Werckmeister Harmonies

One of the major cinematic achievements of the past quarter century, Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky's mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, the filmmakers conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.

Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time 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 that builds inexorably toward violence and destruction.

Review: "Werckmeister Harmonies may be Tarr’s masterpiece (and some of his followers might even have the heretical suspicion that it achieves as much in two-and-a-half hours as the great Sátántangó in seven.)" – The Guardian

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