to a heavenly composite of the film’s collective whole as Gabor Medvigy’s camera delicately roams and collects the light and shadow that suffocates the film’s existential terrain.

Janos Valushka (Lars Rudolph) steps into a local bar and perpetuates an abstract game of order with the bar’s pawn-like patrons, who circle somberly around each other, aping the movement of the earth and moon around the sun. Drowned by an impenetrable yet hopeful darkness, this silent entity of a film becomes a purgatory between progress and complete an utter self-annihilation. Elsewhere, a carnival attraction arrives and situates itself at the town square, and it’s there that ghostly men congregate, circling a truck that contains a large, metaphoric whale.

Advertisement

Janos is entranced by the whale’s omnipotence; its godly purity becomes the antithesis of the resentment that Janos’s uncle harbors for Werckmeister’s splitting of the musical octave. Think of the faceless Prince as the carnival’s dictatorial ringmaster, his shadowy form signaling the nightmarish tyranny that the town’s men take out on a dilapidated hospital’s patients.

That scenario is accompanied by Tarr’s most startling masterstroke. His harmonious camera slithers silently in and out of a hospital held siege by political uncertainty and aggression against the meek that should inherit the earth. Medvigy’s camera pauses, focusing on a curtain that reveals the frail naked form of an older man. On cue, Víg Mihály’s melancholic score erupts and the film’s tyrants are forced to assess their vicious need to strip the world of its humanity.

Score: 
 Cast: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla, Ferenc Kállai, Mihály Kormos, Putyi Horváth, Éva Almássy Albert, Irén Szajki, Alfréd Járai, Gyorgy Barkó  Director: Béla Tarr  Screenwriter: Béla Tarr  Distributor: Menemsha Films  Running Time: 145 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2001  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.