Werckmeister Harmonies is a 2000 Hungarian drama mystery film screened at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. It’s directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky and is based on the 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai written during the time of the iron curtain.
Werckmeister Harmonies is a slow-moving film shot in black-and-white and composed of thirty-nine long paced shots. It attempts to depict and explain why society is inherently flawed. The film shows János, whose thrown into a mental institution, and his uncle György on their journey among helpless rioting citizens during the communist Hungarian era as a mysterious dark circus comes to town with a giant whale and a 25-lb circus freak.
The title refers to the baroque musical theorist named Andreas Werckmeister, whose harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in music and need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony. Basically, in Western music, we have a tuning system for instruments created by Andreas Werckmeister. Werckmeister’s theory is no good because his tuning allows instruments to sound good but sacrifices the purity of sounding perfect. Therefore, modern music is not pure like naturally tuned instruments from long ago. Werckmeister Harmonies is about mankind’s need to quantify the unquantifiable and our need to create artificial order. This movie speaks in metaphor and is a cinematic work of art.
Werckmeister Harmonies ranks 56th on BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century. It is a beautiful yet disturbing film.
