Werckmeister harmóniak

Hungary, Germany, France

Synopsis

This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian plain, in a provincial town, which is surrounded with nothing else but frost.

It is bitterly cold weather - without snow. It is twenty degrees below zero.

Even in this bewildered cold hundreds of people are standing around the circus tent, which is put up in the main square, to see - as the outcome of their wait - the chief attraction, the stuffed carcass of a real whale.

The people are coming from everywhere, from the neighbouring settlements, from different holes of the plain, even from quite far away parts of the country.

They are following this clumsy monster as a dumb, faceless, rag-wearing crowd.

This strange state of affairs - the appearance of the foreigners, the extreme frost - disturbs the order of the small town. Human connections are overturning, the ambitious personages of the story feel they can take advantage of this situation, while the people who are condemned to passivity anyway fall into an even deeper uncertainty.

The tension, growing to the unbearable, is brought to explosion by the figure of the Prince, who is pretending facelessness and is lying low behind the whale.

Even his mere appearance is enough to break loose the destroying emotions.

The apocalypse that sweeps away everything spares nothing. It does not spare the outsiders wrapped up in scientificness, does not spare the teenage enthusiasts, the people who have philistine fears for ease, the family - nothing that the European culture preserved from the last centuries.

The burst of instinctive rage helps the victory of the petty lust for power, that finally holds the rage down again, as the terrible end of an awful story, justifying the sarcastic game of nature - the whale and the cold without snow, which are unimaginable for Hungarian people.

The story is based on the novel "The Melancholy of Resistance" by Laszlö Krasznahorkai.

Director's Biography

Bella Tarr was born in Pécs, Hungary in 1955. He graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Theatre and Film in Budapest in 1981. Since 1981, he has been employed by MAFILM. In 1979-80, he was a member of the direction committee of the Béla Balázs Studio in Budapest, a film studio for young filmmakers. In 1989-90, he was in Berlin on a DAAD grant and since 1990 he has been working as a visiting professor at the Film Academy in Berlin. He has been a member of the European Film Academy since 1996.

Selected filmography:
1977 FAMILY NEST
1980 THE OUTSIDER
1981 PREFAB PEOPLE
1982 MACBETH, video
1984 ALMANAC OF FALL
1987 DAMNATION
1989 CITY LIFE — THE LAST BOAT
1991-1994 SATANTANGO
1995 JOURNEY ON THE PLAIN, video
1996-2000 WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES
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Cast & Crew

Directed by: Béla Tarr

Written by: László Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr

Produced by: Franz Goëss, Miklós Szita, Paul Saadoun, Joachim von Vietinghoff

Cinematography: Emil Novák, Rob Tregenza, Patrick de Ranter, Miklós Gurbán, Erwin Lanzensberger, Gábor Medvigy

Editing: Ágnes Hranitzky

Original Score: Mihály Víg

Cast: Lars Rudolph (János Valuska), Peter Fitz (György Eszter), Hanna Schygulla (Tünde Eszter)

Nominations and Awards

  • Feature Film Selection 2000