Werckmeister Harmonies (4k Restoration)

Béla Tarr Tribute Film! 4K Restoration!

One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance.

Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai (Sátántangó), Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens. Comprised of just 39 shots in 145 minutes and engraved in ghostly black and white, Tarr conjures an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.

Renowned for his uncompromising, hypnotic approach to cinema, Béla Tarr began his career in the 1970's working at Balázs Béla Stúdió, one of Hungary’s seminal studios for experimental film. His early work bore the marks of social realism, heavily influenced by his upbringing in communist Hungary, but he soon developed the stark, meditative style that defines his reputation: austere black-and-white imagery, extraordinarily long takes, minimal dialogue, and an obsessive attention to time, decay, and moral exhaustion. Films such as Damnation (1988), Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), and The Turin Horse (2011) are considered landmarks of slow cinema, confronting viewers with the weight of history and the quiet apocalypse of everyday life.

_{2000, 145 minutes, Hungary, In Hungarian and Slovack with English subtitles, Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, Not Rated}