Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Werckmeister Harmonies
2001 · Béla Tarr · Werckmeister Harmonies on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch a single shot run on for many unbroken minutes. (camera)
Tarr builds the film from roughly thirty-nine shots across over two hours, the camera moving in slow, lateral or circular arcs that trace rather than cut between people.
Payoff: Holding the shot this long changes what counts as an event in the first place. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). Deleuze calls a stretch where nothing advances but duration is simply held dead time, and this film is built almost entirely from it.
Watch how deep the blacks and how flat the grays stay. (light)
The whole film is shot on black-and-white 35mm, no color anywhere, giving every street and interior the same stripped, unglamorous tonal range.
Payoff: Removing color removes a whole layer of distraction from what you're being asked to watch.
Listen for the scrape of metal and the crowd's distant roar. (sound)
Sound design favors raw texture, footsteps, an engine, a rumor of a crowd, over clear dialogue, and speech itself often blurs toward ambient noise.
Payoff: You're made to strain for meaning the same way the town is straining to understand what's happening.
Watch Valuska press his face against the whale's gray hide. (setting)
An enormous taxidermied whale arrives on a truck and simply sits there, never explained, never shown arriving in any ordinary narrative sense.
Payoff: Its presence alone is enough to unsettle a town that has no place to put it.
Watch drunk men in a bar orbit each other like planets. (staging)
In an unbroken ten-minute take, Valuska arranges the men into the sun, the earth, and the moon, and sets them turning under a single bulb.
Payoff: A model of the cosmos gets built out of nothing but bodies and patience. In the reading: cinema of the body (attitudes & postures). Deleuze calls bodies set moving like this a cinema of the body, where posture itself makes time visible instead of plot.
Once you have seen it
Notice the Prince is never actually shown clearly on screen. (structure)
The rumored figure behind the violence appears only in fragments, an unconfrontable power sensed everywhere in the town's fear but locatable nowhere in the frame.
Payoff: The violence needs no clear villain to organize the town against, and that's the horror. In the reading: condemnation of the plot. Deleuze calls a power that's sensed everywhere and graspable nowhere a condemnation of the plot, a conspiracy you can't actually locate to oppose.
Watch the mob stop, inexplicably, before one helpless old man. (staging)
The camera moves with the mob through the hospital ward by ward, and the brutality dies into arrested stillness at a moment nothing in the film explains.
Payoff: There's nothing to do with that image but sit with it, unresolved.
Watch what wonder does to Valuska's face by the film's end. (performance)
Rudolph plays him with transparent, unguarded openness throughout, and by the end that same openness has been broken rather than protected by what he's witnessed.
Payoff: His innocence turns out to be the thing the whole town's violence actually destroys.
Carry this in: Watch a single shot run on, and watch Valuska's face for wonder as the town grows tense.