Werckmeister Harmonies
by B?la Tarr, ?gnes Hranitzky
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DVD details
Actor: Djoko Rosic, Hanna Schygulla, J?nos Derzsi, Lars Rudolph, Peter FitzDirector: ?gnes Hranitzky, B?la Tarr
Brand: FACETS VIDEO
Producer: B?la Tarr
Writer: B?la Tarr
Writer: Gyuri D?sa Kiss
Writer: Gy?rgy Feh?r
Writer: L?szl? Krasznahorkai
Writer: P?ter Dobai
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Hungarian (Original Language), Unknown; Slovak (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 145 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-02-28
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Facets
DVD Reviews of Werckmeister Harmonies
DVD 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. *****
DVD Review: all made quiet on the western front.
Summary: 4 Stars
I have seen the beginning of the fall of man. I have been witness to cinematic moments that hold you breathless and leap the arch of the collective conscious known as the civilized, educated, modern, and spiritual man. This can all be torn asunder with a few well placed phrases from madmen. Statements made to entice them. In a restless Eastern Europe, sleeping giants lie. Leave it to Bela Tarr to film man's finale. Using the long shot we see through the apocalyptic viewfinder. This is equally beautiful as unsettling, giving new meaning to the term "in the land of the blind the many eyed man is king".DVD Review: what a stinker!
Summary: 1 Stars
This is the kind of pretentious, boring foreign film that gives foreign films such a bad name. There are so many engrossing, life-changing foreign films out there, but I think people shy away from them because they fear getting stuck with something ridiculously self-indulgent like this. This film is as pompous as it is esoteric.
Since it made so many critics' top ten lists for the year in which it was released, I was eager to watch it but couldn't find it for rent. Thank God I finally found it, and didn't buy it: I hated virtually every minute of it.
It consists, so I read, of only 39 black-and-white shots: most of the time we are being treated to the spectacle of circus-related characters monologuing on in the directors attempt to instill a "looming sense of dread" in the viewer. The only dread I felt was that the thing would go on and on.
I have no hesitation admitting that this film is over my head, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any good.
DVD Review: Wreck meister
Summary: 1 Stars
Having lived in Hungary for a few years, I can state with certainty that the whale was not a metaphor for anything, but in actuality, it represented true commodities from the whale economy. The price of whale lard, whale oil (for lamps), whale boots, etc, drastically climbed so high that no one in small towns could afford anything. The prince was merely a robber baron at the time, 1950's, who imported whale from Japan.
This is hardly surreal good fellows.
The film is utterly boring and should be avoided.
DVD 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.
Description of Werckmeister Harmonies
In Bela Tarr's celebrated film the arrival of a couple of bizarre circus attractions - the stuffed corpse of a huge whale and a mysterious character with magnetic powers called The Prince - sparks unrest in a provincial Hungarian town. Although composed of only 39 shots the mesmerizing camerawork of this complex allegory creates subtle suspense and a lingering sense of dread. "A work of bravura filmmaking." In Hungarian with English subtitles.System Requirements:Running Time 145 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre:?DRAMA UPC:?736899091026 Manufacturer No:?DV86934General DVDs
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