Werckmeister Harmonies
June 2 - 14, 2023
One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. New 4k restoration.
Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens, which builds inexorably toward violence and destruction. In thirty-nine of his signature long takes, engraved in ghostly black and white, Tarr conjures an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.
- Director: Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky
- Principal Cast: Lars Rudolph, Hanna Schygulla, Peter Fitz, János Derzsi
- Country: Hungary
- Year: 2000
- Running Time: 145 min.
- Producer: Franz Goëss, Paul Saadoun, Miklós Szita, Joachim von Vietinghoff
- Screenplay: Béla Tarr
- Editors: Ágnes Hranitzky
- Music: Mihály Vig
- Language: Hungarian, Slovak
- Has Subtitles: Yes