Werckmeister Harmonies
DIRECTED BY: Bela Tarr

STARRING: Lars Rudolph .... János Valuska
Peter Fitz .... György Eszter
Hanna Schygulla .... Tünde Eszter
János Derzsi .... Man In The Broad-Cloth Coat
Djoko Rosic .... Man In Western Boots
Tamás Wichmann .... Man In The Sailor-Cap
Ferenc Kállai .... Director
Mihály Kormos .... Factotum
Putyi Horváth .... Porter

RUNNING TIME: 2 hours 25 minutes

LANGUAGE: German and Hungarian
Subtitled in English

Programme Notes

The three reviews reproduced below come from a variety of sources. Take your pick, but come and experience this unique talent. The only review that matters is your own and you can only come to that conclusion by seeing the film.

The Hungarian director Bela Tarr goes beyond surreal, beyond miserablist, beyond anything I have ever seen with this quite bizarre, dream-like film in monochrome: an apocalyptic vision of - well, what?
A young man in a desolate Hungarian town is devoted to his elderly uncle, a musicologist working on a revisionist theory of the music of the spheres. Some kind of circus arrives, the kind of circus at which no one is expected to have a good time. It consists of a single corrugated-iron pantechnicon containing a dead whale. The presence of this, and someone called the Prince, incites the populace to a strange, somnambulist uprising.
If genius is close to madness, then Tarr's genius - because genius has to be what it is - is closer to autism, a kind of untrained savant touch for compelling imagery. Famously unschooled in European cinema, he has developed his own vernacular language of movie-making.
He is a master of the long, long take: mostly compelling but sometimes just outrageously weird. He has a close-up of the young man and his uncle wordlessly walking down a street which goes on for minute after minute. God only knows why.
Who to compare him to? David Lynch? Tod Browning? You've got me. This will be a tough watch for many: an uncompromisingly difficult and severe experience. But I found it unique, mesmeric and sublime.

Compared to the 435-minute Satantango, which was also based on a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Bela Tarr's adaptation of The Melancholy Of Resistance is a breeze.
Taking its title from a 17th century German composer who specialised in the structure and harmony of music, it's a brooding treatise on the abuse of beauty and power, the malleability of the masses and the helplessness of the individual swept away by a tide of great events.
But while this is anything but an easy watch, it's also a film packed with memorable images - outsider Lars Rudolph choreographing some barroom drunkards in a planetary orbit dance, the arrival in a town on the cusp of civil unrest of a charismatic 'prince' and a giant stuffed whale, the pitiless assault on the hospital by an uncontrollable mob. For once, understanding is less important than experiencing.

And this from an unnamed reviewer on the internet:

So Much Art (without meaning)

The reviewers have waxed poetic, claiming this to be a masterpiece. Alas, the only reasonably accurate appraisal I've read of this dreary drek was the capsule review in "Time Out New York," a magazine that for my money nearly always hits the target right on with a minimum of words and pretentiousness when it comes to movies (forget the other reviews). This movie is strictly for hairshirt sadomasochists and those under heavy sedation. True, the scenes, each a long long chunk of real time, are evocative, conjuring associations and possible meanings; but the pay-off never comes. By the end the associations and possible meanings have evaporated, never coalesce, leaving one with the undeniable feeling of having been sucked in by the big monster Art. The apocalypse never comes, the sun never re-emerges after the eclipse; Jonah never learns his lesson inside the whale's belly; the Kafkaesque funhouse turns out to be a sham; there's only darkness, a dour prediction of human history we've heard countless times before, esp. from Eastern Europeans, who seem to relish their bitter misery and are only too eager to pass it on to the world.

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