Baltic Cinema: Werckmeister Harmonies

Baltic Cinema: Werckmeister Harmonies

Wed 28 January | 18:30

£6 Full price / £4 Students, under 18s, unwaged and 65+

To mark the passing of visionary director Béla Tarr earlier this month, we present the haunting, brooding and all-consuming masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies. A must for fans of early David Lynch, in particular, whose Eraserhead bears direct comparison for both the atmosphere it conjures and its tactility.

‘Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. 

Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time 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 that builds inexorably toward violence. In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, auteur Béla Tarr and co-director-editor Ágnes Hranitzky conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.’

— Criterion

‘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 … Werckmeister Harmonies may be Tarr’s masterpiece (and some of his followers might even have the heretical suspicion that it achieves as much in two-and-a-half hours as the great Sátántangó in seven.’ 

— ★★★★★ Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 2024

Watch the trailer.

Doors open 18:30; Film starts 18:45. Baltic Kitchen is open until 18:30 for drinks, which you are welcome to take up to the cinema.

Please note we cannot offer refunds on this event.