Abstract

Rosa Barotsi (Dept. French, Darwin College) will introduce this screening of Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies

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Werckmeister Harmonies (Hungarian: Werckmeister harmóniák)

A Hungarian film directed by Béla Tarr in 2000, based on the novel The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), by László Krasznahorkai.

Shot in black and white and composed of only thirty-nine languidly paced shots, the film describes the aimlessness and anomie of a small town on the Hungarian plain that falls under the 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.