Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

In Bela Tarr's celebrated film the arrival of a couple of bizarre circus attractions - the stuffed corpse of a huge whale and a mysterious character with magnetic powers called The Prince - sparks unrest in a provincial Hungarian town. Although composed of only 39 shots the mesmerizing camerawork of this complex allegory creates subtle suspense and a lingering sense of dread. "A work of bravura filmmaking." In Hungarian with English subtitles.System Requirements:Running Time 145 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 736899091026 Manufacturer No: DV86934 Product Description

A wonderful opening set-up in an allegory that should make us uneasy

The opening is one of the most intriguing I've come across. We're in a working class tavern in a small Hungarian village. It's closing time, but one of the drunks wants Janos (Lars Rudolph), the young mail carrier, to explain the cosmos again, and the meaning of a great eclipse. Soon Janos has these rough, staggering men shuffling around the one he has made the sun, one the earth, another the moon. Others join in, eyes unfocused, all caught up in something out of their understanding. "...and now," Janos says, "we'll have an explanation that simple folks like us can understand about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine that in this infinite sonorous silence everywhere is an impenetrable darkness." The temperature outside is 17 degrees below zero. It's cold to the bone, but without snow. And Janos says, "The sky darkens and then all goes dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds, the birds, too, are confused and go to roost. And then...complete silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open under us? We don't know. We don't know."

Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies seems to me to be a great combination of allegory about human beliefs, pessimism about human behavior and extraordinary movie making. The image of all these village drunks slowly shuffling and turning around one of their own, the sun, is pure cinema, original, striking and memorable.

Late that night, when Janos is delivering mail, he sees a huge truck slowly driving past a row of buildings leading to the town square. The truck casts a shadow like a pitch-black cloak against the buildings, slowly putting them in such darkness that we can't see them. Inside the truck are the preserved remains of a giant whale and, a poster tells us, a "guest star, The Prince."

Janos Valuska is one of life's innocents. He's "our Janos" to all he knows. For him, everyone is "Uncle" or "Auntie." He believes what people tell him. He does what they ask of him. He cares for them. He does no harm and much good. But now in the village strange things are rumored to happen...families have disappeared, headstones stolen, assaults, killings and burglaries. Rough men are coming to the town because of the whale and The Prince. "The mysterious unknown plagues are here," one woman says. " Great frozen mountains of refuse are everywhere. People bolt the door and tremble, dreading what is to come..." Some choose to prepare themselves by making lists of names.

Much worse is going to happen. The natural harmony of God (or the gods) shouldn't be interfered with. Between the forces of anarchy and the forces of order, between faith and God, there's not much left for most of us, only a disordered and dangerous universe. Janos will no longer be one of life's innocents.

With two minor caveats, I think this is one of the most significant films I've seen. The discussion of Andreas Werckmeister, whose theories of tonal harmonies is challenged by one of the characters, seems to me to be needlessly abstruse (That's probably because I'd never heard of the man and didn't have much of an idea of what the movie's character was going on about.) Surely this could have been developed in a less abstract way. And then there are Tarr's long, unbroken takes. At first I wasn't expecting this and was caught up with the time Tarr was quite willing to spend on a character's expression or action. Close to the beginning of the film, late at night, Janos visits an old man, an important character in the film, who is dozing in the cold parlor of his home. The camera follows Janos in the commonplace activities of helping the man to bed, folding the old man's trousers, helping to take off the socks and shaking and folding them. Pulling up the blanket. Going into the bathroom to bank down the wood-burning heater. Putting on a scarf and heavy coat and his mail pouch to go deliver letters. There was nothing special in these activities, but they were so naturally framed and conducted that they were interesting in themselves and illustrated the kind of well-meaning person Janos was. At the 90-minute mark, however, I found myself anticipating the scenes where Tarr would use this device. Some of those long takes began to seem very long. Small criticisms, really, considering how masterfully Tarr composed this film and how deeply he looked into faith, evil and human behavior. August 5, 2008

Discordant Harmony

10/10 masterpiece film, long message, with some musical jargon...

Werckmeister's well-temperament (different from equal-temperament) was borne of a process Werckmeister used to alter meantone temperament.

To be brief, Werckmeister modified meantone temperament (and Tarr was using the temperament as a metaphor...) to preserve as much of its harmoniousness (metaphor...) in the commonly used natural keys as possible.

This enabled musicians to avoid using quasi-equal temperaments (metaphor...), because quasi-equal temperaments destroyed (metaphor...) the harmoniousness of the commonly used natural keys.

Werckmeister's well-temperament was a musical philosophy that, when implemented, enabled an appealing and refreshing tapestry of colour changes during modulations. The variety of changes, combined with the harmoniousness of tonalities, made well-temperament more advantageous and popular than equal temperament.

Many of these well-temperaments, which are also called circular temperaments, provide rich palettes of thirds that range from pure to full syntonic comma, meaning, from your basic pure appealing, symmetrical sound to an ebullitional, emotional equilibrium.

I said that the uncle's assertions were proven by life's own default, because life is dualistically harmonious and unharmonious, life detunes that piano, detunes that harmony, detunes that temperaments, etc, and life also tunes that piano, bursts forth with harmony, creates colourful, refreshing, indiviudal, and unique temperaments.

The theory which is technically disproven when it is applied to society and life as a whole, not just musical notes.

Soviet Communism in Hungary detuned the Werckmeister Harmony of the lives of the characters, and, ironically, the fall of Soviet Communism detuned the shadow of the Werckmeister Harmony of the lives of the characters.

Soviet Communism itself was presented as a Werckmeister well-tempered harmony, but the facade of its harmony was clearly false, Tarr through Gyorgy was metaphorically articulating that the government was propagating a false harmony, that people live their lives as a false harmony, that Werckmeister's harmonies acted as a false harmony to a mask unsavory tonal imperfections that always exist and threaten to destroy true harmony.

Werckmeister's harmonies were an allegory for the failure of East European Communism, for the evolution and propagation of corrupted "pure" ideas that are based on flawed premises (you can never hide and ignore bad sounds with advanced modulation techniques, you can never suppress and ignore all protestors who want to overthrow repressive governments, you can never suppress and ignore all the bad things in this world), and an allegory for blindly believing in the false ideals that ultimately destroy harmony and generate repression, cruelty, intolerance, cultural isolation, spiritual desolation, etc, etc.

The uncle's viewpoint was proven by his own discontent with the harmonies and by life itself, what happens in life proves his viewpoint because life is not one perfect, flawless, circular harmony. His discontent and emotional weariness and Janos' confusion and the traveling circus show (which disrupted the "harmony" of the village) and the effects of Soviet Communism in Hungary were all de facto proofs of the uncle's perspective. His viewpoint was, ironically, a direct result of the "Harmonies" themselves: perfect harmonious content breeds boredom and emotional emptiness and disconent.

Janos' emotional breakdown, the prince's tirade, the children banging out harsh sounds, the overall bleak desolation of the town, are all flaws in Werckmeister's theory.

The theory of Werckmeister's well-tempered harmonies was equivocated to following a false path to achieve harmony and enlightenment and existential purpose, and, again, the theory which is technically disproven when it is applied to society and life as a whole, not just musical notes.

************

The primary theme is the contrast between natural order and man-made order. This is discussed directly by the uncle who is distraught over the sacrifice of the natural scales to the Werckmeister Scales. In the man-made Werckmeister solution, the purer natural harmonies are sacrificed for a broader musical range. This is the downside of a man-made order. In the opening scene, Janos demonstrates a disturbing but temporary dark moment (an eclipse) that emerges from a natural order (de Revolutionibus). The opposing options are set up.

Relate this to recent Hungarian history where there were two significant political occurences. The first being the rise of Hitler. We can be pretty certain that the Prince is an easy stand in. This is also the eclipse, the temporary dark moment resulting from the natural tides of hate, opinion, and all the rest of our god-awfulness. The second major influence is the rise of Communism, which may be the darker of the two. This is the imposition of the Werckmeister Harmony, a disruption of the natural order to broaden the extension of music. Here, I assume the Aunty is the stand in for Stalin and his ilk. Hungary was ripped apart, first by Hitler, then by being subjugated to Communism, and this was a country with a long and proud history (and I don't mean that as a throwaway line, check it out, you'll be amazed by what the West ignores). During the past 50 years, it had been isolated, abandoned, and forgotten by the world. You see that mood aptly reflected through the movie.

In any case, the remaining figure is the Whale, which, while probably not G-d himself, reflects G-d's imagination, or, in an atheistic turn, the vastness of the natural order. If there is something to be known about Janos, it is his tendency to stand mouth agape and the wonder of natural order. This is established beautifully in the opening scene, further established in his first encounter with the whale, poigniantly counteracted when he is denied access to the whale by the mob, and puts him in the asylum when he sees the whale abandoned and desecrated at the end of the film.

The eclipse illustrates the tendency of humankind to lapse into brief, artificial periods of madness and hysteria. But these are always fleeting.

János appears to be permanently scarred by the trauma. He does not emerge from the eclipse like the rest of the town. He sinks into a profound and (seemingly) endless oblivion.

Even though the "even-tempered tuning" is seriously flawed as the professor dictates, there is no resolution. In fact, over the last 300 years, humankind has managed to force music to conform to the Werckmeister scale. We now have digital MIDI instruments which conform to Werckmeister's (flawed) frequencies. We seem to have forsaken the instruments which use the "natural scale" in favour of instruments which have frets, keys and even-tempered resonance. (Aside: the only instruments which still have the capability of playing the natural scale are the string family--violin, viola, cello, double bass--and a few brass horns. But even these instruments are forced to tune to the flawed piano.)

These two points seem to conflict with the idea that "the natural order will prevail." Perhaps, in an oblique way, Tarr is telling us that the eclipse does not always recede. Humankind's will is more powerful and destructive than nature's. March 30, 2008

BELA TARR, OPUS 7

***** 2000. Co-written and directed by Hungarian director Béla Tarr. 145 minutes of perfection. With Werner Herzog, Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr belongs to the small group of visionary directors. During the projection of this film, I had the same feeling that I had a long time ago when I first saw Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, the feeling to be in the presence of a work of art whose beauty went beyond the screen. You can call Béla Tarr's film bizarre, strange, lyrical, philosophical or poetic if you want but you can't deny the fact that THE WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES is an undisputable masterpiece if you have an ounce of artistic sensibility. January 20, 2008

Ray Bradbury and the Killer Peasants!

Do you long for a world where movies could be made without the constraints of commercialism? Do you wish directors could just be given the film to make the movie they want, without worrying about Return on Investment or box-office totals or the opinion of "the masses"? Do you think the ultimate worth of a movie should be decided not by the size or reaction of a paying audience, but by taxpayer funded Art Bureaucrats and the instructors at the local junior college?

Do you spend a major portion of your leasure time brooding over "The Emptiness of Existence"? Do you feel like you are surrounded by ignorant peasants?

Boy, do I have a movie recommendation for you!

The idea behind this movie is promising. It takes the notion of Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (AKA "Dark Carnival") and mixes it up with some other Bradbury works such as "Music of the Spheres" and Bradbury's screenplay for the movie "Moby Dick". Before they hit the screen, Bradbury's ideas are filtered through an intermediary work, "The Melancholy of Resistance" by László Krasznahorkai, who is a friend of the director. In addition to relocating the Dark Carnival from a small town in America to a village in Hungary, Krasznahorkai adds a political subtext. Ever since the Communists left town, nothing works any more. The trains don't run on time. The coal doesn't get delivered. The chickens aren't laying eggs. And "The Masses" are dangerously ignorant. Even though it is in the 21st century, they are frightened out of their wits by an eclipse.

So there is an idea for an interesting film, but unfortunately, the execution is not up to the material. This movie is extremely slow moving, perhaps due to the fact that the director received part of his grant as surplus black and white film, which had to used before it faded. There is ample plot make a decent episode of "Twilight Zone". (Come to think of it, there was an episode of the Twilight Zone somewhat like this.) Sadly, the director had way too much film on hand for a short episode. So he pads it out with endlessly drawn out scenes of characters trudging through the snow, with no dialog or sound except the crunch of the feet.

In commercial films, when a character needs to move from point A to point B, there may be a short transition, or the character may simply show up at point B, after leaving point A. In Eastern European Art films, we are forced to watch every step of the journey across. Don't assume the character will have some dialog during the transition, or that there will be anything interesting to see along the way. The setting is supposed to be a "village", but the film makers did not bother to go to a real village or small town to do the filming. (Perhaps they were afraid of meeting "ignorant peasants"?)

The outdoor scenes are clearly done on the industrial outskirts of some large city. Most of the 40 plus minutes of walking back and forth scenes take place in a snow covered lane with high fences blocking the view on both sides, somewhat like an alley between two junkyards. These scenes are highly praised for their "beautiful photography".

The advocates for this film claim that the expression on the face of the walking character artfully and elegantly establishes the fact that he feels dread for the future. I know what you are thinking: Once you establish that a character feels dread for the future, can't you just get on with the movie, without seeing him walking on silently crunching the snow with that same expression for the next 20 minutes? Well, anyone who would ask that question is looking the film from the view of the "Censorship of the Crowd" rather than from the perspective of the Director. The Director cares nothing for the opinion of the ignorant peasants who directly pay money to see movies. After all, his funding comes from foundations mainly supported by taxpayers who wouldn't ever see what they are paying for, even if they wanted to.

As black and white film ages, it loses speed and the "gamma" changes, so the middle gray tones drop out. This contributes to the look of bleakness. Of course, in the world of the non-commercial art film, "bleakness" is a big plus, right up there with "symbolism", "bookish dialog" and "ennui". Another effect of the missing gray scale can be seen in the subtitles, which being perfectly white, become invisible over any light surface. With so much snow, there are many light surfaces behind the subtitles.

In common with so many European Art films, undergraduate textbook style philosophical dissertations are placed in the mouths of the characters in place of dialog. In Bradbury's work, set in a small town in America, the carnival posses some kind of moral threat to the inhabitants. In Krasznahorkai's rework, the threat is political. You see, with the Commies gone and the chickens not laying eggs, the ignorant peasants might just follow any potential dictator that breezes into town, even if that dictator is some sort of a freak that lives inside a fake whale. We don't get to see the freak, which seems to be an Ur Jonah/ post Ahab character of some sort. But when we hear him talk, he delivers a tirade that is almost the same as Lang's Mabuse character. (You have heard it before in a hundred better movies: We are going to take over. We are going to control everything. We are going to destroy everything. Etc. Etc.)

Apparently the Masses/Audience are so ignorant that this speech inspires them to go on a destructive rampage. Because the filmers never went anywhere near an actual small town, realistic shots of a rampage in a village were out of the question. So the rampage is mostly off camera, other than a interior scene straight out of MST3K where patients are dumped out of hospital beds. But 15 minutes of film are devoted to show 600 unemployed people trudging up and down that alley between the two fences. This is beautiful artful moviemaking according to some.

The "Whale" looks interesting early in the movie, when it is photographed in the dark. But in the last scene, we catch a glimpse of it in the light, which cannot hide the fact that it is a crudely constructed fake. By the way, the freak living in/under the whale is called "The Prince". Do you get the symbolism? Or do I need to bring the Director in here to hit you on the head again with his sledgehammer?

If you think ten thousand known Art Films asserting, or better yet, contributing to "The Emptiness of Existence" are not enough, you should definitely add this one to your collection.

January 4, 2008

The banality of evil

The main character of this film, Janos, is a young man whose purpose, leading a solitary life, is to serve as the connector for the isolated village in which he and the rest of the cast live. In this context, "connector" means the one who insures there is constant communication among all the various inhabitants.

I think it helps to view this film from the perspective of communication. Janos' function is essentially destroyed when a "circus" comes to the village, which consists of a huge dead whale, entombed in an equally huge trailer-truck, an impresario whose sole focus is making money, a "barker" who does nothing but collect money to see the whale, and the "Prince" which appears to be an obvious metaphor for the Devil (Prince of Darkness), with the whale representing the Devil's works, as it were--that is, the expression or manifestation of evil.

Evil does ensue as, shortly after the appearance of the "circus", villagers go on a rampage, smashing up stuff in the local hospital and pulling the patients out of their beds and beating them. The last patient they encounter, a naked frail old man, stems the tide and they shuffle off, returning to their previous lives.

Janos' communication function is shown almost right from the start as he arranges a few drunks in the local tavern in a human equivalent of part of the solar system--earth, moon, sun--moon revolving around earth, earth around sun. What is the purpose of this? Viewed in the context of the film, the only purpose can be, again, to demonstrate Janos' obsessive need to communicate.

The title of the film derives from the mouthings of another character, Estzer, an older highly educated composer whose bitterness comes from, among other things, divorce from his wife Tunde. His essentially meaningless metaphysical spoutings allude to the composer Werckmeister who composed music based on a set of 12 harmonic tones, or some such. The obvious irony of the title in the context of the primary event of the film, the march on the hospital, is heightened even further by the strikingly downbeat ending which will not be revealed here, but which definitely leaves the chin on the sidewalk.

The potential buyer of this DVD should note that there is an entire sequence in this film, in which Tunde is speaking with Janos, where the subtitles--in white text--are superimposed over a white tablecloth. This is absolutely infuriating; the subtitles are virtually impossible to read. A question put regarding this problem to the DVD distributor, Facets Video, resulted in no answer at all. This sequence goes on for about four minutes and is, needless to say, extremely frustrating. There is another shorter sequence in which Estzer speaks with Janos where the white subtitles are also superimposed over a white background. This is a serious caveat that should be addressed by the DVD's distributor; the obvious solution to this issue is to release a new edition with yellow subtitles instead of white, or to put the subtitles in the lower black space under a widescreen image.

If it were not for these two instances of impossible-to-read subtitles (unless you speak Hungarian, you will be, I am sure, as frustrated as I was), I would have given this five stars.

The film is in black-and-white, and is a startlingly powerful piece of cinema. The sight of the hordes of villagers (how big is this village anyway? Or are these men--and they are all men--from more than one village?) marching, row upon row, down the village streets, is more chilling than any big budget Hollywood horror movie. The irony of the film's title is shown here as well; the hordes march in a completely uniform pattern, echoing the "harmonies" in the title. Equally chilling is the vision of these same villagers, prior to their march, out in the village "square" as the camera moves, as Janos does, from one clump of them to another. In these scenes, Janos is hard put to know how to perform his primary function of communicator because it's obvious that these men, by this time, are way past the ability to communicate.

It's not hard to draw all kinds of symbolist interpretations of the film. My admittedly glib interpretation above of the Devil and evil is certainly one, but others may include the intrusion of the chaos of the 21st century into a backwards, timelocked culture, for example. Viewers will no doubt have a field day with the potential plethora of interpretive perspectives. Regardless, this is a brilliant film that should not be missed. If you can somehow overlook or bypass or get around the two sequences with the unreadable subtitles, you will find something unique, breathtaking, and seriously disturbing.

Parallels to Fellini are justified, but Tarr is like the negative image of Fellini. The few moments of sensuousness in Werckmeister Harmonies are quickly supplanted by the overriding bleakness of atmosphere that dominates the film. Very highly recommended. It will be interesting to see what Tarr does with his unique voice applied to a novel by Georges Simenon, The Man From London--his next film. September 5, 2007

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