Werckmeister Harmonies opens late at night in the local bar of an anonymous Hungarian city. Janos, who soon becomes the haggard centerpiece of this baffling tale, steps in to conduct what must be a periodic ritual. Standing one drunken patron in the middle of the floor as the middle of our galaxy, he trains two others to circle around each other in orbit around this bedraggled sun. In halting rhythm these planets circle, a vague memory of cosmic order in a city that has lost all sense of direction. Bela Tarr’s camerawork embodies the finer points of Eastern European cinema. Moving in clean and thoughtful strokes across simple sets and themes, Tarr’s work seems devoid of style and pretension. But if gravity and transcendence can be construed as a style Tarr may be one of the most successful formalists of his day.


This brilliant opening sequence turns out to be the gentlest moment of the film: the young Janos directing these old broken spirits in a rehearsal of the natural determinism that soon unravels the city. Werckmeister Harmonies is about a travelling carnival that by night unleashes a violent anarchy on the towns it visits. By day it only seems to offer people a chance to see the world’s largest stuffed Whale, and the townspeople use these precious daylight hours to combat the inevitable assault. Unfortunately, their only hope is an aging musical theorist fixated with the octave and a purer cosmic scale that can be achieved by what appears to be untuning your instrument. These odd tones are "Werckmeister Harmonies," music in a world controlled by a much different sense of order. As night falls on the carnival workers milling about the Whale parked in the town square, Tarr’s dogged steady-cam unflinchingly witnesses this irrational sense of order taking over. In one memorable attack, Tarr slides his camera in and around a group of men emptying a Soviet-era hospital with wooden sticks and pipes until they encounter an old man, standing frail and unclothed in a cracked bathtub. This raw humanity is enough to stave off the onslaught for a moment.


Here the scene cuts as the haunting score crescendos and Tarr moves on to his next set of images. This score, every bit as engaging as Tarr’s imagery itself, runs only at select moments in the film, serving to root each image it accompanies in a common sense of reluctant despair. At times these major elements of the film seem vague and unrelated. Janos’ first viewing of the giant whale, accompanied by the soundtrack, is obviously a rich and important experience, but we are left with little reasoning as to why. Does this whale draw on the Biblical image of prophetic certainty? Or is it the monolithic offering of the sea, that traditionally represents the chaotic and unknown? Perhaps it is like Janos, a silent and inmpotent spectator to the anarchy of the carnival. They drag it around as a relic of the past in which things were much simpler and safer.


Eventually, it is Janos that breaks down, unable to shoulder the burden of the entire town. We realize that the opening scene of the film marks Janos as a sort of Atlas, and that the anarchy of the carnival may be little more than the concentration of the same malaise that lurks at the heart of this village. Throughout the film Tarr’s village has been tipping on its axis, his camerawork operating at a pace just slow enough for us not to really notice. The genius of Bela Tarr is his universal appeal. Though his films are absolutely rooted in a specific place and timing, his stories are ancient, simple, and endlessly repeated in history. And Werckmeister Harmonies is exactly this, a philosophy of history whose first real reader, Janos, simply can’t handle.