Werckmeister Harmonies

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Werckmeister Harmonies
Werckmeister harmóniák
Directed by	Béla Tarr
Produced by	Béla Tarr
Written by	Novel: László Krasznahorkai Screenplay: László Krasznahorkai
Starring	Lars Rudolph Peter Fitz Hanna Schygulla
Music by	Mihály Vig
Cinematography	Patrick de Ranter
Editing by	Ágnes Hranitzky
Release date(s)	2000
Running time	145 min.
Country	Hungary / Italy / Germany / France
Language	Hungarian
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Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák) is a 2000 Hungarian film directed by Béla Tarr, based on the novel The Melancholy of Resistance (1989) by László Krasznahorkai.

Shot in black and white and composed of only thirty-nine languidly paced shots, the film describes the aimlessness and anomie of a small town on the Hungarian plain that falls under the fascist influence of a sinister traveling circus lugging the immense body of a whale in its tow. A young man named János tries to keep order in the increasingly restless town even as he begins to lose his faith in the unnatural and disordered universe from which God Himself seems to have disappeared.

The title refers to the baroque musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister. György Eszter, a major character in the film, gives a monologue propounding a theory that Werckmeister's harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in all music since, which need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony.

1 Synopsis
2 Cast
3 Trivia
4 External links

[edit] Synopsis

This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain. In a provincial town, which is surrounded with nothing else but frost. It is bitterly cold weather — without snow. It is twenty degrees below zero. Even in this bewildered cold hundreds of people are standing around the circus trailer (a box of corrugated iron) in the main square, to see — as the outcome of their wait — the chief attraction, the stuffed carcass of a real whale. The people are coming from everywhere. From the neighbouring settlements, from different holes of the Plain, even from quite far away parts of the country. They are following this clumsy monster as a dumb, faceless, rag-wearing crowd. This strange state of affairs — the appearance of the foreigners, the extreme frost — disturbs the order of the small town. The human connections are overturning, the ambitious personages of the story feel they can take advantage of this situation, while the people who are condemned anyway to passivity fall into an even deeper uncertainty. The tension growing to the unbearable is brought to explosion by the figure of the Prince, who is pretending facelessness and is lying low behind the whale. Even his mere appearance is enough to break loose the destroying emotions. The apocalypse that sweeps away everything spares nothing. It does not spare the outsiders wrapped up in scientificness, does not spare the teenage enthusiasts, the people who have philistine fears for ease, the family — nothing that the European culture preserved as from of attitude in the last centuries.

[edit] Cast

Lars Rudolph as János Valuska
Peter Fitz as György Eszter
Hanna Schygulla as Tünde Eszter

[edit] Trivia

Director Béla Tarr spent almost a year finding the right square for some scenes in the film.
During the shooting the temperature dropped to -15 degrees Celsius.
In September 2007, film critic Roger Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list, making it third of only four post-2000 films in the list, the others being Ripley's Game, Pan's Labyrinth, and Babel.