Werckmeister Harmonies

[Dave Monroe]

>From Fred Camper, "Preserving Disorder," Chicago
Reader, Friday, December 21st, 2001 ...

Bela Tarr's seventh film, a melancholy meditation on
social disorder and senseless violence, begins with an
enigmatic scene in a bar. Janos Valuska, a postman in
a small Hungarian village, recruits three patrons to
enact the heavens' rotations. One man serves as the
sun, vibrating his fingers to simulate its rays, while
the other two play the earth and moon. Valuska sets
them spinning about each other, stopping them to
simulate a solar eclipse. Shot in a single ten-minute
take, this sequence acquires resonance as the film
progresses, coming to stand for a quest for harmony in
a world that's falling apart. But appreciating its
full import depends on understanding the musical
reference in the film's title, which most critics have
missed.

In the film ... Valuska is something of a holy fool.
He soon sees a gigantic truck lumbering into town
carrying a huge preserved whale; parked in the market
square, it also advertises the arrival of a mysterious
Prince. We learn that previous appearances of the
whale and Prince, who advocates chaos, have caused a
commotion in other locales, and there's already much
discontent in this village -- the people have no coal
or phone service, and rumors of civil unrest run rife.

One of Valuska's duties is to care for retired music
professor Gyuri Eszter. In response to the mounting
troubles, Eszter's estranged wife, Tunde, founds a
political movement requiring a "strong leader"; its
goal is to "restore order, create cleanliness" --
phrases with fascist echoes. She enlists the respected
Eszter as that leader. But despite their efforts,
crowds of men gather in ominous silence around the
whale and grow uglier, and near the end a large group
of club-wielding men invades the local hospital,
beating up patients and smashing equipment.

Tarr has said the film, made between 1997 and 2000,
was partly a response to the horrors in Bosnia, where
"ethnic cleansing" took the form of mass rape and mass
murder. But the details seem open to many
interpretations. Valuska says the whale manifests the
magnificence of "the Lord's creative impulse," but it
could also signify capitalism at its crudest,
exploiting nature for gain....

[...]
 
... Continuing the long-take style of the opening
(which reiterates the long sentences of the novel on
which the film is based, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's The
Melancholy of Resistance), Tarr builds a subtle
suspense: we wait for things to fall apart. The men in
the market square seem statues frozen in space, but
the camera's movements around them emphasize their
dynamically disordered arrangement. Long takes also
serve as a reminder that time has its own autonomy --
it's apart from humans' lurching violence....
intensifying our sense of the devastation by making
clear that destruction, like time, cannot be reversed.

[...]

... in Tarr's film the characters' independence is
always qualified by the way the camera pulls away from
them to depict other aspects of the scene....
Similarly, offscreen sounds frequently disrupt the
action with news of social chaos, as when the camera
moves from Valuska to a postal clerk describing
growing unrest.

[...]

... Throughout Tarr creates a powerful tension between
the camera's quest for unity and scenes of disorder,
the camera seeking balance where there is none....

[...]

The full meaning of the film's quest for order,
though, must be understood in terms of the musical
theories offered by Eszter, the retired professor.... 
Eszter's melancholy stems from what he sees as music's
slide away from godly harmony into modern
imperfection, a devolution he attributes (wrongly, but
no matter) to 17th-century German music theorist and
organist Andreas Werckmeister. In a long speech,
Eszter says that the result of Werckmeister
instituting Western music's current tuning system,
equal temperament -- in which the 12 notes of the
octave are separated by precisely equal intervals --
is that "all the intervals of masterpieces of many
centuries are false"; in a later scene he calls a
prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, meant to
demonstrate the virtues of equal temperament,
"grating."

A little knowledge of music theory and history helps
illuminate Eszter's nostalgic references to Pythagoras
and a music of "pure intervals." For the Greek
philosopher-mathematician, music, mathematics, and
astronomy were linked manifestations of the harmony of
the universe, a view that continued well into the
Middle Ages. Pythagoras argued that the most
euphonious harmonies resulted from tones that
reflected the proportions of simple integers, such as
2:1 and 3:2. (Today we know that these simple ratios,
which represent an octave and a fifth, cause sound
waves to reinforce one another, producing consonant
rather than dissonant chords.) The music of the
spheres was supposedly created by tones the planets
emitted while rotating -- Pythagoras believed that the
organization of the cosmos was based on the
proportions among simple integers.

But basing musical scales on simple ratios leads to
contradictions, such as octaves that aren't true --
the impetus behind equal temperament, which emerged in
the Renaissance. But some, like Eszter, consider every
interval except the octave in this system "impure" and
"out of tune." This is a debate that continues today:
composer La Monte Young, for example, argues
vehemently against equal temperament as unharmonious
and retuned a piano according to whole-number ratios
for his The Well-Tuned Piano.

In Eszter's terms, the camera's quest for order and
symmetry is a quest for the unified worldview of
classical Greece and the Middle Ages, for an ordered
cosmos. But Tarr's view is more nuanced. In the
opening, Valuska attempts to create heavenly order --
the music of the spheres -- using the materials
available to him: his drunken neighbors. But his
response is quite unlike what one imagines the
cultured Eszter's might be. Valuska doesn't object to
his planets' irregular lurchings; perhaps drunk
himself, he seems pleased with the performance. Tarr
sees fascism's quest for absolute order as wrong;
Eszter's lugubrious musings on the falseness of equal
temperament, stemming from his desire for perfection,
are misguided, as he himself seems to acknowledge at
the film's end by caring for Valuska. Though Tarr
makes his own attempts at ordering, he also
acknowledges that humans are imperfect by nature and
that true harmony depends on imprecision and
compromise.

http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2001/0112/011221_2.html

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0249241

About as Pynchonian a film as I've ever seen, or may
ever see.  Profoundly affecting ...

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