Our four film retrospective on the films of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr kicks off with a new restoration of his 2001 masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies.

One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, this 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.