It’s been a good time to be a Béla Tarr fan. While the Hungarian master hasn’t made a full-fledged new feature since 2011’s The Turin Horse, we’ve seen recent restorations of Damnation, Sátántangó, and Twilight, for which he consulted on. Now, his mesmerizing turn-of-the-century masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies, co-directed with Ágnes Hranitzky, has received a 4K restoration. Following a TIFF premiere last fall, Janus Films will release it in theaters starting later this month and the new trailer has landed.
Here’s the synopsis: “One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens, which builds inexorably toward violence and destruction. In thirty-nine of his signature long takes, engraved in ghostly black and white, Tarr conjures an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.”
See the new trailer below and read our interview with Tarr here.
Werckmeister Harmonies opens on May 26 at Film at Lincoln Center and will expand.