Werckmeister Harmonies

Béla Tarr's film, set in a small town in Hungary. A show comes to the town. Inside the truck is a dead whale, and with it a figure whose face is never seen, the Prince. People come to see the whale, but something else is the real matter in the town: a tension is accumulating, nobody says why, and the crowd grows every day. In the end the crowd moves. The narrative turns around a young postman named János. Apart from him, nobody tries to understand what is happening. The formal property is the number of cuts: a film of roughly two and a half hours was shot in around forty shots. Scenes run for minutes without a cut and the camera walks with the characters. The opening scene in the bar, where an eclipse of the sun is staged using people, is the best-known example of the method. The source is László Krasznahorkai's novel; the writer was Tarr's long-standing collaborator. The music is by Mihály Víg, and a single theme circles through the film. One of the principal works of its kind for anyone who likes slow cinema and formal radicalism. A warning about pace is in order: the film never speeds up and the plot proceeds without explaining itself.