Werckmeister Harmonies

I must admit, I’m a sucker for a long take . . . I love the long crane shot that opens The Player, and that masterful Steadycam that follows Ray Liotta through the bar in Goodfellas. The opening shot of Werckmeister Harmonies is like that, it’s one long take, ten minutes twenty seconds, to be exact. But unlike Altman’s camera, which remains on the outside looking in, or Scorsese’s, which follows only one character, director Bela Tarr’s swoops in to close-ups and back to long shots. It dances in amongst the characters, breaking the 180-degree rule (and several others) with great abandon.
The opening takes place at closing time in a drab, worn-out bar; and its very first image—of a fire being doused by beer—sets up a light/dark motif that pervades the film. The camera pans right to encompass the barroom, where the owner has just announced closing time to a dozen inebriated patrons.

But it seems that things aren’t quite over yet: one of the drunks persuades János (the film’s protagonist) to give a demonstration. After clearing a space in the bar—and with the camera still at a distance—János plucks one of the men from the crowd, saying “You are the sun.”

Now the camera pans to follow him as he chooses another patron—“you are the Earth”—then pushes in until it’s tight on him in a head-and-shoulders shot. János’ hands move animatedly as he sets up the demonstration; in the background we see the “sun’s” hands wiggling as if in drunken imitation.

János sends the earth orbiting the sun, flapping his arms and spinning on his axis, and now the camera is right in the action, we are right in the action. He recruits one more drunken patron, labels him the moon, and sends him orbiting the earth as it orbits the sun. Now János is flapping his arms, conducting the whole affair like a maestro does a symphony. There’s a dancing, waltz-like rhythm, the music of the drunken spheres—this is the Werckmeister Harmonies, after all—when suddenly, it all stops, the planets are aligned, the moment has arrived.

“At the next moment,” János says “ the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens and then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in flight. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk even the birds … the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then . . . complete silence.”

We’re on a medium close-up of János, his hands in an attitude of prayer, with the light bulb next to his head in the frame, and—contrapuntal to the silence of the eclipse—a haunting musical theme begins. János again: “Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open under us? We don’t know. We don’t know, for a total eclipse has come upon us.”

The camera pulls slowly back, and as it does, it rises until at a slight high-angle, looking down at the men, and there is a florescent ceiling light, and all the participants seem encompassed by that light, all seem bathed in its glow. János, with his head bowed before him, hands clasped in prayer; the sun, still bowed as if before the God of the Universe . . . it is a moment of atavistic awe, a sacred moment, a mystery . . . the shot conveys this perfectly, all are bathed in holy light. Is it a halo? Or are we to be reminded of a UFO movie, with the characters caught like deer in oncoming, alien headlights?

Now the camera descends and pushes in, reversing its previous glide, and János is talking again “But no need to fear, it’s not over. For across the Sun’s glowing sphere slowly the Moon swims away.” And he sets the planets in motion again, and the sun’s hands are wiggling out its heat, and the whole bar joins in a throbbing, weaving dance of relief . . . and we are down there with them once again, until the bar’s owner opens the door to the outside, and throws them all out.

János is the first one out the door, and he tells the bartender “But Mr. Hagelmayer, it’s still not over.”

He’s not whistling Dixie: the film has just begun, and so have the trials of the little Hungarian town where it is set. As Jim Emerson has said, in a good opening sequence the whole film presents itself in miniature, and that’s certainly true here. In the course of the film, the town awaits the coming of a circus with superstitious dread . . . the rumors run wild—windows are being broken, they say, whole families are being disappeared—and whether the circus has brought it about or not, a darkness descends upon the town, a silence. Riots break out, buildings are destroyed, and the government sends in tanks to quell the violence. As in a total eclipse, the light of the town is dimmed almost to extinction. But by the closing shots of the film, it’s back again, life is going on, albeit not in the same way as before. Some who were on top are now on the bottom, some who were well-liked are fugitives, and some who were sane are now insane. But the town has resumed its business and the light has returned . . . after a fashion.