Werckmeister Harmonies

Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (Hungarian: Werckmeister harmóniák) won the Hungarian Film Critics Award for Best Director in 2001 and has appeared in Sight & Sound's greatest films polls since 2012, most recently making the top hundred in the 2022 critics' poll. It is Tarr's most accessible feature, and to our mind one of the central works of European art cinema at the end of the twentieth century.

It is adapted from László Krasznahorkai's 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, and belongs to the long collaboration between Tarr and Krasznahorkai that also produced Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994), the seven-and-a-half-hour film that is probably Tarr's greatest, The Man from London (2007) and The Turin Horse (2011). Krasznahorkai went on to win the International Booker Prize in 2015 for his ongoing literary work.

Tarr shoots in deliberately long takes, with only thirty-nine separate shots across the entire 145-minute running time, and the cinematographers Gábor Medvigy, Erwin Lanzensberger, Patrick de Ranter, Miklós Gurbán, Emil Novák, Rob Tregenza and his longtime collaborator Ágnes Hranitzky worked in shifts. Mihály Vig, his regular composer, wrote the score. Lars Rudolph, in his German-Hungarian breakthrough role, leads a cast that includes Hanna Schygulla, Peter Fitz and Lajos Dobák. The film was shot on 35mm black and white in the small Hungarian town of Baja, and the whale carcass at its centre was built as a practical prop and toured between locations.