I Would Like to See It: Werckmeister Harmonies

Werckmeister Harmonies’ two-hour and twenty-minute running time consists of only 39 shots, most at eye-level, most constantly or near-constantly on the move at paces varying between meandering and brisk. Directed with tremendous restraint and nearly invisible skill by husband and wife team Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, the film unfolds with the hazy gravity of Biblical allegory and the brutal precision of expert polemic. Young newspaper delivery man János Valuska (Lars Rudolph) instructs bar patrons on how to act out the movements of the celestial spheres. A faceless “Prince” whips a mob of circus-goers into a violent frenzy. An aging and well-respected pianist and composer, György (Peter Fitz), endorses the imminent fascist occupation to escape the minor inconvenience of sharing a home with his own wife. The world turns on and in such trivialities.

Throughout the film, Tarr and Hranitzsky’s camera moves just as Valuska prepares us to observe the motions of the heavens. We orbit the young delivery man in tight circles, tidally locked. We revolve as we turn about the poles of knots of grousing revolutionaries, looking inward, outward, inward, outward. Werckmeister Harmonies most closely resembles an elaborate and wholly naturalistic piece of clockwork, wheels turning within wheels as individual dramas set into motion the obscure and impenetrable dance of politics and mob violence. A tide of rioters break into a psychiatric ward to beat imprisoned enemies of the regime, only to withdraw in shamefaced silence at the sight of a naked and emaciated old man trembling in the shower. Later, a distraught Valuska reads the journal of another rioter who recounts participating in the fatal gang rape of two postal workers. Rhyme and reason dissolve.

It’s these same revolutions which usher in the end of Tarr and Hranitzky’s film. As Valuska flees along the railroad tracks outside his nameless town, a helicopter locates him and begins to circle. Its rotors form one revolution, its movement another, and as its downblast pulses waves through grass and water, loose soil and underbrush, Valuska staggers to a halt, horrified and hypnotized in equal measure. These revolutions turn as easily upon the horrors of brute violence as they do the gentle warmth of a night drinking with friends. Like the great stuffed whale kept as an attraction by the Prince’s circus, all signs and symbols of power, all manifestations of the godhead, are ambiguous in nature and amoral in their silence and inaction.