Werckmeister Harmóniák

Six years after the monumental, seven-and-a-quarter hour Sátántango, Béla Tarr presents a new full-length feature. Werckmeister Harmonies, ‘only’ two-and-a-half hours long, bears the unmistakable trademark of the Hungarian master, seen by some as the only true successor to Andrei Tarkovsky. As usual, Tarr films in black and white and the story is set in the Hungarian countryside, in a tiny village.In a beautiful opening scene lasting ten minutes, Tarr shows us a local bar at closing time where the drunken customers, whipped up by the young postman (the German actor Lars Rudolph), lose themselves in a dance intended to portray the solar system. The village is visited by a touring foreign circus, with as greatest attraction ‘The Prince’. The villagers visit the circus en masse to see this mysterious apparition, but after paying their hard-earned money, they have to make do with looking at a stuffed whale. When it becomes apparent that The Prince will not put in an appearance, the tense mood turns to complete rebellion.Tarr worked on Werckmeister Harmonies for four years, with the team behind Sátántango: cameraman Gàbor Medvigy, who was responsible for most of the shots, composer Mihály Vig and writer László Krasznahorkai, whose books had been used for three previous films by Tarr.