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Film Review by John Demetry
 Bela Tarr's new Werckmeister Harmonies is about the limits of cinema and
of all human endeavors. An awesome, visionary work, it goes about as far as
a movie can go. However, it finds a lilting melancholia at the borders of
the artform's possibilities. At the very realm of impossibility - at the
precipice of the abyss - this film achieves greatness. Werckmeister
Harmonies tunes into shifts of global consciousness - into the changing
ways people experience the world - and answers the resulting spiritual need.
Why write of Werckmeister Harmonies in such lofty terms? Because to only
get into the specifics of its story, and even its formalist construction,
would make Werkmeister Harmonies sound ponderous and overbearing - too
arty, too Eastern European. It even challenges - or, rather, exposes - the
limits of conventional film criticism. Breath-paused, heart-quickened
enthusiasm best introduces why Werkmeister Harmonies matters so much.
The movie is a shocking marvel from beginning to end. Werckmeister
Harmonies mixes movie genres: from German Expressionism and film noir to
cautionary sci-fi and horror. This mixing deepens and complicates genre into
a philosophical perspective. Tarr's black-and-white cinematography borrows
Expressionistic and noir shadows to contemplate the relationship of light
and perception in a fantastic story, itself vibrating with the truth of
history. The dissonance of genre tropes harmonizes with metaphysical and
social dissonance.
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In the film's small town, the citizens grow restless as heat becomes sparse.
Increasing the anxiety, a freak show comes to town featuring a whale and a
deformed dwarf. The freak show sets up in the Town Square where increasing
numbers of people keep warm by bonfires. The dwarf, only seen by the film
audience as a shadow, preaches chaos to the masses. Answering some of the
townspeople's desire for order, a reactionary clique forms a "Clean Town
Movement" to exploit power from the situation (clearly mirroring the rise of
fascism at numerous points in the 20th Century).
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Rotten Tomatoes: Werckmeister Harmonies
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The audience follows Lars Rudolph, as Janos, through the malaise. Janos
typifies the modern protagonist: an idiot savant who, like the film's
audience, soaks it all in and searches for meaning. He dutifully delivers
newspapers in the town and follows orders from his elders (whom he
respectfully refers to as "aunt" or "uncle"). Janos' outlook earns audience
(and filmmaker) fascination from the first - long-take - sequence. The film
introduces him choreographing the customers at a bar in a drunken rendition
of the heavens - orbital order and the momentary awe of an eclipse.
Tarr films each sequence in long takes to reproduce the long sentences of
the source novel. The method marks Tarr's formalism on two levels:
reproducing the form of another medium and sustaining a rigorous stylistic
strategy in the film medium. Most critics have argued that the opening
sequence prepares for the film's dialectic between Tarr's stylistic order
and chaotic choreography. Tarr's staged chaos is actually an ordered
representation of chaos within his controlled depth of field.
Rudolph's performance of Janos' monologue involves the audience in the true
dialectic of the film. Rudolph's rhapsody on the perfect sublimity of the
heavens gains power by the act of creation. As Janos exclaims after seeing
the sideshow whale: "How strange is the God of this world that He can amuse
Himself with such a creature."
Janos' conception of God's presence differs from that of one of his
"uncles," a musical theorist who speaks of the "harmonies of the Gods" with
which humans have lost touch (or are incapable of touching). That
character's aesthetic theorizing also contrasts Tarr's combination of
cinematic, literary, and musical tropes. The very imperfection of Tarr's
approach perfectly reproduces modern experience.
As he attempts with literature, Tarr mimics musical form through the
repetition of visual motifs. After the apocalyptic climax, Tarr repeats a
camera movement from earlier in the film. The camera begins by framing a
performer from behind as he - later, she - watches Janos walk away, then
tracks around to frame the performer from the side parallel to a shop sign.
Tarr structures the film through alterations of exterior and interior
sequences, yet provides stylistic variety to their execution. His long takes
study the movement of characters and camera through light and darkness -
like the flicker of celluloid. Such calculated repetition develops an
unexpected emotional rhythm and cadence.
That emotional flow results largely from the repetition of Mihaly Vig's
music score - evoking different strains of awe in each context. Tarr's
self-conscious use of music transforms the two-dimensional plain of the film
screen into a three-dimensional space into which the audience enters. Doing
so, the audience shares Rudolph's and Tarr's phenomenological wonderment -
as in Tarr's long-take contemplation of a helicopter, the side of the
sideshow truck, and, especially, human faces.
Tarr dramatizes the strategy through the various reactions to the sideshow
whale. The characters impose symbolic meaning on the whale. As one character
explains: "Some say it has nothing to do with it, some say it is behind
everything." It's the reality of a symbol of symbols. Heavy stuff, right?
Fear not. All is answered in the emotional tidal of the first and final
confrontation with the whale during which Tarr choreographs the spectator's
imagination to Vig's ethereal score.
The impression one gets is that Tarr is a filmmaker who plans everything.
The film's intended revelation - a prelude to madness - pulls the curtains
to expose an old man, standing naked and vulnerable to mechanical mob
violence. It's the final solution - Auschwitz-to-AIDS as inevitability -
symbolized in one image. The horror Tarr realizes is in the image's failure
- its inherent incapacity - to do more than merely signify true atrocity.
Yet, the image also captures - in space and time - the man's individuality
and humanity - his spiritual uniqueness. In attempting to prove that "God is
dead," Tarr's art takes him - and the audience - to a revelation he didn't
imagine. Tarr discovers God through the movie image.
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