Béla Tarr's 2000 film "The Werckmeister Harmonies" deals with troubling events in a small town in Hungarian's eastern plains. After an opening scene showing simpleton postman János demonstrating to a bar full of drunks how the Earth and moon rotated around the sun with the help of three of the old geezers, he does his rounds in the early morning. Posters put up advertise the arrival of a giant whale with special guest, the Prince. This travelling circus, however, fills the townspeople not with eager anticipation but with dread. Indeed, when the Prince does appear, all hell breaks loose.Based on the novel "The Melancholy of Resistance" by László Krasznahorkai, the plot of this film is a transparent allegory for Hungary in the 1930s and 1940s: unable to keep its house in order, and falling for the demagoguery of fascism, Hungary brought on itself its long nightmare of Soviet domination. Tarr has curiously stated, however, that he is not offering us a historical allegory. By that I can only imagine that he is turning the allegory into a parable, using a reference to mid 20th-century Hungary as way of exploring more universal themes. Perhaps the central tension in the film is between a natural order, the ecstatic cooperation of free human beings, and an order dictated by a manipulative leader. I don't want to spoil anything that happens here, but Tarr's depiction of a mob let loose is harrowing.Tarr is truly the heir to Andrei Tarkovsky in treating filmmaking as "sculpting in time". "The Werckmeister Harmonies" was expertly filmed in 39 long, carefully composed shots. These carefully crafted visuals demand a high-definition release, though unfortunately one is not yet available as I write this.I was very moved by this film the first time I saw it, and on repeat viewings there has been much to appreciate. However, there is one painful flaw for me: Tarr's decision to use German actors for two main roles. Lars Rudolph, who plays János, and Fassbinder mainstay Hanna Schygulla as the sinister "auntie Tünde" give physically commanding performances, but they were presumably speaking in German while acting, and Tarr has had them clumsily dubbed into Hungarian, no synchronization between their mouths and the voices.However, if you are interested in auteur cinema, and certainly if you have enjoyed other films by this director, then I would recommend seeing "The Werckmeister Harmonies". There are scenes in this film that will remain with you as long as you live.

"Werckmeister Harmonies" is one of the most challenging films, with the greatest payoff, of any movie I've ever seen. A visually stunning adaptation of László Krasznahorkai's novel "The Melancholy of Resistance", this film tells the story of a sleepy Hungarian village over the course of about a day and a half when the circus rolls into town. With the circus come two main attractions: the body of a giant whale, and a 25-lb circus freak known only as "The Prince". These two attractions have profound, shocking effects on our hero Janos (excellently played by the boyish Lars Rudolph) and the inhabitants of the entire village, if not the entire country.The story presents a powerful allegory, every bit as biting and accusatory as Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", exposing the nature of human folly and the reason why society does, did, and always shall suck. I've found that the people who most enjoy this film are those who are moderately to extremely cynical; it shows us a very dark, nihilistic, nightmarish world similar to what we've seen in the classics "Brazil", Orson Welles' "The Trial" and basically every Herzog film ever made.But what makes this dark film enjoyable to watch is that doesn't just show us that humanity is flawed; it seeks to explain *why* humanity is flawed.I'll warn you up front, this is a very slow moving film with seemingly pointless, indulgent scenes of people silently walking down the street, eating a can of soup, or walking down the street in the opposite direction. Something to bear in mind is, just like in the epic "2001: A Space Odyssey" which has scenes of, say, an astronaut running on a giant hamster wheel for a painfully long time, these scenes are there to convey the monotony of existence. Even beyond that, these scenes are supposed to convey the comfort humans feel with tedious & ritualistic behavior. Order vs. chaos.The second thing that might help is the meaning of the title "Werckmeister Harmonies" which is the key to understanding the film's message. It's explained in a scene near the beginning, but I'll try to explain it in simpler terms here. In western music, we have a particular tuning system for all instruments. This system was developed by Andreas Werckmeister around the year 1700, and centuries later we still use it. The problem is, in a nutshell, it's wrong. Werckmeister's "well tempered" tuning is a compromise that allows instruments to sound good in a variety of keys, but it sacrifices the purity of sounding perfect in any 1 particular key. Pure, "natural" instruments such as the recorder flute sound great but they are limited to 1 key, 7 notes per octave. When western music took on complex instruments like the piano & guitar which play in every key, 12 notes per octave, a certain degree of fudging had to be made in their tuning. This is because in the natural world, the diverse frequencies of music don't add up to neatly repeating 12- note octaves as we want (for some reason we lose about 1/5 of a note every octave). Thus the music we know today, while not necessarily being unpleasant, is not as pure & simple as true "naturally tuned" instruments of yesteryear.How does this relate to the movie? The movie is about humans' need to quantify the unquantifiable, our need to create artificial order that suits us, even though it may be an aberration of nature. If you grasp this idea, along with the metaphor of the Werckmeister tuning, as well as the creative story that unfolds in the film, all augmented with intelligent cinematography, you will adore this film.Congratulations, you have successfully read through the driest & most boring IMDb review I have ever written. I have no doubt that you will enjoy solving the philosophical puzzle of the film "Werckmeister Harmonies".Similar, challenging films include: "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1969), "Aguirre the Wrath of God" (1972), or the more recent Coen brothers' philosophical "A Serious Man", or the brain-blasting Kaufman dark comedy/mindbender "Synecdoche, NY" (2008).

What this film appears to loose in its measured pace it makes up for in its multilayer's of meaning. Everything is symbolic, from the dousing of the stove in the opening shot foreshadowing the removal of warmth and comfort to come, to Janos walking from the light into darkness as he leaves the bar. Workmeister Harmonies is an in depth reworking of the police captain's speech in Satantango with particular emphasis on order. "The strange thing is there is nothing to fear about freedom... order, on the other hand, can often be frightening." This film explores both natural order and social order. Natural order in the motions of the planets giving explanations to the eclipse showing modern mans superior knowledge over the animal kingdom. The musical scale has imperfections. Harmonic intervals on a piano tuned perfectly in one key give discordant intervals in a different key. That is why Werkmeister modified the tuning of stringed instruments to give the best fit over a range of keys. The question then arises why a perfect God would create an imperfect system. This leads on to Eszter's statement that (the imperfections in the tonal scale) "Is a philosophical question…the tonal system has led us ultimately to a test of faith in which we ask on what do we base our belief? …We have to speak of a deception." As with other Tarr films, things of significance happen in the by goings. When Janos collects his morning deliveries the woman in the sorting office is relieving her boredom by talking to herself and addressing the room in general. Here is where the link between natural order; social order and superstition occur. "If a family is ordered it disappears without explanation. The world has gone completely mad. Now it's not down here but up there where something's gone wrong. There is no coal and it is 17° below. There is a circus and a prince who makes a speech nobody understands and suddenly the broken church clock starts working and trees are split so their roots come out of the ground (A reference to the miracles of Jesus - perhaps). Nothing is sacred, statues are pulled down and gravestones stolen. How can you explain it in normal terms? People bolt their door and tremble dreading what is to come. It is certain something is to come." Janos never doubts his faith. "All is well in the cosmos", he says. The whale, I think, represents the unknown, and because his faith is intact he has no problem to look into its eye. There he sees only the wonder of the Lord's creation. Mr Eszter and those who gather in the town do not want to discover the unknown themselves but want others to see it for them.The fundamental question that was alluded to but never asked and therefore never answered was 'Why, when the temperature was minus 17°C was there no coal in the region'. Was it a failure of natural order or was it deliberately withheld to destabilise the social order? If it was the latter then the prince is an agent for those who have the social order under their control. If the prince is a false Messiah then that is why he says of his followers, "What they build and what they will build; what they do and what they will do is delusion and lies." "What they think and what they will think is ridiculous. They think because they are afraid and those who are afraid know nothing."The police chief cannot control his own children let alone the town. Aunty Tunde is not as benign as she appears and is there to organise the military. The military do her bidding so she is on the side of those who control the prince. Is it helpful in understanding this story if we change the name Gyorgy Eszter to that of Winston Smith? When he is pushed by Tunde into organising action against those who are gathering in the town he says "When the town is under threat we have amusements in chaos (compare to endless sport and reality TV). We need solidarity, common sense is important. We cannot remain passive; to retain order we have to take action." This is a prime example of what we often meet in modern life; attacking the symptoms of a problem and not its cause. If Eszter really wanted to cure the problem he would find a way of providing more coal, not just clearing the destitute out of the town. But this is just what he is charged with doing – so that order can be restored but order for whom? Here, even the innocent are the guiltiest. As he says earlier, "We have to speak of a deception".What has changed between the beginning and the end of this story is that the civil administration has been replaced by a military one. "……Order on the other hand can often be frightening."

"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.