It is only after a third viewing that I dare venture some comments on this awesome film. That I was fascinated from the start was beyond doubt but its funereal tempo caused me to nod to the extent that even on a second viewing there were whole sequences I had missed. By the third attempt I feel ready."Werckmeister Harmonies" is one of the great artistic challenges of our age. I cannot begin to admit that I understand it fully but I do know that it carries those haunting resonances remaining long after the final shot, that I recently found in the Japanese "Eureka" and nearly half a century ago in Antonioni's "L'Avventura". As there is very little evidence that even the professionals have got to grips with the film's meaning - most are clearly as mesmerised as me but talk mainly about style, in other words how the director looks at his world, I will venture a few ideas even if they are erroneous. Bela Tarr's masterwork can only be understood as an allegory. In the 17th century the German musician, Andreas Werckmeister, conceived the idea of equal temperament thus enabling music to be written and played in any key. In doing so, according to the philosopher musicologist of the film, the purity of the natural cosmic language and inevitability of ordered sound became tainted. As a metaphor for this concept we are shown a small Hungarian town in mid-winter under the threat of civil chaos, The catalyst that brings this about is the arrival in the main square of a circus consisting of only one giant lorry containing a stuffed whale and a mysterious figure billed as the Prince who occasionally speaks but is never seen except as a shadow on a wall. The circus is a challenge to man's understanding of his safe familiar world and when, as here, there is a failure of comprehension the result is a crescendo into anarchy. A mob go on the rampage and, in a sequence of extreme barbarity, attack the local hospital beating up the defenceless patients. That the film works as an intensely human document is due to the fact that the director has given us a character with whom we can identify in the form of Janos, a young postman, whose odyssey throughout the wintry town we follow every step. As each scene takes place in real time generally in a single shot, a walk down a street is the length it takes to achieve. Thus Tarr builds into his structure that element of reflective time for the audience that is a hallmark of the cinema of Angelopoulos and Aoyami. We assimilate Janos's impressions for the time it takes him to experience them. As much has already been written about Tarr's use of the long take I will just add that the attack on the hospital is every bit as powerful an action sequence as the massacre on the Odessa Steps in "Battleship Potemkin". What however is so extraordinary about Tarr's great set-piece is the way it generates a similar power not by Eisenstein-like montage but by long tracking shots. Equally extraordinary is the use of silence. Not one of the victims cries out in distress, there is just the sound of furniture and fixtures being smashed. Whereas Eisenstein homes in on characters and faces, Tarr views his as a dark almost faceless collective. There is just one face recollected from a previous crowd scene to relate this terrible event to the casually familiar. The sequence reaches its climax when a curtain is pulled down from a bath to reveal in longshot the naked standing body of an old man, just flesh devoid of personality. This has the astonishing effect of taming the mob so that they gradually slink away in shame. There is a strange parallel here with our final glimpse of Janos sitting on a hospital bed, traumatised after his unsuccessful attempt at escape from the town. The only sounds he makes are quietly sung unrelated notes. His uncle, the musicologist is with him. He admits to the by now uncomprehending Janos that he has finally compromised by tuning his piano to equal temperament as the only way of perhaps selling the instrument. For the rest all is silence. The musician visits the square by now deserted to see for himself the whale abandoned outside its wrecked carrier. It is Tarr's haunting resolution of a nightmare vision of a world gone mad.
Review of Werckmeister Harmonies
