Werckmeister Harmonies
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| Werckmeister Harmonies | |
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 Werckmeister harmóniák |
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| Directed by | Béla Tarr |
| Produced by | Béla Tarr |
| Written by | Novel: László Krasznahorkai Screenplay: László Krasznahorkai |
| Starring | Lars Rudolph Peter Fitz Hanna Schygulla |
| Music by | Mihály Vig |
| Cinematography | Patrick de Ranter |
| Editing by | Ágnes Hranitzky |
| Release date(s) | 2000 |
| Running time | 145 min. |
| Country | Hungary / Italy / Germany / France |
| Language | Hungarian |
| IMDb profile | |
Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák) is a 2000 Hungarian film directed by Béla Tarr, based on the novel The Melancholy of Resistance (1989) by László Krasznahorkai.
At once horrifically bleak and breathtakingly beautiful, the film — shot in black and white and composed of only thirty-nine languidly paced shots — describes the aimlessness and anomie of a small town on the Hungarian plain that falls under the fascist influence of a sinister traveling circus lugging the immense body of a whale in its tow. A young man named Janos tries to keep order in the increasingly restless town even as he begins to lose his faith in the unnatural and disordered universe from which God Himself seems to have disappeared.
The title refers to the baroque musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister. György Eszter, a major character in the film, gives a monologue propounding a theory that Werckmeister's harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in all music since, which need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony.
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[edit] Synopsis
This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain. In a provincial town, which is surrounded with nothing else but frost. It is bitterly cold weather — without snow. It is twenty degrees below zero. Even in this bewildered cold hundreds of people are standing around the circus tent, which is put up in the main square, to see — as the outcome of their wait — the chief attraction, the stuffed carcass of a real whale. The people are coming from everywhere. From the neighbouring settlings, from different holes of the Plain, even from quite far away parts of the country. They are following this clumsy monster as a dumb, faceless, rag-wearing crowd. This strange state of affairs — the appearance of the foreigners, the extreme frost — disturbs the order of the small town. The human connections are overturning, the ambitious personages of the story feel they can take advantage of this situation, while the people who are condemned anyway to passivity fall into an even deeper uncertainty. The tension growing to the unbearable is brought to explosion by the figure of the Prince, who is pretending facelessness and is lying low behind the whale. Even his mere appearance is enough to break loose the destroying emotions. The apocalypse that sweeps away everything spares nothing. It does not spare the outsiders wrapped up in scientificness, does not spare the teenage enthusiasts, the people who have philistine fears for ease, the family — nothing that the European culture preserved as from of attitude in the last centuries.
[edit] Cast
- Lars Rudolph as János Valuska
- Peter Fitz as György Eszter
- Hanna Schygulla as Tünde Eszter
[edit] Trivia
- Director Béla Tarr spent almost a year finding the right square for some scenes in the film.
- During the shooting the temperature dropped to -15 degrees Celsius.
[edit] External links
- Werckmeister Harmonies at the Internet Movie Database
- Werckmeister Harmonies at the Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films list
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