“Its uniquely cinematic and emotion-charged experience makes the effort worthwhile.”—Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
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.
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. 2000, Hungary/Italy/Germany/France, DCP, in Hungarian and Slovak with English subtitles, 145 minutes. Recommended for 16+