'Werckmeister Harmonies' Trailer: A New 4K Restoration Of Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzsky's Modern Classic Hits NYC On May 26

Few figures tower over contemporary cinema like Hungarian director Béla Tarr, even though Tarr hasn’t made a film since 2011’s “The Turin Horse.” Now, twenty-three years after its initial release, Tarr’s modern classic “Werckmeister Harmonies” gets a 4K restoration from Janus Films and a theatrical re-release to go with it.

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Based on László Krasznahorkai‘s 1989 novel “The Melancholy Of Resistance,” “Harmonies” takes Tarr’s signature long-take style in exciting and evermore haunting directions. The film follows inhabitants in an unnamed village at an unknown time as a mysterious circus arrives and plunges the town into a dread-filled fervor.

Here’s an official synopsis for “Werckmeister Harmonies,” courtesy of Janus Films:

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.

Tarr co-directs “Werckmeister Harmonies” with Ágnes Hranitzky. He also co-writes the script with Krasznahorkai, adapting the writer’s novel. The film’s cast includes Lars RudolphPeter FitzRainer Werner Fassbinder regular Hannah SchygullaJános Derzsi, and Đoko Rosić.

Tarr’s film’s new 4K restoration premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival. Now it hits the in NYC later this month. The film opens Friday, May 26, at Film At Lincoln Center. Watch a trailer for “Werckmeister Harmonies” below.