Werckmeister Harmonies

Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (Hungarian: Werckmeister harmóniák) won the Hungarian Film Critics Award for Best Director in 2001 and has been included in Sight & Sound's top hundred greatest films polls since 2012, reaching the top hundred most recently in the 2022 critics' poll. The film is widely considered Tarr's most accessible feature and one of the central works of late-twentieth-century European arthouse cinema.

The film is adapted from László Krasznahorkai's 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, the second of the long Tarr-Krasznahorkai collaborative cycle that included Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994) — the seven-and-a-half-hour film widely regarded as Tarr's masterpiece — 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.

The film is shot in deliberately long takes — only thirty-nine separate shots across the entire 145-minute running time — by cinematographers Gábor Medvigy, Erwin Lanzensberger, Patrick de Ranter, Miklós Gurbán, Emil Novák, Rob Tregenza and Tarr's longtime collaborator Ágnes Hranitzky working in shifts. The score is by Mihály Vig, Tarr's regular composer. The cast pairs Lars Rudolph (in his German-Hungarian breakthrough role) with Hanna Schygulla, Peter Fitz and Lajos Dobák. The film was shot in 35mm black and white in the small Hungarian town of Baja, with the central whale carcass set piece constructed practically and toured between locations.