Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

hello-82528 This is pure cinema, the triumph of cinema in our little planet. Like a flower that the observer is waiting to blossom to give him his beauty, wants time and patience, as everything is worth in this life.Alongside with Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr is the last director -philosopher in our time.

Doktor Hackenbush A circus attraction and a mysterious prince arrive very very (but very very!) slowly to a village where it is cold and the inhabitants are afraid of something. That's what you notice while you see how a very common sad guy commonly and sadly walks, commonly and sadly wanders, commonly and sadly eats, commonly and sadly works. He commonly and sadly looks after an old guy who is obsessed with the musical tempered systems that try to imitate the celestial harmonies: so hopefully, he says, all the tunings should be just, otherwise the Bach preludes sound badly, and blah, blah, blah.... That's the cultural stuff Bela Tarr found some day so he could use it in a new movie and look profound and exquisite. Because, if he finds that subject truly amazing, why does he use such an stupid piano new-age music for the first scene, that repulsive description of an eclipse with fake drunkards, so pedantic? Beeeeeeghhhhrpl.Apart from that evident evidence, Tarr shows you everything very slowly (unbereable the scene when the truck crosses a big street, at 5km/h). But that slowness has no justification: it is the exact mirror of the stupid American action movies ("Gladiator", "Transporter"...) that show you everything very very fast so you can have the feeling of "frenetic action", which is what it's "really cool", oh yeah! These slow movies are also done to make the director and the believers feel that same feeling: "we are slow, we are really cool!, oh yeah!, amen!". Because in this movie there is no reason for slowness: there are no details, the story doesn't change, the characters are uninteresting and are never seen in a different way during the film, there is no sense of humour... "I'm slow, so I'm special", that's all.It's in b/w and some people say it has a dream-like atmosphere. I think that in dreams the events don't happen so slowly, we don't need to dream every second that we are eating in the dream, or walking, and there is a kind of brutal presence of the unexpected, of elements that break the "artistic direction" of the dream, something that Mr.Tarr will surely not find "cool" enough.I didn't like it very much.

Lee Eisenberg Béla Tarr's "Werckmeister harmóniák" ("Werckmeister Harmonies" in English) is not a movie that I can easily describe. Consisting of only 39 shots, some of them lasting several minutes, it focuses on the strange effects that a circus has on a Hungarian town. Seen through the eyes of one János Valuska (Lars Rudolph), we see the town become almost a different place, particularly in terms of people's relationships.I spent a lot of the movie wondering if it was trying to say something, or if the whale and the Prince were a metaphor. Whether or not it was, or whether or not they were a metaphor, you gotta admire what the makers put into the movie. A lot of the movie is an almost dreamlike state with little dialog or music. This is one movie that really tests your attention span. I understand that Tarr also directed a movie called "Sátántangó" which tests your attention span even more than this one. He says that "A torinói ló" ("The Turin Horse" in English) will be his final movie. I will have to see more of his movies.Also starring Peter Fitz and Hanna Schygulla.

tieman64 "I'm a man with a huge world-view, surrounded by microbes." – Woody Allen Bela Tarr directs "Werckmeister Harmonies". The plot? A circus act, consisting of a giant whale and a special guest called "The Prince", arrives at a small Hungarian town. With the circus comes a palpable sense of impending doom. Pretty soon, local townsfolk kick-start a violent uprising. They seem compelled by invisible, magical forces. One man, Janos Valuska, observes these mysterious proceedings with fascination. A figure of innocence and perhaps naivety, Janos watches as the circus causes violent gangs to form, some taking advantage of the situation and seizing power, others attempts to restore "order and cleanliness".The film begins with a beautiful sequence. Janos enters a bar and persuades a group of drunks to create a model of the solar system. Dancing in circles the gang reenact a solar eclipse, a ballet which is beautiful until one looks closely. The participants are all drunk and in a state of mental confusion, readily believing Janos' apocalyptic description of a solar eclipse. To Janos, an eclipse is not a scientific event, but a quasi-religious one which heralds the end of mankind. Instead of rational explanation, Janos and his congregation thus cling to irrationality and superstition. Later, when Janos sees the giant whale up close, he attributes its presence to God; surely only a powerful, supernatural being could create such a funny creature.Tarr then uses the whale as a metaphor for a kind of irrational, medieval superstition akin to blind, fascist obedience. No one in the film even considers taking a closer look at the whale, for if they had they would have noticed "The Prince" hidden behind it, a shadowy leader who represents nothing but an image onto which anyone can project whatever ideals they wish.Midway in the film, Janos overhears his uncle talking about Andreas Werckmeister, a musician famous for dividing the octave into twelve half-step tones. Werckmeister believed that maths, music and astronomy were linked manifestations of the harmony of the universe, a view held by Pythagoras, who argued that most euphonious harmonies resulted from tones that reflected the proportions of simple integers (2:1, 3:2 etc). But basing musical scales on simple ratios leads to contradictions and octaves that aren't true, which led to people like Werckmeister (and others) seeking to find an "equal temperament" or some form of "new musical system".By adopting this new system, Janos' uncle believes that mankind has deprived musical instruments of their divine tuning, replacing it with an artificial system which is nothing but an illusion; an illusion which western music is based on. Werckmeister is thus a sort of Promethian figure, taking the gift of knowledge/music away from God and handing it down to men.Janos' uncle thus believes that music, and by extension life itself, was better when it belonged solely to God. He longs for a simpler universe ruled by a sovereign Master Figure, and fails to acknowledge the vast achievements developed under the Werckmeister scale. As a musicologist he fails to appreciate the higher level of organisation and harmonies which "man's creation" has led to.The film's treatment of "order", "chaos", "anarchy" and "civilization", are thus reduced to musical terms; a three-way battle between order and symmetry (the unified world-view of classical Greece and the Middle Ages), superstition and mysticism and a more nuanced blending of the two. Consider again the first scene, in which Janos attempts to create heavenly order using the drunken bums. The bums fumble about, irregular in their movements, always falling out of position...and yet they are supremely beautiful, spinning in circles whilst the camera pulls back and the music swells. For Tarr, all quests for perfection must take into consideration humanity's imperfections; harmony depends on imprecision and compromise.But Tarr makes a larger point. Late in the film we're introduced to a gun waving police chief, his dictatorial children and his lover, a woman who seeks to use the escalating chaos of the village to acquire more power. Using these characters, and various symbolic sequences, Tarr then sketches a political allegory about the fascist's quest for order, and fascism's unstoppable tilt toward collapse.Hungary became a "Communist" (or rather, state capitalist) state after World War 2, the Soviet Union maintaining a military presence and enforcing Stalinist principles. This led to a revolt in 1956, which helped to topple authoritarianism and give birth to a kind of mixed ideology Socialism, a greatly liberalised approach to communism that lasted until 1989 (upon which democratic government and capitalism became the norm). But the film is not a strict allegory of Hungarian history, rather it aims to show how one political ideology can replace another when an aimless populace irrationally follows a charismatic demagogue. It is about how reactionary opportunists exploit superstition to gain power in the name of order, how people obsessed with "order" have contributed to disturbing the harmonic "disorder" of things and how impotent members of the intelligentsia often sit on the sidelines whilst the world burns. Indeed, it's no surprise that the first thing the violent gang does in the film is to raid a hospital, destroying scientific equipment in a crazy rage. With science dead they become slaves to lies; an irrational force, an angry mob which is only halted by the sight of a naked old man. This man, his body frail, his bones protruding from his flesh, forces them to confront a mass of paradoxes. Humbled and disgusted, they retreat into the night. But the damage has already been done. The old order has been destroyed and a new era has begun, Janos, the boy who believed in apocalyptic whales and the mysterious beauty of god, ending the film in a sterile hospital ward, misdiagnosed by science and branded an insane criminal.8.9/10 – Though comprised of only 39 shots, this is perhaps Tarr's most accessible film.