Werckmeister Harmonies · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Last call in a provincial bar, and the postman won't let the drunks go home. János Valuska arranges them under a single bulb — you be the sun, you the earth, you the moon — and sets them turning. Slow orbits across a sticky floor. As he narrates the mechanics of an eclipse, the swaying bodies find their heavenly relations, the moon crosses the sun, and the light goes out. One unbroken take, close to ten minutes. Nobody decides anything; nothing is accomplished. Men who can barely stand become a working model of the cosmos, and then the bartender shoos them into the night. That opening is the whole film in miniature. Bodies are set in motion. Time is allowed to pass. Meaning arrives through movement, not through plot.

Deleuze divided cinema into two regimes. In the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; editing serves that chain, and time is given only indirectly, as the measure of what gets done. When the link between perceiving and acting snaps, something else appears: the time-image, where the protagonist can no longer act on what he sees and becomes a seer. Time stops being the servant of action and is felt for itself. Valuska is that seer — Lars Rudolph plays him with a transparent, unguarded wonder, a face on which events register rather than a mind that schemes against them. This is Bresson's 'model,' lifted whole from Au Hasard Balthazar: the non-actor directed to withhold expression so the camera observes a surface, not a performance. Valuska witnesses the arrival of the whale, the muttering crowds, the mob, and he changes none of it. He only looks, until looking breaks him.

Adrian Chan puts the film's true subject plainly: Tarr 'makes film think with the body; and it is the body which, set in motion, resides in time.' Deleuze has a name for this — a cinema of the body, where the body, no longer an instrument of action, makes time appear through its attitudes and postures: tiredness, waiting, ceremony, the drunkards' orbit. The film thinks by moving bodies through duration, and it conscripts ours: Adrian has watched friends shift in their seats inside a single shot, their own physicality falling under the spell of Tarr's tempo. His questions — can bodies think? can minds think without bodies? — are the film's, and the eclipse-dance answers in the only grammar it has, choreography held long enough to become argument.

The town these bodies move through is an any-space-whatever — Deleuze's term for a place drained of coordinates and dramatic function, no longer a setting where action can take hold. Tarr's streets are empty, façades scarred, light angled to eliminate warmth; the camera tracks laterally through squares where nothing waits to happen. These are stretches of dead time, dedramatized duration in which the action does not advance because there is no action left to advance. And into this emptiness arrives a presence that insists without ever quite existing: the enormous taxidermied whale on its flatbed, and the rumored Prince, shown only in fragments, never explained. Deleuze would call the whale an out-of-field-absolute — a thing that gestures at something beyond the frame which cannot be located in any adjacent space. Valuska presses his face to its grey hide in awe; the town reads it as omen. The Prince is worse, an unconfrontable force behind the violence, a condemnation of the plot in Deleuze's sense: a diffuse power sensed everywhere and graspable nowhere, the conspiracy you cannot find to oppose.

When the violence finally comes, it comes as pure optical and sound situation — opsigns and sonsigns, perception severed from any possible response. The camera moves with the mob through the hospital, ward by ward, past helpless patients, and we can only watch as they watch, until the men stop, inexplicably, before a naked old man and the brutality dies into arrested stillness. There is nothing to do with this image but read it. Here Adrian's second insight earns its weight: Tarr's is a cinema of proximity built through sound that stays near even as bodies recede into the dark. The scrape of boots, the rumble of the truck, the breath of the crowd hold us close when the image lets figures dissolve into black. Tarr's time, Adrian notes, is material where Tarkovsky's was symbolic — duration you can feel on the skin, not a sign to decode.

The lineage is exact. From Andrei Rublev comes the holy fool who witnesses collective horror without agency, catastrophe staged as atmosphere rather than event. From Jancsó's The Round-Up comes the rehearsal-intensive choreographed long take, the camera's lateral sweep disposing bodies in bounded space. From Damnation and Sátántangó comes the whole apparatus — Medvigy's mobile camera, Hranitzky's near-absent cuts, Víg's modal dirge — and Stalker's ruined zone where movement itself becomes the only available meaning. What Tarr did with all of it was condense Sátántangó's seven hours into a single night's collapse and make duration a moral position: to hold the shot is to refuse to look away. Fewer than forty cuts across 145 minutes, each cut an event, an ellipsis, a shift of moral register.

The significance is this. Tarr proved that film could think without thoughts, by setting a body turning under one bulb and trusting time to do the rest. Watch it again, and watch yourself watching — the moment you feel your own weight in the chair, the film has found its real subject.