'Werckmeister Harmonies'
There’s something about longer films that, by nature of the space they take up, allows for more comprehensive and immersive storytelling. Part of it is a mentality — a focus on character and circumstance that can’t be accounted for when higher-ups are wanting things cut to the bone to fit in more showings per day. But there’s also a promise with longer films that they’ll do things … differently. And that can be refreshing. And invigorating. And Nashville has two very unique opportunities coming up over the next two weeks.
Provided you don’t have a music theory background, Werckmeister Harmonies might fire a few synapses thanks to its two previous one-off local screenings (the first at the Nashville Film Festival back in the glory days, the second at the Belcourt), which lit some cinematic fires and dazzled the eyes and souls of a hundred or so folks. The 2000 feature from Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky was the North American breakthrough for the duo (though Hranitzky’s contribution was never really addressed in English-language press, despite being front-and-center in the Hungarian credits), a remarkable diagram of the ways that fascism and the breakdown of society take hold in a community. It’s become all the more tragically relevant given what Viktor Orbán has done to Hungary in the intervening two decades.
Werckmeister Harmonies is a formalist ritual, its black-and-white long takes effective in their cumulative power — even as they illustrate the swinging-dick emptiness of so many of the films since then that have used CG imagery and subliminal edits to massage or pad out their long takes. This is, simply, real. Tarr and Hranitzky continue the tradition of Miklós Jancsó, who’d been experimenting with how the single-shot approach changes the way in which audiences process mood and imagery (also with lots of gorgeous naked people). And now, in a stellar 4K restoration from the folks at Janus Films, Nashville viewers can experience the complete film! (Not that it was cut for the U.S., rather that there being only one English-subtitled 35 mm print meant that some moments — and the opening credits — fell away due to splices from the mechanics of exhibition.)
It was Tarr and Hranitzky’s seven-and-a-half hour 1994 film Sátántangó that has since become the big one, triumphantly enjoying a proper global release a few years back. But real talk: Werckmeister does everything that Sátántangó does, and does so in two-and-a-half hours. (Also, no questionable sequences involving cats.) Similarly, 2018’s La Flor — an Argentine epic from director Mariano Llinás and the production team El Pampero Cine running just under 14 hours — rightfully got some attention for its ambition (its second section, a musical mystery involving a scorpion cult possibly inspired by singing duo Pimpinela, was one of the most dazzling whatsits of the 2018 festival circuit) and its freewheeling approach to genre and storytelling.
Now, La Flor’s producer Laura Citarella has taken that approach and given us Trenque Lauquen, an expansive (four hours and 20 minutes, nice) but viscerally exciting mystery that traces a disappearance through multiple genres and perspectives — a captivating journey that never bores and never stops reworking and rearranging itself.
You know how people will look at a season of a prestige TV show and say, “That could have been a movie, and it would have worked better”? Well, Trenque Lauquen covers all the plot and all the emotions (and finds the menace at the heart of ’80s MOR), at times feeling like The Saragossa Manuscript as a nighttime soap. It’s an exceptional film, and there’s simply no better way to spend the afternoon of June 18.
