And now I find that Tarr does, in fact, make films both unique and original, and in a style I find beautiful. I prefer the purity of black and white to color, I like very long takes if they serve a purpose and are not simply stunts, I am drawn into an air of mystery, I find it compelling when a film establishes an immediate, tangible, time and place. For all of its phantasmal themes, “Werckmeister Harmonies” is resolutely realistic. Every person, every room, every street, every action, every line of dialogue, feels as much likecinema verite as the works of Frederick Wiseman.

 

This evening I managed to get into conversation with someone who claimed to love films where very little happens, where the overall, and the general interactions between characters matters most; and I was put into mind off Werckemeister Harmonies,  a film where a lot happens, but very slowly, and so I recommended it wholeheartedly, and meant it - it is a film that you don’t forget - it is magnificent in a way that only cinema can be (each form has its own magnificence). 

 The conversation brought me back to the film, and from that to Roger Ebert’s review (a critic I much admire and appreciate) and he sums up some part of the film so beautifully in the above passage. The film is one of the most astonishing I have ever seen, it is fantastical, it is otherwordly (or dreamlike, whichever you prefer) yet it is also, as Ebert says, realistic. For a film about an apocalyptic circus, that features just a whale and the elusive ‘prince’, that might seem like a bizarre statement, yet there is something to Tarr’s direction that strips the whole film of any falsity - it feels true: it is affecting in the way that only something really plausible can be.