Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Werckmeister Harmonies
It's getting cold again
Werckmeister harmóniák is a 2000 Hungarian film directed by Béla Tarr, based on the novel The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai. Shot in black and white and composed of only thirty-nine languidly paced shots, the film describes the aimlessness and anomy of a small town on the Hungarian plain that falls under the fascist influence of a sinister traveling circus lugging the immense body of a whale in its tow. A young man named János tries to keep order in the increasingly restless town even as he begins to lose his faith in the unnatural and disordered universe from which God Himself seems to have disappeared.
The title refers to the baroque musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister. György Eszter, a major character in the film, gives a monologue propounding a theory that Werckmeister's harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in all music since, which need to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony.
Matt, I will return this to you later this week..I've had it for almost a year..sorry!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It's fine! We're both to blame for your having it. Also, and I just learned this the other day, he put out a new flick two years ago – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_From_London – Don't know if it's been released yet but we should make an effort to watch it together when it does. Or perhaps you could buy it, watch it, and then I'll borrow it from you for a year, to level the field.
ReplyDelete