#1215: TARR, Béla and HRANITZKY, Ágnes: Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

TARR, Béla and HRANITZKY, Ágnes (Hungary)
Werckmeister Harmonies [2000]
Spine #1215

Blu-ray

This mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus — complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince — arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence. In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, auteur Béla Tarr and codirector-editor Ágnes Hranitzky conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.

145 minutes
Monaural
Black and White
in Hungarian
1:66:1
Criterion Release 2024

 

Directors/Writers

Béla Tarr was 45 and Ágnes Hranitzky was 55 when they directed Werckmeister Harmonies.

Screenplay by László Krasznahorkai and Tarr.

Additional dialogue by Péter Dobai, Gyuri Dósa Kiss and György Fehér.

The Film

Every cinephile understands that every choice made by a director dictates the ultimate shape of the finished film.

Every punctuation mark — straight cuts, dissolves, fades, wipes — puts his or her mark on the material and exists as such as a kind of extraordinary commentary on the film.

Some directors prefer long, languid takes which stitch the film together with little or no sharp punctuation. Hitchcock wanted Rope (1948) to feel like a play, hiding every single cut, as did Mendes with 1917 (2019). Directors as diverse as Tarkovsky, Wenders and Ozu seem to prefer this technique, as well.

Tarr spreads his 39 takes over the 145 minutes (a little short of an average of four minutes per take), creating a dreamy, quasi-hallucinatory feeling — combined with the stark black & white and the slow camera movements.

For example, look at the three-minute-plus take at 1:58:07 as the camera swirls around in a 360° pan, beginning on the ceiling and gradually dropping to the ground to find János (Lars Rudolph) reading a diary.

So many interesting things:

• 0:01:38: János forms the drunken patrons in a bar into a human cosmos;
• 0:32:55: György (Peter Fitz) expounds upon the theories of Andreas Werckmeister about equal temperament.
• This is an important metaphor in the film for the idea of freedom and experimentation crushed by totalitarianism. As Jacob Collier says, “equal temperament is a scam.”
• 1:22:35: Aunt Tünde (Hanna Schygulla) dances with the gun-toting police chief (Dobai).
• 
  
• 
• 1:27:20: Followed by János checking up on his kids, making a terrific racket with a drum and cymbals!
• 1:42:48 to 1:55:10: Two cuts — visually terrifying, ending with the camera discovering János.
• 2:09:08: Four minute cut of János trying to escape from a helicopter.

A magnificent film.

Film Rating (0-60):

55

The Extras

The Booklet

An essay by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim.

“The long take, the cornerstone of Tarr’s mature style, is typically a prompt to recalibrate one’s attention, although the mode of attention varies depending on the film and the viewer: duration can be an invitation to concentrate or to drift. In a 1967 essay, Pier Paolo Pasolini described the long take as cinema’s ‘primordial element,’ equating it with life and the cut with death. For André Bazin, an uninterrupted shot that maintains the unity of time and space bespeaks a ‘faith in reality.’ Despite its association with realist cinema, the long take has been used to many ends, including dreamlike abstraction (Tarkovsky), political analysis (Tarr’s countryman Miklós Jancsó), and conceptual formalism (Michael Snow). Tarr’s prowling, protracted shots are remarkable for seeming to do so many of these things at once: they function equally as sensorial immersions into distinctive environments and as reflexive reminders of the cinematic artifice at work.”

Commentary

None.

Interview

With Tarr by film critic Scott Foundas.

His influences (Tarkovsky, of course) … interesting to note that like many artists from authoritarian countries, he only became (relatively) free to create after making a sensation in at a free country’s film festival (Mannheim).

Family Nest (1979)

Tarr’s first feature film.

A most welcome extra.

How good it is to compare Tarr’s earliest work with the more recent Werckmeister! This bleak look at life in Budapest in the 70’s is beautifully shot (the takes are long, but the dialogue/action moves along at a fairly rapid pace).

All nonprofessional actors, but completely believable — the main characters are all well fleshed-out. Irén (Irén Szajki — Aunt Harrer in Werckmeister) has our sympathies after we see how her father-in-law berates her; then we see her in a different light; her husband Laci (László Horváth) may be a cad, but Tarr makes us see him in a different light; and best of all is the father (Gábor Kun), a brute perhaps, but towards the end of the film Tarr shows us what a terribly pitiable man he really is.

The ending features a song that plays over Irén‘s pathetic face in close-up and heartbreakingly sums up the story:

When at last our cottage is built

Come and see us any time

In the evening, eat with us

It you want to, sleep with us

We’ll protect you, dream your dreams

Dreams in your dreams will come true

Our house will be a little house

All our friends will come here

We’ll play all those old sweet songs

When our cottage is built at last

Trailer

A perfect look at a must-see piece of cinema.

Extras Rating (0-40):

36

55 + 36 =

91

By Director

By Spine #