New 4K Re-Release Trailer for Béla Tarr’s ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’

New 4K Re-Release Trailer for Béla Tarr’s ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’

by Alex Billington
May 6, 2023
Source: YouTube

“We’re not going anywhere. Neither now nor later.” Janus Films has unveiled a new official trailer for a 4K restoration re-release of a film from 2000 titled Werckmeister Harmonies, which originally debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight section. This new 4K version premiered last year at the Toronto & Taipei Golden Horse Film Festivals, and will play in a few art house theaters, starting at Film at Lincoln Center in NYC. Worth catching in the cinema if you have the chance. “Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance.” In this, a young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction – featuring a massive stuffed whale and strange man known as “the Prince.” The film stars Sandor Bese, Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla, plus many other locals. The title refers to the baroque musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister. György Eszter, a major character in the story, gives a monologue propounding a theory that Werckmeister’s harmonic principles are responsible for aesthetic and philosophical problems in all music since, and needs to be undone by a new theory of tuning and harmony.

Here’s the new 4K restoration trailer for Tarr & Hranitzky’s Werckmeister Harmonies, from YouTube:

One of the major achievements of 21st century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer & frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens, which builds inexorably toward violence and destruction. In 39 of his signature long takes, engraved in ghostly black and white, Tarr conjures an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty. Werckmeister Harmonies, or Werckmeister Harmóniák, is co-directed by Hungarian filmmakers Béla Tarr (The Prefab People, Damnation , Satantango, The Man from London, The Turin Horse) & Ágnes Hranitzky (The Man from London, The Turin Horse). This initially premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar section, later opening in US theaters in late 2001. Janus Films will be re-releasing Werckmeister Harmonies in 4K in select US theaters (Lincoln Center in NYC at first) starting May 26th, 2023 this month. For more info, visit their official site.

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