Werckmeister Harmonies
Director: Ágnes Hranitzky, Béla Tarr Run Time: 139 min. Format: DCP Release Year: 2001 Language: Hungarian w/English subtitles
Starring: Hanna Schygulla, Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz
Premiere Reissue!
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. 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. – Janus Films Brattle Debut!
“An unabashed art film of real daring and power.” – Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
“Mysterious, poetic and allusive.” – Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times