There are only 39 shots in the two hour and twenty-five minute film, and they seem to act as visual musical motifs for the third eye. Indeed, a stuffed whale with magical eyes also serves as a central character in the traveling circus and film, and, in one shot, a helicopter with that omnipresent buzz of its wings and ethereal all-staring evil eye hovering from inside its transparent windows, seems to exist as a reminder that while one watches life from a distance, life also watches the watcher, and the watched, in turn, turn inwards.
Displaying beautiful black and white portraits and long and carefully-constructed shots, the film has a wondrous sense of soundtrack placement, too, as the camera pulls back on the commencement or coda of a scene, and, often, it is trailed by a tranquil and sublime piece of music written by Mihály Vig, a simply amazing composer whose work reaches an epic height here, transcending the various images he has been commissioned to support, to illustrate, often bordering on effortless flight within a speeding winged beast.
Of course, music plays underneath the subtext of the film, as well. The title is a nod to Andreas Werckmeister, a 17th century composer and musical theorist, who specialized in a theory of well-temperament, now known as the Werckmeister temperament, during the Baroque era of classical music. In essence, his thoughts on counterpoint, invertible counterpoint, were in relation to the movement of the planets around our star. These theories, obviously, include a lot of mathematical possibilities, and what is fascinating isn’t that Werckmeister saw the key relationship between music and math, but he saw the stranglehold tractor beam that gravity holds on the seemingly eternal dance of the planets around the sun, and the way in which music was also locked into this moving series of beats within the heart of the cosmos. In the film, Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky, and written by László Krasznahorkai and Mihály Vig, a mighty quartet of synchronized talent, working in tandem, and in inspired improvisation, find a way to link Werckmeister, mathematics, music, and the cosmos all in the simple tale of a small European town trying to keep its grip on its sanity, while arriving somewhere, but not here, is a strange traveling circus, offering no respite, but only more nihilistic solutions—
the last thing you hear as you’re fading out is a song…arriving somewhere, but not here.
I walked out of the room, the room which looked like an old converted hospital room—a Danish hospital room? The Kingdom of another at another time?—and wandered back down the hallway. Two men and two women were playing GAMEHENDGE on a Sony laptop, slicing through that universe, and each had their own camera setup, their own scene, to find their way through their own Book, their own adventure…looking into the eye of that mammoth whale of existence, real or otherwise, we see ourselves—oblivion.
Kneeling nearby, resting, at peace, content with the flow of the planets, and oblivious to nothing, her deep gaze resting upon me, forcing its own mysterious link, is a shy woman reading Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance. Defying odds, she smiles at me, but I smile and back away, as stalking my ears, reality beckons, scratching my skull, and Porcupine Tree arches from its roots and lumbers along with me:
Every thought from here on in your life begins
And all you knew was wrong?
And as I walk out through the in door, a tall and amiable lyricist follows, matching me stride for stride. We head to my European car—ever onwards, of course—to a destination he has plotted, as we shoot out towards Belgium, in our next edition of Hidden Flick.
