Werckmeister Harmonies: Tarr's Whale and the Mob

Andreas Werckmeister was a German organist and music theorist who died in 1706, and his contribution to civilisation was a compromise. The pure intervals produced by physics do not fit into an octave neatly — the arithmetic refuses — so a keyboard tuned to perfect harmony in one key is unplayable in another. Werckmeister was among those who codified the fudge: bend every interval slightly out of true, distribute the error evenly, and a single instrument can play in all keys. Everything is now slightly wrong, and nothing is unbearably wrong, and the whole of Western music since Bach sits on top of that bargain.

In Béla Tarr’s film, a provincial Hungarian musicologist named György Eszter has decided the bargain was a catastrophe. He sits in his room, retuning his piano toward the natural harmonics, arguing that the compromise corrupted music at the root and that we have all been listening to a lie for three hundred years. It is a crank’s project. It is also the title, and the thesis, and the reason the film is about a mob.

The setup

Werckmeister Harmonies was released in 2000, directed by Tarr with his editor and constant collaborator Ágnes Hranitzky, and adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance, with Krasznahorkai on the screenplay. It runs a little over two hours and consists of thirty-nine shots. Not thirty-nine sequences. Thirty-nine cuts of the scissors in the entire film.

The place is a small Hungarian town in an unnamed winter, and it is cold in the way that only Eastern European monochrome can be cold. János Valuska (Lars Rudolph) is a young postman with an open, credulous, luminous face — the last innocent in the county. He delivers papers, he cares for the elderly Eszter (Peter Fitz), and he believes in the cosmos with the uncomplicated devotion of a child.

A circus arrives. It consists of a lorry, an enormous dead whale, and a figure billed as the Prince, whom almost nobody sees. The whale is parked in the main square. Men begin to gather around it, and they keep gathering, and they do not leave, and they do not speak. Meanwhile Eszter’s estranged wife Tünde — played by Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder’s great star, which is a casting decision doing an enormous amount of historical work — is organising a civic movement under the slogan of a tidy yard and an orderly house, and she can see exactly what a silent crowd of several hundred men in a square might be good for.

The shot that teaches you the film

The film opens in a bar at closing time. Valuska is asked to do his party piece, and he arranges the drunks into the solar system: this man is the Sun, stand here; you are the Earth, walk around him; you are the Moon, orbit the Earth. He sets them turning, staggering, in the smoke and the yellow light, and he narrates an eclipse — the darkness falling, the animals going quiet, the terror of the sky — and the drunks revolve, and for about ten minutes the camera moves among them and does not cut.

Everything is in that scene. The film is going to be about a small group of ordinary men, in a room, being arranged into a shape by someone with a vision. It is going to be about how beautiful that is while it is happening. And it is going to be about what happens when the man doing the arranging has a different idea in mind.

Tarr’s long take is often described as a test of patience, and that description is a failure of attention. The shot is not static and it is not empty. The camera prowls; it selects; it changes its mind about what it cares about; it drifts away from a face and finds a wall and stays with the wall long enough that you begin to attend to the wall. What Tarr has actually built is a machine for transferring the burden of looking from the editor to you. In a conventionally cut film, the director has decided what matters and the cuts enforce the decision. Here nobody decides. You are in the room, and the room lasts as long as rooms last, and by the fortieth minute your eye is doing work it has not done since childhood. Our essay on the long take as an instrument of dread covers the technique’s uses across genre; Tarr is the extreme case, the man who took it past style and into a moral position.

Mihály Vig’s score is the other half. A short, circling, unbearably sad theme on a handful of instruments, repeated across the film with almost no variation. It arrives, it says the same thing again, and it stops. Tarr uses it the way Werckmeister used his tuning: one small compromise, applied everywhere, holding the whole structure together.

Why the riot is the best riot in cinema

The men in the square eventually move, and the sequence that follows is the reason people who have seen this film cannot stop talking about it.

Everything about how cinema normally films a mob is discarded. There is no cutting between faces. There is no roaring on the soundtrack. There is no leader, no inciting speech, no camera thrust into the middle of the chaos to make you feel present. Tarr simply puts the camera in front of a large number of men walking, in the dark, in step, and travels backwards ahead of them for a very long time.

They are silent. That is the thing. Screen riots are loud because filmmakers believe noise reads as danger, and Tarr understands that the genuinely frightening crowd is the one that has finished discussing it. These men have nothing to say. They walk at a steady pace towards a hospital and they wreck it, methodically, room by room, and the camera stays with them at the same distance and the same speed throughout, refusing either to condemn them or to get out of the way.

The scene achieves what a thousand handheld war films fail at, and it does so by removing every technique those films rely on. No cuts, no score, no shouting, no close-ups. What is left is arithmetic: a large number of bodies, moving in one direction, with no argument left in them.

The ancestor

The forebear is Miklós Jancsó, and he is the most unjustly forgotten major director in Europe. In the 1960s Jancsó made The Round-Up and The Red and the White — Hungarian films built from vast, choreographed, minutes-long tracking shots across empty plains, in which uniformed men move groups of other men about, and nobody has an interior life, and power is shown purely as geometry: who walks, who stands, who is made to strip, who is on a horse. Jancsó took psychology out of the frame and left only the shape of coercion.

Tarr’s whole grammar comes from that. The long take, the moving camera, the crowd as a body rather than a collection of characters, the flat refusal of interiority — Jancsó had all of it thirty years earlier, and Jancsó was doing it about the Hungarian past because the Hungarian present could not be filmed. Tarr inherits the machine and points it at his own century. If you want one thing to watch after this film, make it The Red and the White, and the debt will be audible in the first reel.

Within Tarr, the run is Sátántangó → Werckmeister Harmonies → The Turin Horse, and this is the accessible one, the one to start with, the one that fits inside an evening.

The case against

Tarr’s method is coercive. He has decided how long you will look at a thing, and he has removed your ability to negotiate, and there is a reasonable objection that the profundity people report is a side effect of the duration rather than the content. Hold on any wall for four minutes with sad music underneath and a large number of viewers will find it meaningful. That is a real problem and Tarr does not answer it.

The Eszter material is where I feel it most. The tuning monologue is superb; the character around it is a device — a stand-in for the film’s own thesis, wheeled out to state it. And Tünde is a political abstraction with a great actress inside her, which is a waste of Schygulla and an unusually blunt piece of writing in a film this careful.

Also, honestly: the parable is legible almost immediately. Whale arrives, town breaks, order returns with tanks. If you want a film to surprise you, this one has made its point by the fortieth minute and then spends ninety more minutes making you inhabit it. Tarr would say inhabiting is the point. He would be right and it would still be a long night.

The verdict

Werckmeister Harmonies is the most persuasive argument anyone has made that cinema can do something no other medium can. The whale is a good image and the riot is a great sequence, and the thing that lasts is smaller: a young man in a bar, turning drunks into planets, absolutely certain that the universe is beautiful and can be explained, ten minutes before the town proves otherwise.

Tarr’s argument is Werckmeister’s, run backwards. A civilisation is a tuning system — an agreed set of small, evenly distributed wrongnesses that lets the instrument be played at all. When somebody insists on the pure interval, the instrument stops working, and men gather in a square. The film restored beautifully a few years ago and plays repertory whenever a programmer is feeling brave. Go, and sit near the front.

Spoilers below

The mob’s march ends in the hospital, and the wrecking stops in a bathroom. They pull back a curtain and find a naked old man standing in a bath — ancient, silent, undefended — and the men look at him, and the violence simply drains out of them. They turn round and leave.

It is the finest moment Tarr ever filmed, and it works because the film has spent two hours removing every emotional handrail. There is no music sting, no line of dialogue, no cut to a weeping face. A body too frail to be an enemy interrupts an unstoppable process by existing, and the process breaks. Tarr gives you the mechanism and no commentary.

Valuska sees the aftermath and runs. The army comes — helicopters, a tank in the square, order restored by the state, which is the outcome Tünde has been engineering from the start. She gets her tidy yard. Valuska is caught and ends the film catatonic in an institution, the last innocent finally corrected, and Eszter comes to sit beside him and can do nothing at all.

The final shot is Eszter walking out to the square in the fog, alone, to look at the whale. The circus is gone. The carcass has been abandoned where it stood. He regards it for a while, this enormous dead thing that arrived, broke a town, and was left behind by the people who charged admission to see it — and then he walks away into the mist, and Tarr holds, and the film ends without telling you what the whale was.

That is the correct ending, because the whale was never the point. The men were already in the square. The whale only gave them somewhere to stand.