Werckmeister Harmonies

I went to see Werckmeister Harmonies (directed by Béla Tarr ) with Gabriele last night. After seeing Russian Ark, and reading that Werckmeister Harmonies (based on the book “The melancholy of resistance” by László Krasznahorkai) made Russian Ark look zippy, we kind of knew what to expect. A surreal story told in black & white in a kind of Tarkovsky style - it is apparantly a zippy film for Tarr (whose last film Sátántangó was 7½ hours long) at only 145minutes (and only 39 shots!). The ‘story’ is about the slow metered inwards destruction of a small town, seen indirectly via the experiences of Janos Valushka (played by a German, Lars Rudolph) as he walks and interacts with his fellow townsfolk. He is an emotionally detached, vunerable, eccentric outsider (like a village idiot in a still emotionally detached, but clearly placed community), yet the majority of relationships shown in the film are through him. The opening scene is beautifully comic, Janos choreographs a trancendental telling of a full eclipse using drunks in a local bar - all shot in one take.

The muted and emotionally isolated equilibrium in the town is disrupted when a giant stuffed whale (being exhibited along with a circus freak called ‘the Prince’) arrives in the town square. The arrival of the whale at night is again shot in an amazing slow single take. The Prince is a malevolent character, who speaks of a philosohy of nihilism, and is followed by a group of desperate ‘others’. The film doesn’t so much tell a story, as a sequence of visual impressions give us a framework on which to construct ‘our’ film.

The path to destruction is patiently observered yet always inevitable. The final scenes of destruction are brutal yet beautiful. The pointlessness(circularity) of nihilism is highlighted when the violent destruction of a hospital and senseless beating of it’s patients suddenly halts at the glowing vision of an old naked male patient cowering in the shower (a scene of amazing beauty). Law and order are restored in the town, yet Janos, who is always framed as the outsider of the community, seems to be the one who has paid the highest price - he goes insane. A very beautiful and elliptical film…

A brilliant interview with Béla Tarr can be found here, showing a director as hard to objectify as his films. Here is my favourite part, where the reviewers struggle, and fail spectacularly, to get what they want out of him. The whole interview is filled with these elliptical encounters:

FD & MLC: Thematically, your films’ depiction of a world on the brink of catastrophe seems to link up with a lot of other films made lately, Pola X for example.

BT: I’m sorry, in the past four years I haven’t seen anything.

FD & MLC: Yes, I know…

BT: I just wanted to tell you I know nothing…

FD & MLC: I know, but I just think there is a trend in world cinema towards this sort of existential terror and chaos.

BT: No, I just wanted to make a movie about this guy who is walking up and down the village and has seen this whale… And, you know when we are working we don’t talk about any theoretical things. We only ever have practical problems. And it’s the same with the writer. Mostly we just talk about life. How it’s going on the street. We never talk about theoretical things. We never talk about Chaos or existential things. We just talk about someone coming into the room and he wants something and the other guy who is sitting there doesn’t want these things. That’s all.

Posted by Ian at May 20, 2003 09:31 AM | TrackBack §