It’s a testament to the cruelty of time and the venality and susceptability of man that Werckmeister Harmonies has bridged many chasms and somehow become the most easily relatable film from Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky for American audiences, not because of any sort of extensive flourish in the capacity to empathize, but rather, simply, that anyone living through the past eight years of American history just cannot simply pretend that elaborate demonstrations of the mass appeal of inarticulate fascism and chaotic demagogues are something to merely be viewed through the veil of ‘Eastern Europe,’ when there’s no aspect of this film, from the perceptive way science and art become enemies of collective mania all the way to the dependence that all of us rely on to whomever is on the inside, connected to power in enough of a capacity that we may live- merely live on the crumbs and spare change that slip from the pillaged table.
Taken from Laszlo Krasnahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, in tribute to whose sentence structures I have undertaken this introduction just as I aim to pay homage to this film’s thirty-nine shots by doing this in 3.9 sentences, Werckmeister Harmonies is the fruition of a school of Hungarian cinema going back decades, but most fun to explore in the work of Miklos Jancso (The Red and The White, Private Vices Public Virtues, Red Psalm), who had been experimenting with the combination of radical political thought and extended, fluid single-take scenes since the ‘60s- with the added bonus of a bit of horny optimism and ample flesh, a form of expression that was viewed by some as decadent and by others as obsessively formalist, which let’s be real are two exceptional ways to hammer away at personal pain and national trauma and make it into something new, supple and stark.
If you saw the seven and a half hour Satantango back when we showed it on film in 200? or in its rapturously lovely restoration in 2019, then you know how Tarr and Hranitzky work, which is exquisite black-and-white photography and not rushing into foolishness, moving with deliberation and purpose and letting the viewer sit with everything that’s happening, not relying on constructivist editing or Slavko Vorkapich mind games, letting you steep in stark emotional truth and often incredible performances, sometimes dubbed into Hungarian, widely known by more diligent linguists than I to be a very difficult language for non-native speakers to master- even Tilda Swinton, who worked with Tarr and Hranitzky in 2007’s troubled The Man From London, had a Hungarian dub artist- but always reliant on the human face, in this case Lars Rudolph’s eyes, the site of human decency bearing the sight of a perpetual disappointing pain that drags humanity down like gravity, or in the cruel sparkle of Hanna Schygulla’s posture, collaborator chic she’s been refining since the Fassbinder days, and the sheer heft of ideas incarnated in teeming throngs of bodies.
To watch this film now is an illustration of how it all can happen, all too easily, a lifechanging work of art for more than two decades that has nonetheless remained constant even as the world continues to unwind on such a sudden scale, leaving us to contemplate the movements of the cosmos not to gauge our impact upon them but rather to take comfort in our inability to do so, chastened by our own limitations, reflective and wounded, deprived of even the privilege of being a cautionary tale, replaying our tragedies, bound to the knowledge that there was nothing we could have done anyway, music itself having left, suspended in silence and
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