The title references the baroque musical theorist Andreas Werckmeister, who believed music was directly related to the movement of celestial bodies. The main character of Werckmeister Harmonies, Jonas (Lars Rudolph), is himself preoccupied with the heavens. He has a star chart hanging above the bed in his otherwise meagerly decorated apartment and, in the oddly exhilarating opening scene, uses drunks staggering around a barroom to illustrate what happens during a solar eclipse. Like Werckmeister, Jonas sees the perfection of the heavens, yet he is perplexed by the imperfection of the creation that surrounds him.Jonas is especially perplexed by the travelling sideshow that has just arrived in his isolated Hungarian village. As he goes about delivering newspapers early one morning, he sees the show arrive. Nothing elaborate or extraordinary, just a long trailer made of corrogated steel pulled by a tractor. The show advertises two main attractions: a dead whale, which lies in the trailer with its tail propped in the air, and the reclusive Prince who has been known to incite restless villagers to violence.
When the show opens, Jonas is the first to buy a ticket and see the exhibition which, along with the whale, consists of a variety of medical anomalies in jars. He enters the trailer alone, but doesn't regard anything for very long, except the eye of the great beast. He is mezmerized by it, and tells his Uncle Gyorgy (Peter Fitz) that he should see the exhibit. Uncle Gyorgy is a musical scholar who provides a monologue about Werckmeister that expounds on aesthetic and philosophical problems that Werckmeister's theory of tuning have raised. His uncle promises, however reluctantly, that he will go to the exhibit.
The people in the village are sharpely divided in their opinions of the show: some are enthralled by it, others believe that it can only lead to trouble. In the film's final scenes the Prince calls to those who have camped out around the trailer to attack the village. One long shot consists of a mob marching down the street, attcking the occupants of a hospital, finding an old man naked in a bathtub, and quietly retreating from the building.
Though the film has a baroque style, it does not dwell on the grotesque. The medical anomalies are not seen close-up and, though we are informed by the show's proprietor that the Prince is a "freak," all we ever see of him is his shadow. The only part of the show that the viewer ever sees in any detail is the whale because it is the only part of the show that interests Jonas.
The film runs a leisurely 145 minutes and consists of 39 shots. As Roger Ebert points out in his Great Movies essay on the film, that's an average of 3.7 minutes per shot (compare to 1.9 seconds per shot in The Borne Supremacy) with some shots lasting over 11 minutes. However, if the viewer becomes restless at any point it is because the film's director, Bela Tarr, wants them to be. Tarr is more interested in giving his audience an experience than he is in telling them a story, and in this way the film is entirely successful. It creates a mood using stark black and white that could not be created using color and sets the action to an enchanting musical score.
In the end, what Jonas doesn't understand, namely nature and humanity, is enough to drive him mad. The final scene has Jonas' uncle visiting him in the madhouse and paying an inevitable visit to the whale, now lying unprotected in the village square after the previous night's violence. Like Jonas, he is no longer protected against the violence, the chaos, the imperfection of creation. As Jonas did, Uncle Gyorgy regards the whale's eye, yet with none of Jonas' wonder.
Thanks, that cleared a lot up for me.
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