Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr and his co-director and editor Ágnes Hranitzky now have their 2000 film re-released as part of a career retrospective; it is an eerie monochrome vision of power, group hysteria, cosmological breakdown and the end of the world. When I first saw this film I responded to what might be called its spiritual aspect, its mystery, its unknowability, and of course its distinctive style: the extended dream-tempo takes, the murmuringly restrained dialogue achieved through overdubbing and the long trudging walks through an unforgiving landscape. There is a quite extraordinary closeup sequence in which two men simply walk together down a city street in wordless silence, for minute after minute, their faces juxtaposed in semi-profile. That shot is the kind of eccentric indulgence forbidden by every film school in Europe or the US, but Gus Van Sant created a homage to Tarr and to that very scene in his 2002 film Gerry, with Casey Affleck and Matt Damon doing the same walk.
A second viewing of Werckmeister Harmonies reveals to me something in it more concrete about fascism and the sleep of reason, about the longing to submit to power which lurks just below the surface, to which humanity might so easily surrender, as if in a somnambulist trance; Tarr in fact recently spoke to me about these ideas. And this second time around I saw another resemblance: to George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
