"I'm a man with a huge world-view, surrounded by microbes." – Woody Allen
Bela Tarr directs "Werckmeister Harmonies". The plot? A circus act, consisting of a giant whale and a special guest called "The Prince", arrives at a small Hungarian town. With the circus comes a palpable sense of impending doom. Pretty soon, local townsfolk kick-start a violent uprising. They seem compelled by invisible, magical forces. One man, Janos Valuska, observes these mysterious proceedings with fascination. A figure of innocence and perhaps naivety, Janos watches as the circus causes violent gangs to form, some taking advantage of the situation and seizing power, others attempts to restore "order and cleanliness".
The film begins with a beautiful sequence. Janos enters a bar and persuades a group of drunks to create a model of the solar system. Dancing in circles the gang reenact a solar eclipse, a ballet which is beautiful until one looks closely. The participants are all drunk and in a state of mental confusion, readily believing Janos' apocalyptic description of a solar eclipse. To Janos, an eclipse is not a scientific event, but a quasi-religious one which heralds the end of mankind. Instead of rational explanation, Janos and his congregation thus cling to irrationality and superstition. Later, when Janos sees the giant whale up close, he attributes its presence to God; surely only a powerful, supernatural being could create such a funny creature.
Tarr then uses the whale as a metaphor for a kind of irrational, medieval superstition akin to blind, fascist obedience. No one in the film even considers taking a closer look at the whale, for if they had they would have noticed "The Prince" hidden behind it, a shadowy leader who represents nothing but an image onto which anyone can project whatever ideals they wish.
Midway in the film, Janos overhears his uncle talking about Andreas Werckmeister, a musician famous for dividing the octave into twelve half-step tones. Werckmeister believed that maths, music and astronomy were linked manifestations of the harmony of the universe, a view held by Pythagoras, who argued that most euphonious harmonies resulted from tones that reflected the proportions of simple integers (2:1, 3:2 etc). But basing musical scales on simple ratios leads to contradictions and octaves that aren't true, which led to people like Werckmeister (and others) seeking to find an "equal temperament" or some form of "new musical system".
By adopting this new system, Janos' uncle believes that mankind has deprived musical instruments of their divine tuning, replacing it with an artificial system which is nothing but an illusion; an illusion which western music is based on. Werckmeister is thus a sort of Promethian figure, taking the gift of knowledge/music away from God and handing it down to men.
Janos' uncle thus believes that music, and by extension life itself, was better when it belonged solely to God. He longs for a simpler universe ruled by a sovereign Master Figure, and fails to acknowledge the vast achievements developed under the Werckmeister scale. As a musicologist he fails to appreciate the higher level of organisation and harmonies which "man's creation" has led to.
The film's treatment of "order", "chaos", "anarchy" and "civilization", are thus reduced to musical terms; a three-way battle between order and symmetry (the unified world-view of classical Greece and the Middle Ages), superstition and mysticism and a more nuanced blending of the two. Consider again the first scene, in which Janos attempts to create heavenly order using the drunken bums. The bums fumble about, irregular in their movements, always falling out of position...and yet they are supremely beautiful, spinning in circles whilst the camera pulls back and the music swells. For Tarr, all quests for perfection must take into consideration humanity's imperfections; harmony depends on imprecision and compromise.
But Tarr makes a larger point. Late in the film we're introduced to a gun waving police chief, his dictatorial children and his lover, a woman who seeks to use the escalating chaos of the village to acquire more power. Using these characters, and various symbolic sequences, Tarr then sketches a political allegory about the fascist's quest for order, and fascism's unstoppable tilt toward collapse.
Hungary became a "Communist" (or rather, state capitalist) state after World War 2, the Soviet Union maintaining a military presence and enforcing Stalinist principles. This led to a revolt in 1956, which helped to topple authoritarianism and give birth to a kind of mixed ideology Socialism, a greatly liberalised approach to communism that lasted until 1989 (upon which democratic government and capitalism became the norm). But the film is not a strict allegory of Hungarian history, rather it aims to show how one political ideology can replace another when an aimless populace irrationally follows a charismatic demagogue. It is about how reactionary opportunists exploit superstition to gain power in the name of order, how people obsessed with "order" have contributed to disturbing the harmonic "disorder" of things and how impotent members of the intelligentsia often sit on the sidelines whilst the world burns.
Indeed, it's no surprise that the first thing the violent gang does in the film is to raid a hospital, destroying scientific equipment in a crazy rage. With science dead they become slaves to lies; an irrational force, an angry mob which is only halted by the sight of a naked old man. This man, his body frail, his bones protruding from his flesh, forces them to confront a mass of paradoxes. Humbled and disgusted, they retreat into the night. But the damage has already been done. The old order has been destroyed and a new era has begun, Janos, the boy who believed in apocalyptic whales and the mysterious beauty of god, ending the film in a sterile hospital ward, misdiagnosed by science and branded an insane criminal.
8.9/10 – Though comprised of only 39 shots, this is perhaps Tarr's most accessible film.
Bela Tarr directs "Werckmeister Harmonies". The plot? A circus act, consisting of a giant whale and a special guest called "The Prince", arrives at a small Hungarian town. With the circus comes a palpable sense of impending doom. Pretty soon, local townsfolk kick-start a violent uprising. They seem compelled by invisible, magical forces. One man, Janos Valuska, observes these mysterious proceedings with fascination. A figure of innocence and perhaps naivety, Janos watches as the circus causes violent gangs to form, some taking advantage of the situation and seizing power, others attempts to restore "order and cleanliness".
The film begins with a beautiful sequence. Janos enters a bar and persuades a group of drunks to create a model of the solar system. Dancing in circles the gang reenact a solar eclipse, a ballet which is beautiful until one looks closely. The participants are all drunk and in a state of mental confusion, readily believing Janos' apocalyptic description of a solar eclipse. To Janos, an eclipse is not a scientific event, but a quasi-religious one which heralds the end of mankind. Instead of rational explanation, Janos and his congregation thus cling to irrationality and superstition. Later, when Janos sees the giant whale up close, he attributes its presence to God; surely only a powerful, supernatural being could create such a funny creature.
Tarr then uses the whale as a metaphor for a kind of irrational, medieval superstition akin to blind, fascist obedience. No one in the film even considers taking a closer look at the whale, for if they had they would have noticed "The Prince" hidden behind it, a shadowy leader who represents nothing but an image onto which anyone can project whatever ideals they wish.
Midway in the film, Janos overhears his uncle talking about Andreas Werckmeister, a musician famous for dividing the octave into twelve half-step tones. Werckmeister believed that maths, music and astronomy were linked manifestations of the harmony of the universe, a view held by Pythagoras, who argued that most euphonious harmonies resulted from tones that reflected the proportions of simple integers (2:1, 3:2 etc). But basing musical scales on simple ratios leads to contradictions and octaves that aren't true, which led to people like Werckmeister (and others) seeking to find an "equal temperament" or some form of "new musical system".
By adopting this new system, Janos' uncle believes that mankind has deprived musical instruments of their divine tuning, replacing it with an artificial system which is nothing but an illusion; an illusion which western music is based on. Werckmeister is thus a sort of Promethian figure, taking the gift of knowledge/music away from God and handing it down to men.
Janos' uncle thus believes that music, and by extension life itself, was better when it belonged solely to God. He longs for a simpler universe ruled by a sovereign Master Figure, and fails to acknowledge the vast achievements developed under the Werckmeister scale. As a musicologist he fails to appreciate the higher level of organisation and harmonies which "man's creation" has led to.
The film's treatment of "order", "chaos", "anarchy" and "civilization", are thus reduced to musical terms; a three-way battle between order and symmetry (the unified world-view of classical Greece and the Middle Ages), superstition and mysticism and a more nuanced blending of the two. Consider again the first scene, in which Janos attempts to create heavenly order using the drunken bums. The bums fumble about, irregular in their movements, always falling out of position...and yet they are supremely beautiful, spinning in circles whilst the camera pulls back and the music swells. For Tarr, all quests for perfection must take into consideration humanity's imperfections; harmony depends on imprecision and compromise.
But Tarr makes a larger point. Late in the film we're introduced to a gun waving police chief, his dictatorial children and his lover, a woman who seeks to use the escalating chaos of the village to acquire more power. Using these characters, and various symbolic sequences, Tarr then sketches a political allegory about the fascist's quest for order, and fascism's unstoppable tilt toward collapse.
Hungary became a "Communist" (or rather, state capitalist) state after World War 2, the Soviet Union maintaining a military presence and enforcing Stalinist principles. This led to a revolt in 1956, which helped to topple authoritarianism and give birth to a kind of mixed ideology Socialism, a greatly liberalised approach to communism that lasted until 1989 (upon which democratic government and capitalism became the norm). But the film is not a strict allegory of Hungarian history, rather it aims to show how one political ideology can replace another when an aimless populace irrationally follows a charismatic demagogue. It is about how reactionary opportunists exploit superstition to gain power in the name of order, how people obsessed with "order" have contributed to disturbing the harmonic "disorder" of things and how impotent members of the intelligentsia often sit on the sidelines whilst the world burns.
Indeed, it's no surprise that the first thing the violent gang does in the film is to raid a hospital, destroying scientific equipment in a crazy rage. With science dead they become slaves to lies; an irrational force, an angry mob which is only halted by the sight of a naked old man. This man, his body frail, his bones protruding from his flesh, forces them to confront a mass of paradoxes. Humbled and disgusted, they retreat into the night. But the damage has already been done. The old order has been destroyed and a new era has begun, Janos, the boy who believed in apocalyptic whales and the mysterious beauty of god, ending the film in a sterile hospital ward, misdiagnosed by science and branded an insane criminal.
8.9/10 – Though comprised of only 39 shots, this is perhaps Tarr's most accessible film.