Werckmeister Harmonies
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Movie Reviews of Werckmeister Harmonies
Movie Review: Werckmeister harmóniák - Béla Tarr's cinema of involvement
Summary: 5 Stars
There are only a few directors whose films have required the audience to work along with the filmmaker in coming to an understanding of the topic at hand. Tarkovsky comes to mind immediately - but there have been others. No contemporary cinematic auteur belongs more in this category that Hungarian director Béla Tarr. His films are things of great beauty: the long, painstakingly designed and executed shots; the naturalism of the actors, giving the audience the feeling that they are witnessing unrehearsed reality; the convoluted, non-linear storytelling - all of these elements and more combine into a cinematic vision that is intrinsically unique and at the same time universal in the way it touches the viewer. Tarr is pretty tight-lipped about the `aim' of his work, but he has indicated that involvement of the audience is one goal. As strange as some of the images in his films might seem, Tarr eschews the term `surrealism' - he counters that the camera can only capture what is real.
WERCKMEISTER HARMÓNIÁK (WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES) is Tarr's latest work, released in 2000. The title refers to a theory of musical harmonic relationships developed by 17th century German music scholar Andreas Werckmeister. Cosmic harmony and disharmony are important themes in Tarr's film, which begins in a shabby bar in a provincial Hungarian town - one of the locals, János, is attempting to explain a total eclipse of the sun to a number of intoxicated men. He selects a man to represent the sun, then another for the earth, and a third for the moon. Setting them is motion in a barroom ballet that is both humorous and imbued with a sweet grace, he explains the planetary movements to them in terms of both strict science and universal harmony. This first scene is comprised of a single shot, the longest in the film at 11 minutes in length - it's beautiful to behold.
One of János's acquaintances is György Eszter, a music professor who is out to disprove Werckmeister's theories. János goes to check on him in the night and finds the elderly man asleep in his chair - he helps him dress for bed, tucks him in, and makes sure that the heat is working properly before going on his way. This scene is another single shot - 6 ½ minutes. The camera, from inside the house, picks up János as he arrives in the yard, watches through a window as he makes his way to a door, then turns to show the movements of the two actors through the rest of the scene. Nothing is compressed - everything occurs as seen, giving the viewer a rich sensation of experiencing what is being played out on the screen, deepening both the emotional and intellectual impact.
A travelling exhibition has come to town overnight - its only two components the body of a giant whale and a diminutive character known as `The Prince', whose theories and orations have incited violence and anarchy in other towns. When János goes to see the whale, he is visibly shaken by the experience of being so close to the great beast - he sees it as irrefutable proof of `God's imagination'. He attempts to convey his feelings to others as the film progresses - no one seems to understand how deeply it has moved him.
He overhears a conversation between the Director of the exhibition and a man who is a translator for the Prince. The Director is fed up with the increasing demands of the Prince - and fearful of the violence the little man seems to inspire. The Prince launches into a tirade decrying all aspects of what most consider to be civilization: `Under construction, everything is only half complete. In ruins, all is complete.' The Director knows what violence the Prince can inspire - he informs the Prince that he will have no more part of him, that he will not be responsible for unleashing `bandits and thieves' on the population.
After János leaves, the mood of the crowd becomes violent. The camera follows them, hovering just above head level, looking into their determined faces as they march toward some unknown target. This shot of the advancing mob is all the more disquieting for its silence: they advance resolutely toward their goal, the only sound their footsteps on the pavements. This take is married to an even longer shot depicting them reaching their destination - the local hospital - and the ensuing mayhem. Disturbingly, the silence continues, intensifying the impact of their violence. The camera follows them from room to room, pulling patients from their beds and beating them - their victims do not even cry out. The soundlessness of the destruction has the effect of magnifying the horror.
János sees the aftermath of the mob's work - and he is visibly and understandably traumatized by it. The viewer can almost feel the thoughts and emotions racing through his mind as he attempts to comprehend what he has witnessed.
Through his long takes (there are only 39 shots in the entire 2h25m film), planned and choreographed with such precision and care, Tarr compels the audience's attention to linger on the characters as well as on the entire mise-en-scène - allowing all aspects of the film to permeate conscious and subconscious of the viewer. The actors he has chosen masterfully convey the emotion and thought processes of the characters they portray. The sparse, strangely beautiful music is a perfectly utilized element, and the rich black-and-white cinematography adds greatly to the atmosphere.
This is the third film on which Tarr has worked with writer László Krashnahorkai, the previous two being 1988's KÁRHOZAT (DAMNATION) and his 1994 magnum opus, the 7h15m SÁTÁNTANGÓ. Other members of the team include Ágnes Hranitzsky (Tarr's life partner and editor), cinematographer Gábor Midvigy, and composer Míhaly Vig. Everything about his work comes together to truly make the whole greater than the sum of the parts - it has to be experienced for the true impact to come across. This is vital, visonary cinema.
Movie Review: One of the best movies ever made.
Summary: 5 Stars
Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky, 2000)
How much does a dream cost? In Bela Tarr's superlative Werckmeister Harmonies, it costs one hundred forints. As I write this, that's about fifty cents American, and for the people of Tarr's isolated Hungarian town, one that looks very similar to the town we encountered in Satantango, you get what you pay for. While the disillusionment to be found in show business, both in the rubes who somehow find their way backstage or amongst the players, is nothing new in the world of film subject matter--many excellent films have been made on the subject, from MacKendrick's Sweet Smell of Success to Hanson's L. A. Confidential and well beyond--Bela Tarr is one of the world's finest currently-working filmmakers, and you can take it as a given that a phenomenal film will come out of any subject matter to which he turns his hand.
Werckmeister Harmonies, adapted by Laszlo Krasznahorkai from his own novel (as many of Tarr's better-known films are; Karozhat, Satantango, and The Man from London are all Krasznahorkai works), centers around the arrival of a carnival sideshow to a rural Hungarian town, and the unrest it stirs up in the townspeople. The most deeply affected is Janos Valuska (Lola Rennt's Lars Rudolph), a lazy sort of chap who, slacking off from work at the post office one day, attends the arrival of the sideshow, which consists of a stuffed whale, billed as the world's largest, along with a barker, the whale's handler, and a figure known only as The Prince (Sandor Bese, who made his film debut in Dario Argento's version of Phantom of the Opera). Of course, no Tarr film can be so simple; there are a number of subplots surrounding some of the townsfolk, most notably an estranged married couple, Tunde (Hanna Schygulla, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's favorite actress; he cast her in twenty-three productions) and Gyorgy (Peter Fitz, probably best known on this side of the pond for Au Revoir, Les Enfants). As the town descends into chaos, Janos finds himself more and more obsessed with the whale, but soon enough, he finds out that not all is as it seems with this odd little company of misfits.
Tarr, in his earlier films, was known for seemingly-endless pan shots (like the fifteen-minute opening shot of Satantango, which remains as riveting as it was the first time I saw it no matter how many times I watch Satantango); while he tames that particular beast in Werckmeister Harmonies, with its relatively slim running time of 145 minutes, he can't resist a few here and there. A huge stuffed whale, of course, offers the same opportunities for such things as does a town square, and we get them in the dimly-lit trailer. But Tarr has always been a nature photographer at his best, and there's a long take with a stationary camera right in the middle of the film that explains so much of Tarr's genius. Janos and Gyorgy have been walking down the road, discussing things, and they go their separate ways when the road forks. The camera, which has been following them, stops about fifty yards form the fork, and it remains there for a few minutes as the two men walk away in different directions, until both fade from view. It sounds downright boring, and as I said in my Satantango review, I imagine there will be many people who would find it such. But Tarr could have probably drawn that scene out for another ten minutes and still made it watchable; Satantango is by far the shortest seven hours I've spent watching a movie, and the two and a half hours of Werckmeister Harmonies fly by in the same sort of way. Tarr delves deep into these characters, giving us a movie that is slow without being ponderous. The trick of it is that these characters are so fascinating we don't mind. Tarr would be a brilliant documentarian, were he to ever turn his attentions that way.
Another thing about Tarr's films is that these otherwise slow-moving films are punctuated with scenes of shocking violence, usually one per film. Here, Tarr turns that motif on its head; the movie's climax is an extended scene of violence, but as you can probably tell from the synopsis, that's to be expected. The shock comes in a scene of utter stillness, and it is both pathetic (in the best sense) and so beautiful that I found myself tearing up (not because of the subject matter--as always with Tarr, that is somewhat pedestrian--but because the whole thing is so damned well-shot, and because in what amounts to a fantasy film, it's so believable). I should say, given that parenthetical, that I am also well aware that there will be many people who see that climax and its resolution and accuse Tarr of being facile, if not outright playing to the emotions of the audience, but I think it works; every once in a while, you really can credit people with self-realization.
This was Tarr's first effort co-directing with his longtime editor, Agnes Hranitzky, and I think it was a darned good idea on everyone's part. I'm not sure I believed Tarr could make a better film than Satantango (which as of 6 February 2010 sits at #19 on my list of the thousand best movies ever made), but he may have done it here. A sterling effort, and yet another of Bela Tarr's films worthy of his greatest influence, Andrei Tarkovsky. *****
Movie Review: A wonderful opening set-up in an allegory that should make us uneasy
Summary: 5 Stars
The opening is one of the most intriguing I've come across. We're in a working class tavern in a small Hungarian village. It's closing time, but one of the drunks wants Janos (Lars Rudolph), the young mail carrier, to explain the cosmos again, and the meaning of a great eclipse. Soon Janos has these rough, staggering men shuffling around the one he has made the sun, one the earth, another the moon. Others join in, eyes unfocused, all caught up in something out of their understanding. "...and now," Janos says, "we'll have an explanation that simple folks like us can understand about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine that in this infinite sonorous silence everywhere is an impenetrable darkness." The temperature outside is 17 degrees below zero. It's cold to the bone, but without snow. And Janos says, "The sky darkens and then all goes dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds, the birds, too, are confused and go to roost. And then...complete silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open under us? We don't know. 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. The image of all these village drunks slowly shuffling and turning around one of their own, the sun, is pure cinema, original, striking and memorable.
Late that night, when Janos is delivering mail, he sees a huge truck slowly driving past a row of buildings leading to the town square. The truck casts a shadow like a pitch-black cloak against the buildings, slowly putting them in such darkness that we can't see them. Inside the truck are the preserved remains of a giant whale and, a poster tells us, a "guest star, The Prince."
Janos Valuska is one of life's innocents. He's "our Janos" to all he knows. For him, everyone is "Uncle" or "Auntie." He believes what people tell him. He does what they ask of him. He cares for them. He does no harm and much good. But now in the village strange things are rumored to happen...families have disappeared, headstones stolen, assaults, killings and burglaries. Rough men are coming to the town because of the whale and The Prince. "The mysterious unknown plagues are here," one woman says. " Great frozen mountains of refuse are everywhere. People bolt the door and tremble, dreading what is to come..." Some choose to prepare themselves by making lists of names.
Much worse is going to happen. The natural harmony of God (or the gods) shouldn't be interfered with. Between the forces of anarchy and the forces of order, between faith and God, there's not much left for most of us, only a disordered and dangerous universe. Janos will no longer be one of life's innocents.
With two minor caveats, I think this is one of the most significant films I've seen. The discussion of Andreas Werckmeister, whose theories of tonal harmonies is challenged by one of the characters, seems to me to be needlessly abstruse (That's probably because I'd never heard of the man and didn't have much of an idea of what the movie's character was going on about.) Surely this could have been developed in a less abstract way. And then there are Tarr's long, unbroken takes. At first I wasn't expecting this and was caught up with the time Tarr was quite willing to spend on a character's expression or action. Close to the beginning of the film, late at night, Janos visits an old man, an important character in the film, who is dozing in the cold parlor of his home. The camera follows Janos in the commonplace activities of helping the man to bed, folding the old man's trousers, helping to take off the socks and shaking and folding them. Pulling up the blanket. Going into the bathroom to bank down the wood-burning heater. Putting on a scarf and heavy coat and his mail pouch to go deliver letters. There was nothing special in these activities, but they were so naturally framed and conducted that they were interesting in themselves and illustrated the kind of well-meaning person Janos was. At the 90-minute mark, however, I found myself anticipating the scenes where Tarr would use this device. Some of those long takes began to seem very long. Small criticisms, really, considering how masterfully Tarr composed this film and how deeply he looked into faith, evil and human behavior.
Movie Review: Great
Summary: 5 Stars
The DVD, put out by Facets Video, is a good one, qualitatively. But, it is utterly bare bones: no commentary, no trailer, no featurettes. Its only `extra' is a small booklet with essays on Tarr and the specific film, However, when a film is this great, it doesn't really matter. The sound quality is very good, and the film is in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. There is one BIG negative, though, and that is the white subtitling Facets employs. I've often ripped on titles from The Criterion Collection for this flaw, but this particular Facets DVD is even worse, for not only are the subtitles white, but very thin. Also, there are several scenes where the extreme white in the cinematography (excellent by Medvigy Gábor, and supposedly composed of less than 40 actual shots in the film- claims range from 33-39, which, according to legend, allowed Tarr to edit the film in less than a day) almost totally blanches out what one can read. What the hell is wrong with the folks in the subtitles department? Is it too damned much to add a bit of gold, or even some black trim about the subtitles so that they can actually be read? It's bad enough DVD companies skimp on English language dubs, but illegible subtitles? The score (piano and violin), by Míhaly Vig, who played Irimias in Satantango, is spare, but highly effective, as any scoring should be, and its likely the best in the Tarr films I've seen, adding to the reality that this film is the most emotional of the films, as well. Some critics, however, have taken issue with the film's scoring, claiming that the film argues that music is an immanently flawed vehicle to base any sort of foundation upon, thus the film's score is at odds with its artistic claim. But, this is clearly wrong, since the film does not argue that music is immanently flawed, just one of its characters does- Eszter.
Another error that many critics have made is calling Werckmeister Harmonies a minimalist film. It is not. It's amazing how many critical notions in art and life are flawed simply due to the critic's inability to understand the definitions of the very terms they use. Minimalism is when a work of art is reduced to its barest minimum- i.e.- some of the Absurdist plays of a Samuel Beckett, or some scenes in George Lucas's THX 1138 or some films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, come to mind. These critics conflate mere economy with strict minimalism, but there's a world of difference. Minimalism is not just a spare setting, but that spare setting with a singular focus, a character or two, and brevity in action. Economy can have multiple characters, themes, and plot points, but be told in broad, singular strokes. This far more fits the description of a Tarr film, including this one. The film is not larded down with symbolism, but the few moments of such are ripened and potent. The scenes with the whale, never seen in its entirety, when seen by Janos, but only in the final scene, with Eszter, is a good example; for when we see what has so enraptured Janos, in the daylight, it is not nearly as mysterious nor awe inspiring as when we see only glimpses of it in shadow. To paraphrase, the elephant that the seven blind men feel, in the old parable, will always be more interesting and exciting than if they could see the real beast. Werckmeister Harmonies is not minimalist; in fact, it's the exact opposite, it's loaded with meaning, detail, and subtlety. And the elephant also harkens back to the ending of Federico Fellini's masterful La Dolce Vita, and its ending with the discovery of a manta ray's corpse, and its all seeing eye.
Despite many of the critical misreadings, Werckmeister Harmonies is a truly great film; audacious in its depiction of reality, however askew, and even bolder in its plumb of human consciousness; especially in its relationship to things greater than the self. That it does not lay out all its cards on the table for immediate perusal is not a weakness, but a strength, in that it invites rewatches. If all films offered only a quarter of what this film does, cinema would be far better for it. But, when given a rare full plate, like this, it's ok to gorge between the famines. Grace is optional.
Movie Review: "The Melancholy of Resistance"
Summary: 5 Stars
The film is based on the novel "The Melancholy of Resistance" by László Krasznahorkai. This story takes place in a small Hungarian provincial town in mid-winter. 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, s never seen except as a shadow on a wall and who possesses the sinister powers of making people act like a mob. The circus is a challenge to the citizens to understand what its place in their small and familiar universe is. They see the circus as the dark shadow of the moon during the total eclipse that "grows bigger... and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly only a narrow crescent of the sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment, the next moment - say that it's around one in the afternoon - a most dramatic turn of event occurs. At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens, then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds... the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then... Complete Silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don't know. 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. A lot has been said about his camera work and long single take shots. His usage of only two colors - black and white is stunning, his sound works perfectly with the images adding to the building of the unbearable tension. His three main characters are played by the German actors Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, and Hanna Schygulla - the Fassbinder favorite actress, the star of his 23 films. Casting Lars Rudolf as a protagonist, the young man whose journey throughout the winter night on the streets of the town we follow step by step contributes to the movie's success. Rudolph looks like a cross between Prince Myshkin and a Rock Star, and he is actually Frontman of the group Stan Red Fox. Judging by the movie's ending, the comparison with Myshkin will sadly make sense, too. It will also bring to memory the final words of Anton Chekhov's "Ward #6" - "The whole world is Ward #6". You know, I would not say that everyone should run and find the film and watch it. 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. I was resistant to it first, but then, its melancholy overwhelmed me.