Werckmeister Harmonies

Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2001) is a Hungarian black-and-white drama by Béla Tarr — co-directed with Ágnes Hranitzky — that you can watch online on iFILM. Lars Rudolph leads the cast alongside Peter Fitz and Hanna Schygulla. The film was shot in just 39 long, unbroken takes.

A traveling circus rolls into a small provincial Hungarian town. The main draw is a stuffed whale on display in a truck. Young postal worker János, gentle and wide-eyed, helps his musicologist uncle who holds that Andreas Werckmeister's 17th-century tuning system corrupted harmony itself — and by extension, the world. When the circus arrives, so does something like collective unease. Crowds gather. The cold intensifies. Events move toward a kind of violence that János senses before he can name it.

Tarr builds dread out of duration and space rather than plot. Some shots run ten uninterrupted minutes; the whale, the frozen streets, and the music theory converge into a single image of a society tipping past a point of no return. It asks more patience than most films do, and pays it back differently. Stream Werckmeister Harmonies (2001) online on iFILM.