The Last Waltz

STREET OF DREAMS: Lars Rudolph walks alone in <i>Werckmeister Harmonies.</i>

STREET OF DREAMS: Lars Rudolph walks alone in Werckmeister Harmonies.

Werckmeister Harmonies is an apocalyptic ballet.

Werckmeister Harmonies

Directed by la Tarr A Menemsha

by Sam Adams

Recommended

Werckmeister HarmoniesDirected by Béla Tarr A Menemsha release Fri., April 26, 8 p.m., International House

recommended

At some point during Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, it may occur to you how an unmoving three-minute shot of a crowd marching down a city street differs from a 10-second shot of the same. Certainly, either shot establishes that the crowd is, in fact, marching down the street, and while the longer shot gives you a better chance to appreciate the size of the mass of people involved, as they pass under the camera and new bodies take their place on the upper edge of the frame, it’s certainly not the most efficient cinematic means to convey such information.

The answer, in some ways, is simple: What differentiates the two shots is rhythm. The latter merely demonstrates that the crowd is marching, while the former, especially if it's framed and lit as expressively as it is in Werckmeister Harmonies, asks you to submit to the rhythm of their stomping feet, to the minute oscillation of brightness as bodies pass in between the camera and the far-away light source. Beginning with an unbroken 15-minute shot in which mailman and barroom philosopher Janós (Lars Rudolph) uses the figures of shuffling barflies to create a model of the cosmos, the film takes place in a crumbling, bone-cold Hungarian village, where the disquiet norm is disrupted by the arrival of a traveling circus whose only acts are the dried-out (and quite probably fake) body of an enormous whale and a mysterious (and unseen) figure called the Prince, whose mere presence seems to incite discord.

After talking a blue streak through the first scene, Janós is mostly silent, visiting a series of friends and relatives around the village and quietly absorbing their thoughts. His uncle György (Peter Fitz), mostly notably, rails against the system of tuning created by 17th-century German Andres Werkmeister, which split the natural octave into seven unequal intervals; to him, the scale is a fraud, a corruption of natural unity. "Pure musical intervals do not exist," he warns his impressionable nephew (although Janós has so many uncles you begin to wonder if it's possible he's actually related to all of them).

In Janós' description of the cosmos, mortality is like an eclipse, a formulation which has less to do with reincarnation than the idea that creation and destruction are more closely linked than we might think. The very first image we see is a fire being doused by a glass of beer; when Janós constructs his model, the man who put out the fire is cast as the sun. As the men playing the earth, the moon and the sun spin around each other, their movements inevitably become waltz-like, and Mihály Vig's score rises to join them -- order rising out of chaos as easily as it falls back into it.

Late one night, Janós sneaks his way back into the enormous tractor trailer that holds the whale's desiccated corpse, and overhears a conversation between the showman who's brought it there and the Prince, who's thus far not been allowed to appear. Seen only in silhouette, like Murnau's Nosferatu, the Prince says in a voice like bones rattling, "Under construction, all is half done. In ruins, all is complete." His ideas prove to be persuasive; even though we never see the Prince address the crowd that's perpetually milling around the truck's corrugated frame, they're swayed enough to gather en masse and set their sights on a nearby hospital, where they pull patients from beds and lash out at them with pieces of wood. Like the film's opening and several other set pieces, this one plays out in a long, elaborately choreographed tracking shot, as if the camera were dancing with the actors. Such filmmaking tries the patience of some -- one person in the audience audibly released air through his teeth as the end credits rolled -- but its rewards are unquestionable for anyone who values movies that forcibly alter your perspective, that encourage or even demand you see the world in a new way. To compare with a few recent examples from the long-take school, Werckmeister Harmonies has nothing like the plangent melancholy of What Time Is It There?, and Gábor Medvigy's stark black and white photography (far more black than white) doesn't yield the elaborate pleasures of Hsiao-hsien Hou 's Millennium Mambo or Goodbye, South, Goodbye. The film it most recalls is Andrei Tarkovsky's bleak Sacrifice, although it's less punishingly philosophical. Like Sacrifice, Werckmeister Harmonies could almost pass for science fiction, although there's nothing futuristic about it -- rather, it's set in a world that seems to have once been our own, and to have taken an abrupt turn somewhere. What Tarr contributes mainly is the sense of dance, not replacing everyday life but woven throughout it. Even when the music in the opening scene swells, you can still hear the shuffle of boots on the dusty floor.