Minority View: Werckmeister Harmonies by Bela Tarr blog

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Major filmmakers have perhaps fallen into four or five general categories. There are those who are primarily concerned with telling stories even if they are partial to certain kinds of stories and have developed their own methods of telling them - Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Altman, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami among others.

There are others who are more preoccupied with the expressive possibilities of the cinematic medium and place their emphasis on highly individual styles or methods - filmmakers like Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Yasujiro Ozu, Sergei Eisenstein and Miklos Jancso.

There are those filmmakers whose filmmaking styles are not ‘˜personal' as in the second category but intimately tied to their understanding of the world - Franceso Rosi with his documentary realism, Luis Bunuel with his surrealism and Michelangelo Antonioni with his searing portraits of alienated man.

There are those filmmakers who are preoccupied with cinema as cinema and draw attention primarily to its artifice - Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to name only two.

Lastly, there are those filmmakers to whom filmmaking seems to have a deep moral purpose, those whose concerns seem to stretch far beyond cinema, those filmmakers whose seem almost prophetic in their vision. Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos appear to belong to this last ‘˜school'. There are far fewer filmmakers from this category perhaps because claiming to be a prophet is a dangerous claim to make. In their later films both Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice) and Angelopoulos (Eternity and a Day) have seemed more megalomaniacs than prophets and have sometimes been unbearably pretentious. Both Tarkovsky and Anglopoulos have slow, brooding camera styles but to understand that their styles are intimately connected to the purport of their films, one must only compare their films to those of Alexandr Sokurov (Mother and Son, Russian Arc), who mimics the camera style of the prophets of cinema without their concerns and/ or preoccupations. The most recent genuine example of ‘˜filmmaker as prophet' is perhaps the Hungarian director Bela Tarr.

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) is a strange film in black and white and set in a small unnamed town. A circus comes to the town in the dead of night and its chief exhibit is the giant carcass of a whale. Also advertised alongside the whale and various other marine wonders is a performance from a mysterious person called ‘˜The Prince'. The story is told from the viewpoint of a simple postman named Janos who is fascinated by creation and its mysteries. Janos works for a musicologist and an intellectual named Gyorgy Eszter. The arrival of the circus is followed by civic disturbances brought about by the incendiary speeches of The Prince, who is never shown. Eszter has been estranged from his wife, who is now living with the police chief. Eszter is inducted into a signature campaign against the disturbances, which intensify. At the conclusion of the film the establishment intervenes successfully. Order is restored but the town still smolders. The musicologist has been driven out of his home by his wife and the police chief. The stuffed whale, once a mysterious artifact now lies in the town square abandoned and clearly a patched up and pathetic exhibit.

It is difficult to interpret Werckmeister Harmonies as anything except as an allegory. Understanding it may be facilitated by knowing something about Andreas Werckmeister the 17^th Century theorist of music, whose writing apparently influenced JS Bach. However, this information is perhaps too esoteric for us and we need to understand the film in a simpler way. To my mind the film is about the strife eventually initiated any kind of faith, be it a religion or an ideology. The Prince is perhaps the warrior-prophet which most religions cannot do without. Even Communism had its warrior-prophet in VI Lenin. This interpretation makes the film seem even banal but making Werckmeister Harmonies much more profound is the emblem of the whale. The whale is perhaps the original wonderful object associated with the dogma, the original sacred object associated with the faith - the stone slab on which the original Commandments were inscribed (contained in the Arc of the Covenant according to The Raiders of the Lost Arc), the Holy Grail for Christianity, the Black Stone in Mecca or a cultural object like Marx's Das Kapital for Communists. This object is an emblem of the wonder of creation and/ or the world and of God's laws. But after the strife initiated by the warrior-prophets and the eventual re-establishment of equilibrium, the sacred object has lost its wonder. The whale is only a profane object now and not an emblem any longer.

Werckmeister Harmonies is very slow and runs to almost two and a half hours but Bela Tarr's slow and brooding camera style is inextricably bound up with the profound allegorical purpose of the film. For an act or an object to mean more than itself it must be filmed in a very special way. The whale must be filmed to mean something much more than an ordinary stuffed whale. Alongside, this leads to a camera style that must be consistent with the way the other sequences are filmed. Each act should be given a significance that ordinary film language would not easily give it. There are, consequently, long arresting sequences in Werckmeister Harmonies in which people simply walk or eat but these sequences are entirely consistent with the rhythm of the film and don't seem unwarranted.

Coming lastly to the musical score in the film, there are many films that seem inconceivable without their music - Tarkovsky's Solaris without JS Bach's chorale prelude for the organ, Godard's Le Mepris without Georges Delerue's score, Lynch's Mulholand Drive without Angelo Badalamenti's music and Psycho without Bernard Hermann.  Mihaly Vig's haunting music for Werckmeister Harmonies is, in the same way integral to Bela Tarr's film, which would have been incomplete without it.