Dir. Bela Tarr

Country: Hungary

IMDB / Wiki / Trailer

Everybody knows that to be a connoisseur of the finest movies the world has to offer, you have to watch at least one movie a day. It’s an unbreakable rule, because, well, do you know how many movies I’ve still got to get through on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s list? A lot, that’s how many. This is why Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies left me with personal anxiety that almost outstripped the inner surrealism of his own story. For at least three days after watching the film, I couldn’t find it in me to watch another movie lest I become disappointed that it paled in comparison. It was a perplexing state, it really was, and I’m still trying to process it. In other words, I think this is me trying to say that the movie was pretty fucking great and this clip above is an example of why.

Adapted from Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, Werckmeister Harmonies tells the story of Janos Valuska: a simple person; creative, harmless and living in a failed backward town somewhere in Eastern Europe. When a circus arrives it has an unerring effect on the local denizens and its star performers – a Prince and full-sized whale – turn the town into a place of apocalyptic despair. Unexplained debauchery soon runs wild and Tarr’s otherwise languidly shot film – a two-hour picture, composed of just 39 single takes – beckons with a disorientating sensation greatly in the vein of anything you’d usually find labeled ‘Kafka-esque’.

Much has been noted about how the book (and ergo film) can be taken as allegory for the failure of the Soviet Union’s satellite states – such as Tarr’s native Hungary – and while the narrative indicates something like this the film more deeply illustrates social chaos. There’s always something surreal about the proceedings; nothing really makes sense, and it’s like the system underneath everything we see is breaking down in front of our eyes. The power of the film is that we’re never sure why and it seems like just as the town’s residents are waiting for a God to show up, we too are waiting for some kind of answers. In both cases, neither arrives and our silent agitation eventually surrenders.

I could have chosen a few examples to illustrate the point, but I chose this scene, which comes late into the movies and lasts a tantalizing fourteen minutes. It culminates in the mob’s unruly destruction of a hospital and is one of the most powerful scenes in a movie of simultaneous beauty and squalor. One you’d certainly be all the better for watching.

SoS