“And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.”—Melville, Moby Dick
At the center of Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies lies a great whale, a symbol of mystery, the ineffable, and the sublime; as one character says, “omnipotence is reflected in that animal.” But unlike Melville’s White Whale, this one is long-dead, carted about in a carnival trailer; and by the film’s end, it is laid bare, a meaningless mass of flesh in an empty cobblestone street. This ignominy is the subject of the film’s somber lament. The lengthy, meditative shots, the soundscape of silence and ambient noise, even the critique of social decay in post-Soviet Hungary—all are an elegy to the whale.
The film offers an analogy in a character’s lamentation of the invention of the even-tempered musical scale, a scale that forces music to conform to human convention, destroying the natural harmonies. This forcing of convention upon nature’s mysteries—this is the death of the whale. Or, more accurately, it is the mere encasing of the whale: the power of the whale’s mystery remains even when hidden, just as one suspects the missing natural harmonies just outside of one’s hearing. And the mysteries hidden by conventionalism swell up over the course of the film. The town in which the film takes place is swept by a fear of “mysterious unknown plagues,” the townspeople look at a solar eclipse as a thing of wonder and terror, the coming of the carnival brings dread and uncertainty, and a woman is heard wondering, “How can you explain this in normal terms?” There is a sense of social breakdown, an atrophy of convention in the face of the mysterious.
But this swelling is evoked by more than the film’s narrative: it is embedded in the very form of the film, as the stunning black and white cinematography with its pensive shots lasting for minutes, together with the haunting music and its melding with ambient sounds, immerse the audience in rich textures that perpetually point us toward the transcendent within our perceptions. And beyond this encompassing technique lie specific moments of thematic resonance. When the carnival truck bearing the whale arrives in the town, it slowly approaches the camera until the frame is filled with the movement of vertical strips of corrugated iron. The image is thus reduced to abstraction; but this pure abstraction is broken by the figure of the protagonist in the corner of the frame. At several points in the film, a shot slowly transitions from a moving image to a still photo; but in each case, slight movement in the distance or the ringing of a bell remind us that the stasis is illusory. When a mob marches through the streets, the scene begins with a high-angle shot of the mob as a single mass, reminiscent of the great serpentine marches in Triumph of the Will; but the camera then slowly moves between this view and close-ups of individual faces, reminding us that the mass consists of individuals. In each of these shots, we see an attempt to reduce life to abstractions, to fixity or to universalizing concepts, but in each case the reduction is destabilized by a lingering humanity, flux or particularizing heterogeneity.
Within this mood of uncertainty, the film gives us a new vision of Ahab, a dwarf called the Prince, one who does “not fall down and worship the whale like others,” but “pits himself, all mutilated, against it” (to paraphrase Melville). But unlike Ahab, the Prince is not railing against the unknown and its vagaries; instead, perhaps realizing the futility of Ahab’s quest, he rails against humanity and its failed notions. His is the voice of nihilism, decrying both the mysteries of the whale and humanity’s attempt to circumscribe it. He preaches violent destruction of society and its mores. He declares a reign of absolute uncertainty in which “the hills will march off” like Sartre’s forest unburdened by the dictates of induction. In the wake of the riot that the Prince incites, the whale is left lying in open sight, its mysteries abolished by its nakedness; the opportunistic and the greedy seize control in the resulting vacuum of power; and the hero of the film is left in an asylum, blankly staring at the loss of wonder before his eyes. None of which is to say that the movie is impenetrably gloomy… but it does make one join Ishmael in craving the sea.
Tags: favorites, Moby Dick, movies, mystery, notional reality, visual techniques
