Art Film Club NBO - Werckmeister Harmonies
Art Film Club NBO (Nairobi) kicks off the series with maybe the most hardcore selection: Werckmeister Harmonies, by the late Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr. Perhaps no director has had a more singular, uncompromising vision.
For one thing, Tarr was the master of the long, unedited shot. WH is a 2.5 hour film with only 39 shots, powerfully filmed in haunting black and white.
The surrealistic arrival of a stuffed whale, a demagogic figure, and brooding MAGA-like masses in the town square, building to a final explosion of violence, all tests the wide-eyed main character Janos as much as our own viewing expectations.
From a 2024 Criterion Channel review:
A good deal remains murky and unexplained in Werckmeister Harmonies […]. But what comes across with chilling clarity—as visible as the cold breath of the characters or the fog that periodically rolls into the cobblestoned square—is the mood and miasma of fascism, the conditions for its breeding, the mundane mechanisms of rumor and suspicion by which the mindset takes hold, locally and at ground level. “At first, we don’t notice the events we are witnessing,” János says, as he recounts the workings of an eclipse to the tavern regulars in the opening scene, though he could just as well be speaking of the incidents that will follow.
Fascism is even less of an abstract concern today than it was in 2000. Hungary has been under Viktor Orbán’s strongman rule for over a decade now. In the present-day American context, it is hard to watch the riot scenes without flashing on the violent mobs—the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia; the election deniers of the January 6 insurrection—that have been a recurring feature of the Trump era. We leave Werckmeister Harmonies haunted by the increasingly stricken gazes of János, the film’s watchful presence […] This monumental film has only gained force and stature in the decades since it was made. It stands as a Janus-like marker, both summative and prophetic, a capstone of the century past and an omen for the one to come.
(In-person by invite only)
