Capo
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Post by Capo on Jan 4, 2007 0:28:01 GMT
Werckmeister harmóniák Werckmeister Harmonies Béla Tarr 2000 Hungary 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.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Nov 24, 2008 19:15:51 GMT
I made a '15 minute' presentation on this that lasted nearly 30 minutes today.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Nov 24, 2008 19:52:00 GMT
Haha.
What is the name of the module it was for? What did you say? Did you get cut off, or did you just keep going?
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Nov 24, 2008 20:54:21 GMT
It's a screenwriting module called 'Writing Project'. There's no exam. 60% goes for a screenplay I have to submit two weeks from Thursday, 30% goes for this film analysis, and 10% goes for class contribution.
I had to analyse it via Syd Field's Three-Act Structure and Joseph Campbell's Mono-Myth, and then also 'unlock' the 'poetic code', which just means the symbolism, allegory, subtext, etc.
I wasn't aware I'd been talking for so long.
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Post by svsg on Nov 24, 2008 21:23:47 GMT
They should have assigned you Satantango for fitting into a 3-act structure LOL.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Nov 24, 2008 21:39:34 GMT
I chose the film. My lecturer hadn't seen it, I had to lend him the DVD.
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Post by svsg on Nov 24, 2008 21:53:00 GMT
I guess this can be made to fit into a 3-act structure, just as any other film, whether it was intended or not.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Nov 24, 2008 22:07:51 GMT
Yeah, it wasn't too tricky, but if the plot was much more minimal it would've been. The 'pinches' in act 2 were hard to find.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on May 1, 2009 16:16:05 GMT
I've been reading a lot of David Walsh's film reviews on wsws.org, and don't know what to make of some of them. Here's an extract from a longer piece, which discusses Werckmeister Harmonies. Interested in thoughts. Gloom and other unhelpful attitudes
The world is a difficult place, and many tragedies have befallen mankind in its upward climb from savagery, some of them quite recently. An artist with an unfurrowed brow and a carefree air might very well seem out of place. Artists, as well as other people, have the right to take things seriously and say what is. Painting pretty pictures has never helped anyone. “Saying what is,” however, if it is to be a helpful and genuinely truthful activity, needs to include revealing that human misery is socially, not divinely or “naturally” produced, and that human beings can alter the outmoded and destructive social structures other human beings have created.
Lack of hope plays a damaging social role. Not believing that the world can be changed objectively weakens the resolve and the position of those who need it changed. The basis for renewed hope, however, is not blind faith, but a scientific understanding of historical laws and social processes.
Despair can come into fashion like anything else. It can become a cheap and marketable commodity. It often tickles the fancy of essentially complacent layers of the population. Few accountants, professors of literature or civil servants ever lost a night's sleep because a film or novel reminded them of the “meaninglessness of existence.”
One has to be concrete. Under certain circumstances, a bleak picture can provoke thought and action. There are numerous artists today who lack any confidence that social life can be improved and yet sincerely want to criticize and change the world around them. Nicolas Klotz and Elizabeth Perceval, the director and writer of Pariah (France), seem to belong to this category. The film is a dark, two-hour examination of the lives of homeless people in Paris.
Victor, 18, abandoned by his father at the age of four, loses his scooter, his job and his apartment almost at the same time. He finds himself on the streets and even has his shoes stolen off his feet. He finds a girl he likes, Annabelle, and promptly gets into a fight with her boyfriend. Eventually he hooks up with the guy who stole his shoes, Momo, something of a grifter. The latter is taking part in an immigration scam; he will wed an Algerian girl to help her get her documents. On New Year's Eve, the homeless are gathered up, willingly and unwillingly, and transported to a shelter. One of their number is dying from the effects of alcohol and poverty.
Pariah treats the lives of the marginalized quite objectively and honestly. But even here the lugubrious tone begins to wear on the spectator. Is the chief difficulty at present that no one is aware that homelessness and poverty exist? Or is it, rather, that so few believe anything can be done about the problems? In any event, it is clearly the creditable intent of Pariah's makers to arouse anger.
One of the chief sources of artistic gloom these days is eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And clearly a catastrophe has taken place. None of the artists in the former Stalinist countries, however, are yet capable of giving this catastrophe a name: the restoration of capitalism.
The difficulties with Happy Man begin with its heavily ironic title. Written and directed by Malgorzata Szumowska (born Krakow, 1973), the film is about Janek, a 30-year-old who has no job and no prospects in post-Stalinist Poland. He majored in the “Theory of Culture” and nothing could be more useless in the new dog-eat-dog society. His old friend is an unscrupulous entrepreneur and slum landlord. Janek lives with his mother, who still works, in a small apartment and feels sorry for himself. He starts a relationship with a factory worker, Marta, but dumps her when he finds out that she has a child.
When they are informed separately that Janek's mother has come down with a fatal illness, both mother and son ask the doctor not to tell the other. Janek takes up with Marta again so that he can fulfill his mother's desire that he marry. The heavy-handed irony of the title is matched by the heavy-handed irony of the denouement.
The lugubrious tone here seems almost entirely likely to encourage complacency. There is no anger, no passion, just a sort of dull and muddy gloom that extends over every aspect of the film. Things are terrible, but the filmmaker doesn't seem in a particular hurry to get to the bottom of the situation.
If the chief sources of artistic gloom these days is eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as a region, Hungary is surely the single most dedicated supplier. This is not to make light of the social conditions for masses of people in Hungary which, again, are disastrous. One has the right, however, to entertain at least the notion that, in some cases, the gloom of the film artists in the ex-Stalinist countries is rooted less in these disastrous conditions and more in the discomfort caused by an end to the generous subsidization of the film industries provided by the old bureaucratic regimes.
In any event, Béla Tarr ( Sátántangó, 1994), who began making films in the 1970s, is the best known Hungarian filmmaker at present. His new work Werckmeister Harmonies deserves to be sharply criticized, in my view. (Andreas Werckmeister was a musician and music theorist who invented the equal tempered scale—the octave divided into 12 equal half steps—in 1685.)
The film depicts a world thoroughly sunk in misery, poverty, gloom. More than that, as the opening scene suggests, “A total eclipse has come upon us,” and “It's still not over.”
A circus has arrived in a small Hungarian town in midwinter. Its main attraction is the hideous carcass of a whale, on display in the back of a truck. Moreover, the circus promises the appearance of a mysterious Prince, a demagogue who is plotting untold evil.
A sinister “mob” is gathering in the square—unemployed men, dressed in wretched clothes, congregating around fires. The police chief is conspiring with the wife of a leading citizen, organizer of the “Clean Town Movement.”
When the order comes, the mob in the square goes on a rampage, setting fires, sacking a hospital and beating or murdering the patients.
The film is one repetitive horror after another. About the hospital scene, the critics exclaim, “What a tour de force!” Almost no one seems to notice that it continues to be far easier to stage such atrocities than to explain why they take place in reality. And, in fact, so much time and energy is devoted to their staging precisely to evade that more difficult question.
The film is full of affected bitterness, self-pity. There is nothing spontaneous in the performances, nearly everyone has simply been directed to be as menacing and loathsome as possible. Slow, mannered, self-important, Tarr's film is neither original nor penetrating. Werckmeister Harmonies does not represent a warning about the dangers of nationalism, fascism or any other concrete social phenomenon. Tarr has “transcended” such mundane concerns.
Whatever its conscious themes—about the dangers of artificially-constructed systems and who knows what else—the overriding message conveyed by the film is that humanity is swinish. Everyone is polluted, brutish or manipulative ... swinish. Again, the filmmaker does not seem especially angry about the conditions in which people are forced to live—it is humanity that disgusts him. This is an irresponsible and superficial view, and only makes the actual source of social tragedy that much more difficult to grasp.
Tarr has obviously entered the ongoing competition to see who can depict humanity in the worst possible colors. He has numerous rivals for the prize. Let us leave them to it.
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Post by svsg on May 1, 2009 18:03:38 GMT
Gloom and other unhelpful attitudes
The world is a difficult place, and many tragedies have befallen mankind in its upward climb from savagery, some of them quite recently. An artist with an unfurrowed brow and a carefree air might very well seem out of place. Artists, as well as other people, have the right to take things seriously and say what is. Painting pretty pictures has never helped anyone. “Saying what is,” however, if it is to be a helpful and genuinely truthful activity, needs to include revealing that human misery is socially, not divinely or “naturally” produced, and that human beings can alter the outmoded and destructive social structures other human beings have created.
Lack of hope plays a damaging social role. Not believing that the world can be changed objectively weakens the resolve and the position of those who need it changed. The basis for renewed hope, however, is not blind faith, but a scientific understanding of historical laws and social processes.
Despair can come into fashion like anything else. It can become a cheap and marketable commodity. It often tickles the fancy of essentially complacent layers of the population. Few accountants, professors of literature or civil servants ever lost a night's sleep because a film or novel reminded them of the “meaninglessness of existence.”
One has to be concrete. Under certain circumstances, a bleak picture can provoke thought and action. There are numerous artists today who lack any confidence that social life can be improved and yet sincerely want to criticize and change the world around them. Nicolas Klotz and Elizabeth Perceval, the director and writer of Pariah (France), seem to belong to this category. The film is a dark, two-hour examination of the lives of homeless people in Paris.
Victor, 18, abandoned by his father at the age of four, loses his scooter, his job and his apartment almost at the same time. He finds himself on the streets and even has his shoes stolen off his feet. He finds a girl he likes, Annabelle, and promptly gets into a fight with her boyfriend. Eventually he hooks up with the guy who stole his shoes, Momo, something of a grifter. The latter is taking part in an immigration scam; he will wed an Algerian girl to help her get her documents. On New Year's Eve, the homeless are gathered up, willingly and unwillingly, and transported to a shelter. One of their number is dying from the effects of alcohol and poverty.
Pariah treats the lives of the marginalized quite objectively and honestly. But even here the lugubrious tone begins to wear on the spectator. Is the chief difficulty at present that no one is aware that homelessness and poverty exist? Or is it, rather, that so few believe anything can be done about the problems? In any event, it is clearly the creditable intent of Pariah's makers to arouse anger.
One of the chief sources of artistic gloom these days is eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And clearly a catastrophe has taken place. None of the artists in the former Stalinist countries, however, are yet capable of giving this catastrophe a name: the restoration of capitalism.
The difficulties with Happy Man begin with its heavily ironic title. Written and directed by Malgorzata Szumowska (born Krakow, 1973), the film is about Janek, a 30-year-old who has no job and no prospects in post-Stalinist Poland. He majored in the “Theory of Culture” and nothing could be more useless in the new dog-eat-dog society. His old friend is an unscrupulous entrepreneur and slum landlord. Janek lives with his mother, who still works, in a small apartment and feels sorry for himself. He starts a relationship with a factory worker, Marta, but dumps her when he finds out that she has a child.
When they are informed separately that Janek's mother has come down with a fatal illness, both mother and son ask the doctor not to tell the other. Janek takes up with Marta again so that he can fulfill his mother's desire that he marry. The heavy-handed irony of the title is matched by the heavy-handed irony of the denouement.
The lugubrious tone here seems almost entirely likely to encourage complacency. There is no anger, no passion, just a sort of dull and muddy gloom that extends over every aspect of the film. Things are terrible, but the filmmaker doesn't seem in a particular hurry to get to the bottom of the situation.
If the chief sources of artistic gloom these days is eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as a region, Hungary is surely the single most dedicated supplier. This is not to make light of the social conditions for masses of people in Hungary which, again, are disastrous. One has the right, however, to entertain at least the notion that, in some cases, the gloom of the film artists in the ex-Stalinist countries is rooted less in these disastrous conditions and more in the discomfort caused by an end to the generous subsidization of the film industries provided by the old bureaucratic regimes.
I once raised the point of long essays discussing personal philosophies of the author in the name of film review. This one belongs to that. In any event, Béla Tarr ( Sátántangó, 1994), who began making films in the 1970s, is the best known Hungarian filmmaker at present. His new work Werckmeister Harmonies deserves to be sharply criticized, in my view. (Andreas Werckmeister was a musician and music theorist who invented the equal tempered scale—the octave divided into 12 equal half steps—in 1685.) The film depicts a world thoroughly sunk in misery, poverty, gloom. More than that, as the opening scene suggests, “A total eclipse has come upon us,” and “It's still not over.” A circus has arrived in a small Hungarian town in midwinter. Its main attraction is the hideous carcass of a whale, on display in the back of a truck. Moreover, the circus promises the appearance of a mysterious Prince, a demagogue who is plotting untold evil. A sinister “mob” is gathering in the square—unemployed men, dressed in wretched clothes, congregating around fires. The police chief is conspiring with the wife of a leading citizen, organizer of the “Clean Town Movement.” When the order comes, the mob in the square goes on a rampage, setting fires, sacking a hospital and beating or murdering the patients. The film is one repetitive horror after another. About the hospital scene, the critics exclaim, “What a tour de force!” Almost no one seems to notice that it continues to be far easier to stage such atrocities than to explain why they take place in reality. And, in fact, so much time and energy is devoted to their staging precisely to evade that more difficult question. The film is full of affected bitterness, self-pity. There is nothing spontaneous in the performances, nearly everyone has simply been directed to be as menacing and loathsome as possible. Slow, mannered, self-important, Tarr's film is neither original nor penetrating. Werckmeister Harmonies does not represent a warning about the dangers of nationalism, fascism or any other concrete social phenomenon. Tarr has “transcended” such mundane concerns. Whatever its conscious themes—about the dangers of artificially-constructed systems and who knows what else—the overriding message conveyed by the film is that humanity is swinish. Everyone is polluted, brutish or manipulative ... swinish. Again, the filmmaker does not seem especially angry about the conditions in which people are forced to live—it is humanity that disgusts him. Though I am not sure if I agree with all of it or even if this author's interpretation of Bela Tarr's work is correct, he at least talks about relevant stuff here. This is an irresponsible and superficial view, and only makes the actual source of social tragedy that much more difficult to grasp. But then he suddenly makes a leap. I hate these types of film viewers/critics, who rubbish a film because it doesn't fit into their political ideology. Art is not for solving problems in the society.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on May 2, 2009 20:34:46 GMT
I don't see how anything he wrote is irrelevant. He's discussing the relationship between the reality the film purports to represent and the film's representation.
There is a tendency among the WSWS critics to ignore aesthetic questions, and questions of symbolism, allegory, etc, and stick to a very politicised analysis of 'correspondance'; of how accurately the depiction of life corresponds to actual life. In their more generalised writings (on the state of film culture or of culture in general) there's often the claim that they're not only interested in social realist aesthetics, but, frankly, the more specific textual criticism suggests otherwise a lot of the time; that they at least privilege social realist aesthetics over other, less 'concrete', traditions, and also that they're more forgiving of other aesthetics when the text isn't contemporary. However, aesthetic traditions and values don't come from nowhere and their historical origins need to be considered, and for serious and thorough analyses of films in their historical contexts, the WSWS can't be beaten. Stefan Stainberg's review of Sokurov's The Sun is incrediblely enlightening, and really gave me pause on my attitude toward it and Sokurov.
No one is suggesting that art is "for solving problems in society". Art can't solve social problems. But art is part of society. Our cultures of stories and images are part of the way we understand the world around us, and they arise out of that world and communicate an awful lot about it, and certainly not just what the artists intend to communicate. Artists do have a social responsibility; they're responsible for what they say, like anyone else, they're responsible for the images they create, the images that are created socially, about society (however obliquely), for social consumption. They're not above it all, and reality is never beside the point.
I too have been irritated by Tarr's comments about there being "a lot of shit coming from the cosmos", and that he's "realised the problem is not social, but cosmic." What is that supposed to mean? It's hard not to see in that a disillusioned, defeated abandonment of previously strongly held political beliefs.
I do think a closer reading of the film reveals it's not all that pessimistic, since the 'eclipse' does come to an end. It's stated by Janós at the beginning that it will, and it does, and the mysterious stuffed whale is demystified, and the insidious political machinery behind the whole affair is heavily alluded to. I think Walsh missed a lot in his review.
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Post by svsg on May 3, 2009 1:18:28 GMT
Whether or not Tarr actually feels that humanity is disgusting and swinish, the author seems to imply that such a position is irresponsible and superficial and also goes on to suggest that if Tarr had expressed anger at the reasons for the depressing human condition, that might be more worthy (not exact words, but implied). WH is not a documentary with research on the human condition. It is not an academic thesis that has to start with the problem and then proceed to give the solutions and then conclude with areas of future work. Though I am personally not a big fan of WH, I don't think that the abstraction at which the film works is either superficial or irresponsible.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on May 3, 2009 23:20:23 GMT
There is a tendency among the writers there, also, to sort of use the text as a means to psychoanalyse the author in order to determine their political leanings or the depth and accuracy of their understanding of society. They'll often quote from interviews with the writer or director and then measure the authorial intent against the representations contained in the text, etc. It can be quite limiting.
That said, of what merit might a film be if it's expressive of nothing but the view that "people are shit, and we're all fucked anyway"? That would certainly be superficial. And why bother making misanthropic art? To tell your audience they're innately 'swinish' and 'cosmically' doomed to misery?
"Few accountants, professors of literature or civil servants ever lost a night's sleep because a film or novel reminded them of the “meaninglessness of existence.”"
That observation is very astute. The position is easy, shallow and challenges nothing and no one.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on May 4, 2009 0:27:15 GMT
These are some of the notes and bullet points I made for myself for the presentation I did last semester.
The Prince
Represents fascism/totalitarianism/hatemongering, abuse of authority, or illegitimate authority.
He represents the subversion of Western orders and values.
In the aftermath of the violence brought on by the presence of the Prince, János reads aloud to himself from a book he has found, which seems to be a false account of the events, as though his fantasy:
“When the clamour died down, the Prince said this: ‘What they build, and what they will build, what they do, and what they will do, is delusion and lies. What they think, and what they will think, is ridiculous. They think because they are afraid. And he who is afraid, knows nothing.’ He says he likes it when things fall apart. ‘There is construction in all ruins. A single emotion for destruction, implacable, deadly. We didn’t find the real object of our abhorrence and despair, so we rushed at everything we came across with wilder and wilder fury. We destroyed the shops, threw out and trampled everything that was movable and what we couldn’t move we broke up with slats of shutters and iron bars. We turned over cars in the streets, tore off the miserable sign boards, destroyed the telephone centre because we saw the lights inside, and we had the two post office girls and we left only when they had fainted, and like two used rags, lifeless, hands clasped between knees, hunched over, they slipped off the bloody table…”
What really happens, and what refutes decisively charges of misanthropy levelled at Tarr, is that the mob begins to mindlessly ransack an infirmary until they are cowed, humbled and returned to their senses by an image of human frailty. They regain their perspective and their order and the violence ceases, they turn and leave in silence.
The Whale
Represents seductive lies. The tools of deception.
It is a mundane object around which is cultivated the illusion of the mystical. It is a distraction. It is also a symbol of the decadent and alienated Old Order.
Uncle Karcsi: “The whale has nothing to do with it.” / “The whale is the cause of it all.”
The Whale is demystified in the final scene, revealed as pathetic and sad; beached in land-locked Hungary. An alien presence, but powerless.
Andreas Werckmeister
Musical theorist who revolutionised the concept of musical harmony. György is convinced that Werckmeister was wrong, and that the structure he imposed on musical harmony is false and must be overthrown.
This is a metaphor for the structures of post-Enlightenment Western civilisation, the idea that the social structures imposed on people are false; “delusion and lies”.
Pivotal scene which binds György’s monologue on Werckmeister’s musical theory to the spreading undercurrent of unrest: Mrs Eszter and her lover, with his pistol drawn, are playing Brahms loudly, and the music, or its underlying ‘false’ structure, is agitating and inciting two children in the house adjoining to unruliness and aggression.
Cosmos
The conflict between darkness and light is a central motif.
Werckmeister’s theories of counterpoint tied musical harmony to the movement of the planets.
Opening shot is of a light being extinguished, followed by a dramatisation of a solar eclipse. The darkness is coming, but it is temporary.
Final shot is of the Whale’s carcass exposed to the sunlight—the sunrise—for the first time, perhaps since its death.
Tarr: “In the beginning when we made our first film we thought okay, we have a lot of social problems. Afterwards, we made other films, but felt the problem is not only social but ontological, then afterwards cosmic.”
Sequence-shot aesthetic (39 shots; 4.5min ASL)
The importance of the uniformity of the camera’s movement, irrespective of the action; cosmic indifference, objectivity.
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Post by svsg on May 4, 2009 5:14:39 GMT
I like your notes... some points didn't strike my mind when I viewed the film.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on May 4, 2009 14:15:52 GMT
"We didn’t find the real object of our abhorrence and despair"
^ Crucial line, I think.
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