Ten Great Foreign Films Of This Decade

Werkmeister Harmonies

by Ed French

Bela Tarr's Werkmeister Harmonies opens with an elaborate shot that lasts about 10 minutes and rivals any other opening shot in beauty, execution, meaning and complexity.  The rest of the film continues in this vein.  Tarr's early films always dealt with people living within Hungarian communism.  Occasionally they were trying to live outside it, occasionally living within it as they were living anywhere else, as if the communist state does not alter essential human behavior.  Werkmeister Harmonies is still about the behavior of crowds vs. individuals, and as such, reflects deep into European history and the human soul; Tarr has moved somehow far away from the fierce naturalism of his early films (obtaining the budget for grander visions) in exchange for a strange poeticism, characterized by a sense of anomie, carrying threads from those early films into the present. 

A large truck arrives in a small Hungarian village, carrying a large mystery with it.  The arrival attempts to pierce the imagination similar to that of the arrival of a circus.  Really, the arrival of this showpiece is the beginning of something awful – an unidentified presence.  Immediately, one is tempted to call it a symbol for something.  But the director insists that he does not create symbols, forcing the viewer to deal with this thing in some other way. 

Stated flatly, the thing itself doesn't matter.  Like the object of fear in horror movies, we often aren't afraid of a real "blob" attacking us, rather it's the suspense itself that makes us piss our pants.  To paraphrase a figure from American history, the object of fear is not to be feared, but rather what it drives us to do. 

Tarr's films have always focused on these sorts of behaviors, and never the meaning of images.  The images have always simply been the world in which behaviors inhabit.  The final shot of The Prefab People is a couple riding on the back of a truck, bringing home a new washing machine.  We follow them for maybe 10 minutes as they ride through row after row of communist-era housing, all uniform and innocuous.  In spite of the new machine being an object of hope for the woman, the man drinking a beer and the look on her face tell the viewer that nothing's changed.  The ideas here behind communist consumerism starts to look strangely like those behind capitalist consumerism. 

One of the best reasons to watch films by Bela Tarr is his ability to get some of the most honest acting ever seen onscreen.  Frequently, he captures actors in the midst of an involved monologue delving into great honesty.  For characters to speak this honestly is something that often eludes the best playwrights.  While Werkmeister Harmonies errs on the side of perfect camera work over perfect honesty from the actors, this is only in comparison to his other, more character-based films. 

Soon after the truck arrives, the villagers begin to fear for their village.  And then a large crowd of grim-looking men appear in the town square.  They burn fires and wait.  They appear to venerate the thing in the truck.  But it's a veneration that has turned into a general sourness that erupts into violence. 

In light of most modern European filmmaking, it's easy to draw comparisons between these behaviors and those of the fascists earlier in the last century.  But Tarr, always looking at the deeper truths in the details of his films, asks the viewer to examine this in terms of the behavior itself, outside of history and culture.  Instead, we are asked about the effect of images on human imagination and action. 

The motivation is never specified exactly, and that is perhaps the biggest mystery in this film.  American actors and writers are taught to specify where it is a character's impulse comes from.  Tarr might respond that impulses, perhaps even our greatest drives, come from a much deeper place than we can even identify.  Hence, the very impulse to look for a symbol in this film is misplaced, because a symbol must point to something specific – the object of fear in Werkmeister Harmonies does not, in fact, point to anything that we the audience, or even the artist, or the characters are capable of identifying.  Human beings simply behave the way we do for reasons beyond our understanding.

Another reason to watch this film is the acting headed by the Germans Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz and Hanna Schygulla.

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