Werckmeister Harmonies / Damnation

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Film Description

Two films from Bela Tarr based on the writings of Laszlo Krasnahorkai. Werckmeister Harmonies is set in the bitter cold of a provincial town on the Hungarian plain and is a haunting, metaphysical exploration of chaos and harmony in breathtakingly accomplished cinematography. Give it time. Damnation (Karhozat) is Tarr's treatment of love and betrayal in a provincial town. The metaphysical beauty called up from the edges of desolation makes it compulsively watchable.

Film Information

DVD Extras

Two discs; Interview with Bela Tarr at the NFT.

Technical Details

Film Media

6 Stills

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Reviews & Articles

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Review by Graeme Hobbs on 30th June 2003

The perennially underground director Bela Tarr finally sees a major release with his examination of human chaos and harmony. Set in an anonymous town on the bitterly cold Hungarian plain, a nameless unrest attends the arrival of the stuffed carcase of a whale and the ‘prince’ – a lord of misrule that we never see but who provides the focus for both fear and disturbance. The whale is beginning to stink. Thereafter, the effects on the town are documented in Tarr’s trademark style of long, gliding takes and stark, flawlessly composed black and white photography.


Though Tarr has explicitly denied allegorical intent, it is hard not to read the situation of a rotting whale acting as a catalyst for unleashing powerful and unruly new energies as a comment on the last days of communism in Hungary. His aim though is instead metaphysical, showing the compromised and debased harmonies that comprise the human lot (including those of Werckmeister, the 17th century composer whose name gives the film its title).


In the extraordinary beginning to the film, an astonishing ten-minute shot that is a short film in its own right, Valuska arrives at a bar at closing time and organises a happy-drunk re-enactment of the circulation of the planets around the sun. He checks their movement when they are aligned and talks them through an eclipse. We fear he might leave things there – cold and strange, the natural order upset, but he sets the planets in motion again, restoring life and movement. The remainder of the film however seems set during a period of metaphorical eclipse.


The intimations of the film are bleak. Those reaching for higher understanding are trodden on by petty opportunists and power-seekers. Whether Werckmeister was right or wrong is of little importance. These are pragmatic times, the strong rise and mobs can be marshalled. Tunde - played by Hanna Schygulla in a role far removed from her character as erstwhile Fassbinder vamp, exploits the confusion and seizes control. Valuska begins as a man who can set the planets in motion but ends circled as helpless prey.


The portentous sounds of rooks and a booming stillness accompany this strange and hypnotic film. With its seemingly effortless lengthy takes and its concentration on faces or actions for minutes at a time, it is a film that not only holds your gaze, but thoroughly outstares you.

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Review by Howard Schumann on 1st July 2003

It is closing time in a bar somewhere in Eastern Europe. A blank faced young man, Janos Valuska (Lars Rudolph), begins to organize a ballet of inebriated patrons playing the Sun and the Moon turning in their orbits. The dancers carry on until the Earth emerges from the Moon's shadow. Thus begins Werckmeister Harmonies, a film by Hungarian director Béla Tarr. As the film continues, a circus comes to town. The exhibit contains the world's largest whale, dead and stuffed with tiny staring eyes, and The Prince, a shadowy figure that we never see. The town is full of rumors of impending violence. Janos watches a growing group of seemingly unemployed middle aged men gather silently around fires in the square.



Containing shots that last up to fifteen minutes at a time, Werckmeister Harmonies is a nightmarish vision of a society duped by political demagogues and distracted by circuses, being led into a cycle of violence and despair. Based on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, it is a powerful and disturbing film in its surreal depiction of growing madness. The film takes its name from the theories of Janos' "uncle" Gyorgy Eszter (Peter Fitz), a musicologist who tells him of his obsession with the legacy of Andreas Werckmeister, a 17th century German musician who created the twelve-tone scale. Eszter believes that perfect order does injustice to the holiness of music, and says that the heavens move to their own music. As above, so below. The ideology of order results in the disaster of social collapse. Werckmeister Harmonies mourns the deadly past, and offers a bleak warning to the future.

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