Unspoken

Journal for contemplative cinema

SEEKING ORDER IN DISORDER: BÉLA TARR’S WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES

Ian Johnston

The stark black-and-white, the long takes, the constant play with light and shadow and with closeness and distance, the elaborately choreographed sequence shots – it is easy to be mesmerised by the formalism of Tarr’s cinema. ¹ Certainly Tarr’s declaration that “film is not about telling a story” is an invitation to consider stylistic features over questions of theme, character, or narrative. ² Inevitably, this will be an audience’s reaction to a film like Satantango, whose seven-hour length is so much in excess to the requirements of the story and, in particular, whose opening eight-minute shot of cows walking through a village has plenty to offer in terms of mood and texture but almost nothing as far as the “story” is concerned. In spite of a comparatively reduced length (just short of two-and-a-half hours), Tarr still manages to up the ante, so to speak, with Werckmeister Harmonies‘ opening shot. This time it lasts eleven minutes, starting with a close-up on a stove door, which is then opened, after which a hand leans in to douse the fire inside. A shift in camera position reveals a quintessentially lugubrious Tarr setting: a dreary village pub at closing time, drunks stumbling around, one even semi-comatose on the floor.

For the rest of this stunning single shot Tarr executes an elaborate choreography of actors and camera, playing one off against the other to offer a constant shift in camera distance and height. Here, we see what appears to be a nightly ritual in this pub, whereby János Valuska – as close to a central character as the film has – orchestrates the patrons in a recreation of the movement of the sun, earth, and moon during an eclipse. János is a visionary figure, a kind of holy fool whose otherworldly perspective is recognised by his fellow townspeople, although it can just as easily be mocked (“How are things in the cosmos?” someone asks him at the post office). Here, a thematic tone is set for the film by János’ evocation of the darkness of the universe, an apocalyptic threat, and a re-establishment of natural order. Yet, the drunken actors hardly seem in tune with János’ visions, and the symbolic climax of this recreation is undercut, in an echo of the cynicism and sardonic black humour that characterised Satantango, when the publican roars “That’s enough! Out of here, you tubs of beer!” ³

This opening shot is weighted down with “meaning,” yet its significance only begins to become clear when viewed in retrospect. In fact, János’ re-enactment of an eclipse is the first instance in the film of a search for order and harmony. This will be contrasted with other instances: Gyuri Ezster’s search for harmony in musical theory; Tünde Ezster’s fascist law-and-order movement; and, as a dark reverse-image, the chaos promoted by the Prince and enacted in the attack on the hospital. However, placed as the entry point into the world and story of the film, this first shot is perplexing and opaque, in its own way as enigmatic as Satantango’s cows.

When Tarr then cuts to a reverse track outside, we are in the familiar world of the Satantango camera aesthetic, the long tracking shots that obsessively follow a character as he or she trudges onward. Here, János walks the darkened street, the camera tracking before him and keeping him at a distance, a silhouette only occasionally illuminated by the pools of light cast by the street lights, the whole mood keyed by Mihály Vig’s lilting, looping score that has carried over from the previous scene/shot but now predominates on the soundtrack.

Werckmeister Harmonies may be much reduced in length in comparison to Satantango, but, as the description of the first two shots shows, there’s no diminution in Tarr’s aesthetic strategies. Indeed, there are shots that amount to a cinematic tour de force: a long walk, initially with conversation, made by Janós and retired music professor Gyuri Eszter, the camera holding their upper bodies in medium-shot as it tracks to their side; a reverse track down the street before the mass of men on the march, the camera repeatedly craning up and down; or the elaborate sequence shot that tracks through the rooms of the hospital as the rioters run amok.

The film’s major theme is the search for order and harmony in a disintegrating world. The instances of this within the film are all flawed to a greater or lesser extent. Janós is in one respect a surrogate figure for Tarr himself – he directs his pub drunks within the film just as Tarr does outside it. Yet, unlike Tarr, Janós is blind to the darker realities of the world around him. Eszter is wrongheaded in his musical theorising that attempts to return to an imagined past harmony of the universe. And Tünde, with the fascistic order that she seeks and succeeds in imposing on her society, is cruel and manipulative.

Tarr answers this with the aesthetic ordering that he brings to this world, with the structure and formal unity that underlies his elaborate sequence shots. This formal unity is seen in the way the passage through time, marked by the sequence shot, will also be a passage across a delineated physical space. So, in Werckmeister Harmonies’ opening shot, we start at the innermost point within the pub (we will never see any further in) and end at the door to the outside world; or, in the attack on the hospital, the camera starts at an entrance corridor, travels down corridors and through rooms to the climax of the shot, and then retreats almost to its starting point.

Tarr’s ordering aesthetic is also reflected in the symmetry to be found between shots. For example, two shots of the Harrer couple (János lives in a room in their building) are exact replicas of each another, both starting in the courtyard and following the protagonist of the shot to end in the lane outside – the first time the camera follows Lajos Harrer, the second time his wife. There is an important emotional undercurrent to this second shot. In the aftermath to the film’s violent climax János has found Lajos’ body and he has just lied to Mrs Harrer, denying he knows anything of his whereabouts; and the way Tarr then repeats that earlier shot, literally replacing the missing Lajos with his wife, underlines in a restrained but powerful way the strong emotional situation.

This is an important point: that there is more than mere formalism to Tarr’s aesthetic. In fact, when Tarr talks of film being more than a story, he is really pointing to the humanism that underpins his cinema. In that same interview he defines the aim of his cinema as a way “that we can get closer to people, so that we can understand everyday life, and so that we can understand human nature, why we are like we are.” Tarr’s long-take aesthetic is not simply a formalistic reaction against the ubiquitous fast-cutting of modern cinema. ⁴ For him, it is an issue of rejecting what he calls “the logic of the story,” the editing of one piece of information against another and then against another, in favour of “the logic of life.” ⁵  Tarr places the characters at the centre of his cinema; he pays most attention, as he says in the same NFT interview, to “the internal psychological processes.”

The other side to this interest in character, everyday life, and human nature is Tarr’s approach to his audience. He treats that audience as a partner in his filmmaking process and part of that partnership process is an attempt at effecting some change within the audience through their contact with the human drama enacted in his films: “They [the audience] leave a bit differently, as a different person as when they came in – if not as an entirely different person, then with something more in their heart. And if we get that result, we’re happy and satisfied.”

In the case of Satantango the very length of the film is essential to fulfilling Tarr’s humanist aims of bringing characters and audience together. The length of time that Tarr makes a viewer spend with a character within a single sequence can only increase empathy and understanding. This is a rare and enriching experience in narrative cinema, because most filmmakers never give us this luxury of time. ⁶

One example from Satantango of this narrative approach, taking time with a character (and one that is not on the surface a particularly sympathetic one), is a single shot from the first sequence devoted to the alcoholic doctor. What do we see? The doctor sits at his desk. His housekeeper arrives, talks to him, and then departs. The doctor slowly gets up, locks the door, pisses in the toilet, flushes the toilet with water from a bucket, returns to his desk, takes out one of his many notebooks, starts writing, stops, and finally stares blankly ahead. Here is Tarr’s “logic of life,” a series of events that are worth attending to irrespective of their value to the understanding of any “story,” worth it because they bring us close to experiencing the life of this character with him. And what makes this compelling for us as viewers is the formal control Tarr brings to this scene, filming it as one shot with constant but subtle shifts in camera position; a shot that in itself is of great formal beauty.

There is a similar moment in Werckmeister Harmonies, of János at home in his room. It starts with a close-up on a wood-fire stove grille door (a formal rhyme with the opening of the film’s first shot, although apart from János’ presence, there is no real thematic connection between the two shots), the door is opened, and János stokes the fire at some length. Then, the camera rises and follows János around the room (in a 180° turn) as he makes his bed, opens a heated can of soup, carries it to the table, sits down, empties it on a plate, adds bread, and eats. Once again, this sequence of events adds nothing to the film’s story, but it has the effect of making us intimate with the most mundane of János’ everyday actions. It also makes us feel with János the intrusion into and the threat to his world represented by Tünde Eszter’s appearance in the following shot.

Werckmeister Harmonies’ more limited running time does have an effect on this approach of Tarr’s. We simply do not spend time with the range of characters that we do in Satantango. Many of the characters – the townspeople, the Harrers, the men waiting in the square, the police chief – are little more than ciphers. Even with a very negative character like Tünde – she is blackmailing her estranged husband to use his position of respect in the community in order to drum up support for her fascist law-and-order movement – there are indications of other dimensions to her character. When we first see her she is a plump, middle-aged, respectable woman wrapped up in her coat, cold, hard, and ruthless. Yet we are given a glimpse of another (sexual) side to her, when she dances around in her negligee with the drunken police chief. But these dimensions are never really explored.

Thematically, Werckmeister Harmonies is also far more straightforward than Satantango. Tarr has rightly complained about symbolic and allegorical interpretations of his work, and it does not get us very far to interpret the world of Damnation, Satantango, and Werckmeister Harmonies as political allegories of life in Hungary under Communism or of post-1989 neoliberal capitalism. Such interpretations simply limit the range of what the films have to offer. At the same time, in the case of Werckmeister Harmonies it is made very clear that Tarr is offering a general political allegory, though one that is not tied to any particular time or place. It is more along the lines of “a plague o’ both your houses,” where popular revolt and fascist repression are held in equal contempt.

The catalyst for the violent events of the film’s climax is a visit to the town by a travelling circus exhibition of a huge whale and a mysterious Prince. Among the townspeople this generates a swirl of paranoiac rumours of robbery, rape, murder, and vandalism. We get hints that this is a world on the verge of social collapse, with public buildings closed, no transportation, medicines, or telephones, intermittent power, and coal shortages. The townspeople’s general fears of crime and social disorder take on an increasingly apocalyptic tone, with references to “the mysterious unknown plagues” and the earth’s “dire peril.”

János, of course, as the visionary who in the film’s first scene created an image of the harmony of the universe out of a motley collection of pub drunks, shares none of this apprehension and fear. He sees the whale as an image of God himself, an image of the Lord’s mystery, creative power, and omnipotence. Yet ultimately Tarr treats this innocent optimism as blindness, for János ends up physically and mentally destroyed by the events he observes, in a state of catatonic madness. ⁷

In fact Tarr confirms all the townspeople’s worst fears. On each of János’ successive visits to the square the men who have arrived from out of town and are gathering there appear more threatening, violent, and aggressive. And when János overhears in the circus truck the voice of the Prince – never seen, he is only shadows on a wall – the latter is revealed as the promoter of a nihilistic destruction: “In ruins, all is complete.” János runs off in horror at what he hears, and the camera tracks before him in his terrified run as the Prince’s invocation of terror, massacre, and slaughter ring on the soundtrack.

The attack on the hospital that follows is the enactment of this. There is no political programme in action here; it is simply mindless and meaningless destruction and violence. Yet Tarr still redeems these attackers in their status as fellow human beings. The single tracking shot that follows this orgy – smashing equipment, beating up patients – comes to a stop as two ringleaders rip down the shower curtains that cover a bathroom door and reveal an old man standing naked in a tub. It’s an intense image of a man at his most vulnerable, and it leads the attackers to recognise and reflect on their own sense of fellow humanity: chastened, the attackers turn round and slowly file out.

The “Werckmeister Harmonies” of the film’s title comes from a lengthy discourse in musical theory made by music professor Gyuri Eszter in one extended sequence. The ideas are obscure and difficult but are thematically important in placing under consideration one further system of order. ⁸ Andreas Werckmeister was a seventeenth-century theorist who developed a system of well temperament, that is, a way of tuning that allows music to be played in most major or minor keys and not sound out of tune. ⁹ For Eszter, Werckmeister is an epitome of the arrogance of the modern age, and he contrasts him with ancients like Pythogoras who could accept the imperfections of their tuning system because “they knew that heavenly harmonies were the provinces of the gods.” Eszter believes that Werckmeister’s system has led to the situation where “all the intervals in the masterpieces of many centuries are false,” the reason being that his system is based on a falsification that betrays the original harmony of the universe. ¹⁰

Eszter’s work at returning to this perfectionist harmony is a mirror-image of the fascist order that his estranged wife Tünde promotes with her movement “to restore order, create cleanliness,” and Eszter clearly bears responsibility for that fascism’s victory by the end of the film. Obsessed by his theories, he has locked himself away from the world – in one scene, János finds him sitting at the piano in his darkened room, the shutters almost completely closed to block out the daylight of the world outside. Initially resistant to drumming up support for Tünde’s movement (“we’re not going to do anything. We’re not going to make the same mistake twice”) he ends up giving in to her, simply so that he can retreat back to the cocoon of his research.

But that retreat offers no escape. By the end of the film Ezster has lost most of his material assets – Tünde and the police chief have taken over most of his house. When he says, “Nothing counts. Nothing counts at all” to the catatonic János, it is in recognition of his mistakes made in the idealism of his “ivory-tower” research. Significantly, he has now retuned his piano, a renunciation of his whole research project, and he has undertaken to look after János, in the same way that János looked after him in the first part of the film. The search for some kind of perfect order, whether aesthetic or political, is fundamentally flawed.  János, in the first sequence of the film, offered the proper model, creating his own hesitant, incomplete, celebratory image of the order of the universe out of the materials at hand, a group of shambolic drunks. That model is a reflection of Tarr’s own practice as a filmmaker.

In the film’s final scene Eszter finally comes face to face with the whale, but the “look” of the whale returns nothing. The dead eye of the whale has no meaning to offer him, unless it is the “infinite emptiness” that János evoked in the film’s first scene, this time minus any redemption: there is no sun to re-emerge after the eclipse. Eszter in response lowers his glance and walks away, horrified and humbled. Yet that humbling, his abandonment of his research and his assuming of a responsibility for János also mark a reconnection with humanity. It is in such simple gestures that Tarr offers a modicum of hope to counter an otherwise pessimistic vision of society, politics, and humanity. ¹¹

I: TARR↩

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