Sequence shot from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) - The ransacking of the hospital

Foreign Films:The Unclassifiable
Written by Frédéric Vié

  • Title of the film : The Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák)

  • Year : 2000

  • Directed by : Béla Tarr, co-directed and edited by Ágnes Hranitzky

  • Countries : Hungary / Italy / Germany / France

  • Adaptation : The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai (1989)

  • Director of photography for the shot : Rob Tregenza

  • Camera operator : Rob Tregenza (at the dolly)

  • Format : 35 mm, black and white

  • Film : Kodak Double-X negative

  • Lenses : Canon 24mm f/1.5 at the start of filming, then Cooke 20-100mm T3.1 zoom for the final shot

  • Device : Panther dolly, continuous movement combined with a zoom at the end of the shot

  • Lighting : 10K spotlights on aerial work platforms passing through the hospital windows

  • Plan duration : approximately 8 minutes

  • Timecode : around 1:42:00 in the film

  • Number of takes : 10 to 12, over two nights of filming

  • Total number of shots in the film : 39, for 145 minutes (2 hours 25 minutes)

  • Cinematographers credited to the film : Gábor Medvigy, Jörg Widmer, Patrick de Ranter, Rob Tregenza, Emil Novák, Erwin Lanzensberger, Miklós Gurban

  • Music : Mihály Víg

  • French distribution : Carlotta Films (4K restoration)

  • Criterion 4K UHD release : April 2024

  • Main sources : Rob Tregenza interview, The Film Stage, April 2024; Jonathan Romney, Sight and Sound, April 2003; Dennis Lim, Criterion Collection, 2024; BFI Southbank Programme Notes, 2024

A crowd of silent men, dressed in long, dark coats, crosses the threshold of a dilapidated hospital in the night. They enter in step, methodical, without a word. The camera glides alongside them, rushes into the corridors, and follows them into the wards where patients sleep. In a matter of seconds, the rioters drag the sick from their beds, beat them, and overturn the furniture. János, our mute hero, observes the scene through a window. Then the camera continues, past the falling bodies, until it finds, in the background, a naked old man standing in a bathtub. The violence stops abruptly. We are at the 102nd minute of the film.

Why this scene is iconic

You're no longer just watching a filmed riot: you're in it. And yet, kept at a distance. Tarr's paradox: his camera is glued to the bodies, but their silence renders it impenetrable. No screams, no slogans, no hateful words, only the sharp sound of blows and the clanging of overturned objects. The violence becomes ritualistic, somnambulistic, as if the men were performing a choreography they'd been taught in a dream. And it's this silence that chills you, not the blood.

Critic Jonathan Romney summed up the effect in Sight and Sound , ranking it among the most terrifying sequences in recent cinema, precisely because of the spectral placidity of the gaze upon the massacre. You suddenly understand, without any explanation, how a pogrom can occur in the dark, without motive or banner. And the film offers no interpretive escape route: Tarr has always denied any allegorical intent and refuses to explain whether the crowd represents fascism, the fall of the USSR, or something else entirely.

How they filmed it

The shot relies on a much more hands-on approach than it appears on screen. American cinematographer Rob Tregenza, present in Budapest in January-February 1998, shot the scene and operated the camera himself. He recounted his experience in detail in a lengthy interview with The Film Stage in April 2024, coinciding with the release of the Criterion 4K UHD Blu-ray. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, there was no Steadicam used: the scene was filmed on a Panther dolly, with a continuous forward movement through the hospital corridors, culminating in a zoom on Lars Rudolph's face at the end of the shot.

The shoot took place over two nights, on 35mm Kodak Double-X negative film. 10K spotlights mounted on aerial work platforms illuminated the hospital interior through the windows, producing that unreal white light that isolates faces against the deep black of the film. Tregenza began with an 18mm lens, the widest available, chosen because it absorbs the vibrations of a long tracking shot. Too wide, Tarr judged after two rehearsals. He switched to a Canon 24mm at f/1.5.

Then Tarr requested a close-up of Lars Rudolph at the end of the shot, which necessitated using a zoom lens. Tregenza set up his Cooke 20-100mm, his favorite zoom, with a maximum aperture of T3.1. The amount of lighting across the entire set had to be doubled to maintain the contrasts Tarr wanted, and they had to wait for the concrete floor, leveled to absorb the zoom's vibrations, to dry completely. Tregenza recounts how, at the end of the shot, he found himself blindly tilting the camera while zooming in on the actor's eyes: "It was a miracle that we got it ." Ten to twelve takes were required, each using up an entire 300-meter roll of film, before Tarr gave the go-ahead.

The atmosphere on set was stormy. Tregenza described Tarr as "probably the most willful, stubborn, and ignorant of all directors I've ever worked with." The cinematographer accused Tarr of lying to the entire crew about the film's financing and of concealing the reasons for firing the first director of photography. He left the set after a month, in February 1998, even though Tarr claimed to have a fully funded budget for thirty days of shooting. In reality, the production dragged on until 2000, with seven different cinematographers, including Jörg Widmer, a future collaborator of Terrence Malick, who would later take over the Steadicam scenes in the film.

Tregenza only shot two shots in the final film: the hospital rampage and the planetary ballet in the opening sequence. He blocked and prepared five others. His relationship with Tarr was never mended: he never spoke to him again after returning to the United States. "It's now out there and people can watch this; they can look at my two shots that are in that film," he summarizes today with a disillusioned fatalism.

These conflicts are not insignificant. They explain why the film took three years to make, between 1997 and 2000, and why the credits list seven directors of photography. What is striking, knowing what went on behind the scenes, is the absolute visual unity of the result: nothing on screen betrays this chaotic production.

What to observe when reviewing it

  • The tempo of the footsteps at the very beginning of the shot (the first thirty seconds, around 1:42:00): the crowd marches in step, as one. Listen to the rumble on the ground, without music; Mihály Víg doesn't intervene anywhere in this sequence.

  • The transition from 24mm to Cooke zoom, invisible to the naked eye: halfway through the corridors, the depth of field changes subtly, a sign that we have switched to the zoom lens that will be used for the final close-up.

  • The naked old man in the bathtub, at the back of the frame (last minute of the shot): the crowd stops abruptly, the camera freezes, no one says a word. Then watch the final tilt towards Lars Rudolph's face; that's the moment when Tregenza was working blind.

Did you know that?

  • Seven cinematographers for a single film. No production boasts such a number without disaster. Tarr burned through them one after another during three years of filming. Gábor Medvigy, his loyal collaborator from Sátántangó, ended up credited as principal cinematographer even though he had only shot certain scenes, according to Tregenza , "part of them massaging the narrative ," the latter comments.

  • Cuarón would remember this for Roma. Twenty years later, the scene of the student demonstration of June 10, 1971, in Roma (2018) uses the same device: a camera floating at crowd level, the group's silence, the viewer's stunned silence, an unarmed old man who interrupts the violence with his mere presence. Cuarón has cited Tarr several times as a direct influence.

  • Van Sant owes his career change to him. After seeing Sátántangó in 1994, Gus Van Sant built his entire Death Trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days) on long, continuous walking shots, as an explicit homage to Tarr. "I felt like I was witnessing the birth of a new kind of cinema," he wrote of discovering the Hungarian film.

  • Andreas Werckmeister is not a fictional character. He was a 17th-century German musicologist and organist (1645-1706) who theorized equal temperament, the mathematical division of the octave into twelve parts that made all tonal music possible, beginning with Bach. The film's title refers to a long monologue by the character Eszter, who accuses Werckmeister of having killed natural music.

  • Béla Tarr died on January 6, 2026 , in Budapest, after a long illness. He had announced in 2011, with The Turin Horse, that he no longer wished to make feature films. He had been teaching at the Sarajevo Film School since then. Werckmeister Harmonies will remain his most-watched and most-cited film, largely thanks to the 4K restoration released by Criterion in April 2024, less than two years before his death.

  • László Krasznahorkai, the writer who gave Tarr his subject and inspiration, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. He is the author of the novel The Melancholy of Resistance, from which he and Tarr drew the screenplay.

Sources

  • Rob Tregenza, interview with Nick Newman, "All Great DPs Become Alcoholics", The Film Stage, April 29, 2024

  • Rob Tregenza, previous interview, The Film Stage, April 2023

  • Dennis Lim, “Werckmeister Harmonies: Dark Side of the Earth”, The Criterion Collection, 2024

  • Jonathan Romney, essay Sight and Sound, April 2003, reprinted in the BFI Southbank Programme Notes, 2024

  • Reverse Shot Symposium, "Werckmeister Harmonies", 2006

  • Carlotta Films, 4K restoration press kit, 2023

  • Wikipedia (technical credits, biography of Rob Tregenza, biography of Béla Tarr)

Also read:

Frédéric Vié
Previous

Hardcore Henry (2015) - The Highway Chase
Following

The Chef (2021) sequence shot