And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
Bela Tarr‘s “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000) is maddening if you are not in sympathy with it, mesmerizing if you are. If you have not walked out after 20 or 30 minutes, you will thereafter not be able to move from your seat. “Dreamlike,” Jim Jarmusch calls it. Nightmarish as well; doom-laded, filled with silence and sadness, with the crawly feeling that evil is penetrating its somber little town. It is filmed elegantly in black and white, the camera movements so stately they almost float through only 39 shots in a film of 145 minutes.
To know where we stand as the film begins, we should start with these words by the director, Tarr:
“I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another … All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine — time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.”
It is the dead of winter, almost closing time in a shabby pub. An eclipse of the sun is due, and Janos (Lars Rudolph), the local paper carrier, takes it upon himself to explain what will happen in the heavens. He pushes the furniture to the walls, and enlists a drunk to stand in the center of the floor and flutter his hands, like the sun’s rays. Then he gets another pal to be the earth, and walk in circles around the sun. And then a third is the moon, walking in his own circles around the earth. All of these circles stagger around, the drunks rotating, and then the moon comes between the sun and the earth, and there is an eclipse: “The sky darkens, then goes all dark,” Janos says. “The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds … the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then … complete silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us?”
Janos is well-liked in the town. “How’s our Janos?” he’s asked. He receives a visit from his Auntie Tunde (Hanna Schygulla), who insists he visit her estranged husband, Uncle Gyorgy (Peter Fitz) and enlist him in leading the townspeople against unnamed but imminent threats. She gives him a suitcase to take along, a case that is never opened or explained. Uncle Gyorgy is a musicologist who believes the world went wrong when Andreas Werckmeister (1645-1706) popularized a system of harmonics that clashed with the music of the celestial spheres. Janos and Gyorgy walk to the town square, both held in frame in a very long shot, until they arrive at clumps of people hunched in the cold around the truck containing the whale. Later, when Janos buys his ticket and goes inside, he regards the whale’s enormous, lifeless, staring eye.
Bela Tarr (born 1955), is a Hungarian director more talked about than viewed, in part because few audiences have an appetite for, and few theaters the time to play, his films like “Satantango” (1994), which is 415 minutes long.
I find that Tarr does, in fact, make films both unique and original, and in a style I find beautiful. I prefer the purity of black and white to color, I like very long takes if they serve a purpose and are not simply stunts, I am drawn into an air of mystery, I find it compelling when a film establishes an immediate, tangible, time and place. For all of its phantasmal themes, “Werckmeister Harmonies” is resolutely realistic. Every person, every room, every street, every action, every line of dialogue, feels as much like cinema verite as the works of Frederick Wiseman.
So do you just sit there, friends ask, and look at the shots? Well, yes, that’s what everybody does when they watch a film. But they don’t always see the shots as shots. Bela Tarr’s style seems to be an attempt to regard his characters with great intensity and respect, to observe them without jostling them, to follow unobtrusively as they move through their worlds, which look so ordinary and are so awesome, like ours.
Béla Tarr rejected traditional plotting. For him, film was not about "action" but about the texture of reality. His work captures the weight of atmosphere—the rain, the wind, the mud, and the slow, inexorable decay of time.
The dead whale functions as a "Leviathan" – a symbol of an alien, monumental nature cast into a world of corruption. To János, it is proof of God’s creative power; to the incited mob, it is a catalyst for their pent-up rage and nihilism. It serves as a "silent witness" to human decay.
Andreas Werckmeister & Music
The film's title refers to "well-tempered tuning." György Eszter believes that this mathematical compromise in music planted the seed for the decay of truth in the world. If the foundations of harmony are "false," the society built upon them cannot be harmonious either.
Order vs. Chaos
The film examines the paradox of order:
Cosmic Order: The movement of the planets (shown in the famous opening scene in the bar).
Artificial Order: Werckmeister’s music theory.
Political Order: The transition from anarchy to totalitarian control.
Interpretation
Werckmeister Harmonies is often read as a political allegory for post-Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, but it works equally well as a universal fable. It demonstrates how easily a society can slide into barbarism when hope dies and demagogues (like the Prince) fill the vacuum. The scene in the hospital, where the rioters stop before a gaunt, naked old man, marks the only moment where human cruelty hits a limit – the absolute, pitiable frailty of life itself.
The infamous hospital scene serves as the film’s moral climax. As the mob ruthlessly beats the sick and helpless, their momentum is suddenly halted by the sight of a gaunt, naked old man standing in a bathtub. This figure—the "absolute victim"—is so fragile that even the rioters are forced to recognize their own reflection in his vulnerability. It is the only moment where human cruelty hits a limit, suggesting that even in total darkness, the "pitiable frailty of life" remains a sacred, terrifying barrier.
Ultimately, the film posits that when the masses destroy the "fake" harmony of civilization, they do not find freedom; they merely pave the way for a more rigid, military-style authoritarianism, as seen in the film's final takeover by Tünde.
Long Takes: With only 39 cuts in over two hours, the film forces the viewer to experience every movement and every second of decay.
Cinematography: The camera (by Gábor Medvigy and others) literally floats through the streets, often in slow, choreographed tracking shots behind the characters.
Mihály Vig’s Score: The melancholic piano theme is one of the most recognizable motifs in film history, heightening the sense of an unavoidable tragedy.
The Opening: The Cosmic Dance
The film begins with a tour-de-force sequence in a local pub. János uses the drunken patrons to perform a "ballet" representing a solar eclipse.
Significance: This scene establishes János's character as a bridge between the mundane (the pub) and the sublime (the cosmos). It is the only moment of warmth and "harmony" in the film, showing that even the lowliest figures can participate in the celestial order.
Cinematography: A single, circular take that mimics the orbits of the planets.
The Hospital Rampage
Perhaps the most harrowing scene in cinema, the mob enters a hospital to beat patients. The camera follows them in a relentless, slow-moving tracking shot.
The Limit of Evil: The violence only stops when the mob encounters an old, frail, naked man in a bathtub. This "Ecce Homo" moment forces the attackers to confront the ultimate fragility of human existence, leading to a sudden, silent retreat.
Sátántangó (1994)
What can you do in eight hours? Work a full day’s work or log a solid night’s sleep. Run 60 eight-minute miles—that’s over two marathons—or microwave 240 Hot Pockets. Or watch Sátántangó.
I recently set aside a whole Sunday to watch the film critics consider to be Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s masterpiece. Filmed between 1990 and 1994—delayed in part because political antipathy toward his previous effort, Almanac of Fall, had put Tarr in “really deep shit”—Sátántangó actually runs 435 black and white minutes, closer to seven and a half than eight hours.
I decided to read Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó before watching Tarr’s. Though the novel, the author’s first, was originally published in Hungary in 1985, it became available to English readers only last year via New Directions’ handsomely bound hardcover edition of George Szirtes’s translation. I finished the novel the night before my chosen viewing date; for what it’s worth, the film proved to be fairly loyal to the book, both in terms of mood—grim and darkly funny—and narrative shape. The “story,” an aspect of filmmaking secondary in Tarr’s estimation to image, sound, and emotion (“I don’t care about stories. I never did. Every story is the same…. The stories are just covering something.”), involves the return or “resurrection” of two men thought dead to a derelict farm estate. After the body of a local young girl (Erika Bók) turns up, the messiah-figure Irimiás (Mihály Vig) offers a frank but seemingly empathetic appraisal of the estate’s depleted and dejected community; then, with the help of his sidekick Petrina (Putyi Horváth), he convinces the hangers-on that if they give him their pooled savings, he will arrange a better future for them… Structurally, the film retains the novel’s organizing “tango”: six steps (chapters) forward, six steps back. Shifts in perspective create overlaps or folds in the chronology, so that, for example, in one scene we see the eponymous dance from the not-yet-dead little girl’s point of view, and then again in another from the point of view of carousers themselves.
This latter scene, which you can watch here, demonstrates a few of the characteristics typical of Tarr’s work. First, the long take. In “Talking About Tarr,” a symposium transcribed in the Sátántangó DVD booklet, moderator Susan Doll compares an average Hollywood film’s “1,100 shots per 100 minutes” to the 39 shots that make up Werckmeister Harmonies’ 145 minutes. That’s an average shot length of 5.5 seconds vs. almost four minutes! Over Sátántangó’s 435 minutes there are something like 172 shots, averaging 152 seconds or about two and a half minutes per shot. This stylistic habit is so common in Tarr’s films that one interviewer begins his question about it, “You’re probably sick of being asked about the long takes in your films…”—to which Tarr responds: “Yes, I’m getting mad about it. I’ve answered it a thousand times.”
Karrer (Miklós B. Székely) wakes up every day in the shadow of the mining carts that clank back and forth in a seemingly endless cycle above the decrepit village in which he lives. He spends his life meandering from one rundown bar to another while espousing his thoughts and opinions to a series of people who have heard it all before. At one of his favorite spots, Titanik, there is a singer (Vali Kerekes) with whom he is currently involved; however, she is unfortunately married — and has told Karrer that she wants to end their affair.
Béla Tarr's bleak and bitter film is a glacially paced nightmare in which the scare factor has been replaced with desperate melancholy; it is composed with his characteristic long takes, anvil silences and fiercely unsmiling faces, shot in undersea monochrome, and prefaced with Tarr's habitual austere titles in Times Roman. The movie is about the end of time and the end of days. At 56 years old, Tarrhas announcedthat this is his final film.
It is a meditation on Nietzsche who, in Turin in 1889, was said to have seen a horse being thrashed, and protectively threw his arms around the beast, then sobbingly collapsed due to some kind of breakdown, possibly a stroke. Whatever it was, the calamity neither destroyed nor made him stronger, but sent Nietzsche into a long decline that ended with his death in 1900.
Tarr's film imagines what happened to that horse, whose suffering triggered the philosopher's collapse. It is being driven by a hard-faced, bearded man back to his farm, where he gives a terse series of orders to a younger woman, evidently his daughter. We are not obviously anywhere near Turin, or Italy, but rather in Tarr's central European wasteland (it is shot in Hungary), ravaged by a continuous gale that finally makes this setting look like a polar icecap. The orchestral score by Tarr's long-time composer Mihály Víg is as incessant as the wind, repeating and repeating like Philip Glass.
The horse now refuses to work, or to drink, and the old man and younger woman, stricken with dismay, receive disturbing news from a neighbour about an approaching apocalyptic breakdown. Are we witnessing the death of God? Or man? Among the characters, the horse has a Houyhnhnm-like dignity. Perhaps it was the Fool to Nietzsche's Lear, or perhaps Nietzsche has transmigrated into the horse itself, and now impassively watches humanity's final days – though the old man, with one arm incapacitated by a stroke, has himself a faint look of Nietzsche. The movie exerts an eerie grip, with echoes of Bresson, Bergman and Dreyer, but is utterly distinctive: a vision of a world going inexorably into a final darkness.
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