Werckmeister Harmonies: Dark Side of the Earth

Werckmeister Harmonies can be understood, among other things, as a meditation on order and disorder in which both are found wanting, or worse. Order is a pretense, a brutal system of control, but attempts to undo it are doomed to violence, failure, or madness. This double bind is evident in the main narrative events—an inchoate uprising followed by a swift crackdown—as well as in the character quirk that gives the film its title: Eszter’s conviction that the organist Andreas Werckmeister’s seventeenth-century division of the octave into twelve equal tones produced a tuning system, the equal temperament, that was predicated on false euphony.

The ideas that most haunt the film—the notion of celestial harmony so important to the music theory of the ancient Greeks, the double meaning of revolution—are encapsulated in the ten-minute opening scene, a closing-time pantomime in the quintessential Tarr location of the village tavern, where János enlists the local sots to act out a solar eclipse. With a trio of barflies playing the roles of the sun, the earth, and the moon, János sets them spinning, the camera rotating in tandem, then brings them to a halt to demonstrate the rare heavenly alignment capable of plunging the planet into darkness. This bravura single shot, a representation of representation, is wonderfully suggestive of Tarr’s own methods: his ambulant camera, performing its continuous dance of withholding and revealing, often stages eclipses of a sort, occluding views and blacking out the frame by maneuvering behind figures and objects. Circularity is a recurring Tarr motif—in the oscillating camera work, in the repetitive refrains of Víg’s music, and in the films’ looping, purgatorial progression. (One thinks of the final section of Sátántangó, titled “The Circle Closes,” and of the Alexander Pushkin quote that opens Almanac of Fall: “The devil is probably leading / Going round and round in circles.”)

The long take, the cornerstone of Tarr’s mature style, is typically a prompt to recalibrate one’s attention, although the mode of attention varies depending on the film and the viewer: duration can be an invitation to concentrate or to drift. In a 1967 essay, Pier Paolo Pasolini described the long take as cinema’s “primordial element,” equating it with life and the cut with death. For André Bazin, an uninterrupted shot that maintains the unity of time and space bespeaks a “faith in reality.” Despite its associations with realist cinema, the long take has been used to many ends, including dreamlike abstraction (Andrei Tarkovsky), political analysis (Tarr’s countryman Miklós Jancsó), and conceptual formalism (Michael Snow). Tarr’s prowling, protracted shots are remarkable for seeming to do many of these things at once: they function equally as sensorial immersions into distinctive environments and as reflexive reminders of the cinematic artifice at work. The length of these sequences means that the editing, to some extent, takes place in the camera—Hranitzky’s collaboration begins on set, when the elaborate choreography of camera and actors is developed. Indeed, the temporal effects of these films derive not just from their extended takes but even more so from their very particular rhythm and momentum, from the deliberate panning and tracking that gives them a fundamental musicality.

It’s surely no coincidence that the trademark of Tarr’s regular writer, Krasznahorkai, is the long, sidewinding sentence. (His English-language translator George Szirtes has likened his writing to a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.”) Krasznahorkai’s prose approximates an oozing stream of thought that intensifies and ebbs, contradicts and loses itself, often pushing past the point of exhaustion. While Tarr’s films do not try to replicate this mental state, they do at times suggest that the camera, moving independently of the on-screen action, has a mind of its own, and there are intriguing parallels between the two artists’ obsessive formal approaches. Both in Tarr’s films and in Krasznahorkai’s novels, plot is secondary. The simple, archetypal narratives—usually set among the downtrodden and the damned, and involving some nefarious or traitorous machination—are inevitably subsumed, via Tarr’s mise-en-scène or Krasznahorkai’s syntax, into something larger, more mysterious and elemental. For the philosopher Jacques Rancière, Tarr’s films are a “commitment to the materiality of time.” The filmmaker would seem to concur: dismissing stories as obsolete, he once claimed that “all that remains is time,” as close to a statement of intent as he has ever ventured.

The weight of time is never less than palpable in Werckmeister Harmonies, which runs 145 minutes and contains a mere thirty-nine shots. (Its average shot length of just under four minutes is exceeded in Tarr’s filmography only by The Turin Horse.) A geography of the town emerges from lengthy sequences that measure the time it takes for János to walk from tavern to town square, from home to work, from one room to another in Eszter’s sprawling house. (Footsteps are a prominent aspect of the heightened sound design in Tarr’s cinema of walking.) Tarr is very much a materialist filmmaker—to experience his movies is to be reminded of Pasolini’s description of cinema as a language that expresses reality through reality. But especially in the implacable blocks of real time that make up Werckmeister, there is a keen sense that we are peering through to the intangible and atmospheric. “I cling to nothing, but everything clings to me,” says the protagonist of Damnation, effectively describing Tarr’s ability to depict the psychic microclimates of his characters.

A good deal remains murky and unexplained in Werckmeister Harmonies: why the town’s residents are so afraid of this rinky-dink circus and its shadowy figurehead, the Prince; what exactly motivates their revolt; how the new political movement is connected to the army that swoops in to restore order. But what comes across with chilling clarity—as visible as the cold breath of the characters or the fog that periodically rolls into the cobblestoned square—is the mood and miasma of fascism, the conditions for its breeding, the mundane mechanisms of rumor and suspicion by which the mindset takes hold, locally and at ground level. “At first, we don’t notice the events we are witnessing,” János says, as he recounts the workings of an eclipse to the tavern regulars in the opening scene, though he could just as well be speaking of the incidents that will follow.

The insurgency that eventually overtakes the town is described only in passing in The Melancholy of Resistance, but it is given climactic significance in Werckmeister Harmonies. It plays out in a series of vivid, almost hallucinatory sequences that rank among Tarr’s most extraordinary feats. As it trudges through the night (and toward us), the advancing horde fills the screen; the camera observes these expressionless, entirely silent men, some wielding clubs, for a seeming eternity, first from a high angle before descending into the crowd, scrutinizing faces that reveal nothing, then rising overhead again. The camera follows as the rioters storm a hospital, bursting into wards to drag patients from beds and beat them senseless—a savage ritual performed with eerie, automatist blankness, nary a sound coming from perpetrator or victim.

Fascism is even less of an abstract concern today than it was in 2000. Hungary has been under Viktor Orbán’s strongman rule for over a decade now. In the present-day American context, it is hard to watch the riot scenes without flashing on the violent mobs—the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia; the election deniers of the January 6 insurrection—that have been a recurring feature of the Trump era. We leave Werckmeister Harmonies haunted by the increasingly stricken gazes of János, the film’s watchful presence: cowering in a corner as the riot unfolds; looking up in terror at a helicopter that thwarts his escape; and, finally, tragically, staring blankly into the middle distance from his own hospital bed. This monumental film has only gained force and stature in the decades since it was made. It stands as a Januslike marker, both summative and prophetic, a capstone of the century past and an omen for the one to come.