Werckmeister harmóniák Werckmeister Harmonies Béla Tarr 2000 Hungary2nd time; DVD A travelling truck, with a huge whale inside and a mysterious figure called the Prince, arrives in a small town, and hell breaks loose. This comes and goes in turns as interesting and fantastic and… well, astonishing. Tarr's camera is one of the most hypnotic in Cinema, and here it captures, in one-take, some brilliant scenes: last orders in a bar, in which our hero is introduced and shows all the men what happens when there is a total eclipse (a fitting, metaphorical summary of events to come, actually); the arrival of the whale in the huge trailer, pulled painstakingly along by a creaking tractor at night, with distant lights casting shadows on the houses and streets until the trailer passes; the march of a crowd of men towards a hospital, which seems to go on forever. But the most impressive shot is the attack itself, on the hospital, with the camera tracking and turning corridors like a lonely dog, watching on as the men cause havoc, until they come across a helpless, naked old man. Mihály Vig's score is phenomenal, too, and used at the most appropriate times. But it is too easy to fall in love with so meticulously designed and efficiently shot images, and superlatives as a result amount to cliché; it might be better to recommend it, then, as a film unlike any other, not too far removed from Tarr's other films, and once seen, not forgotten.
[Sidenote: Since I use a lot of code in this thread, it's much easier to have one film per post, since whenever you add some code the cursor goes right back to the beginning of what you're writing, so I'd have to scroll all the way back down to find where I was at.]
...dot com bold typeface rhetoric. You go clickety click and get your head split. 'The hell you look like on a message board Discussing whether or not the Brother is hardcore?
