Werckmeister Harmonies
Dirs. Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky Hungary 2000 145’ (12A)
Hungarian with English subtitles | 35mm transferred to digital video
‘Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. 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. In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, auteur Béla Tarr and co-director-editor Ágnes Hranitzky conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.’ (Criterion)
‘A second viewing of Werckmeister Harmonies reveals to me something in it more concrete about fascism and the sleep of reason, about the longing to submit to power which lurks just below the surface, to which humanity might so easily surrender, as if in a somnambulist trance … 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.’
— ★★★★★ Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 2024
Level 1 Cinema
Pop-up bar open for drinks from 18.00. Doors open 18:30; Film starts 18:45.
