This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain. In a provincial town, which is surrounded with nothing else but frost. It is bitterly cold weather - without snow. Even in this bewildered cold hundreds of people are standing around the circus trailer, which is put up in the main square, to see - as the outcome of their wait - the chief attraction, the stuffed carcass of a real whale. The people are coming from everywhere. From the neighboring settlings, even from quite far away parts of the country. They are following this clumsy monster as a dumb, faceless, rag-wearing crowd. This strange state of affairs - the appearance of the foreigners, the extreme frost - disturbs the order of the small town. Aambitious personages of the story feel they can take advantage of this situation. The tension growing to the unbearable is brought to explosion by the figure of the Prince, who is pretending facelessness. Even his mere appearance is enough to break loose destructive emotions...

Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for Werckmeister Harmonies (2001) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla, Alfréd Járai, Gyula Pauer, János Derzsi DIRECTOR: Béla Tarr CINEMATOGRAPHY: Miklós Gurbán, Patrick De Ranter MUSIC: Mihály Víg PRODUCTION: Goëss Film, Von Vietinghoff Filmproduktion, 13 Prods

Box Office Performance

Werckmeister Harmonies earned $69,923 domestically and $-4,949 internationally, for a worldwide total of $64,974. The film skewed heavily domestic (108%), suggesting strong North American appeal.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

In a 2016 BBC poll of the best films since 2000, the film was placed 56th.

Film critic Roger Ebert described the movie as "unique and original", writing that it "feels as much like cinéma vérité as the works of Frederick Wiseman." He went on to add the film to his "Great Movies" collection in 2007.

In the 2012 British Film Institute's decennial Sight & Sound poll, ten critics and five directors voted Werckmeister Harmonies among their ten favorite films — placing it 171st in the critics' poll and 132nd in the directors' poll. In the 2022 critics' poll, it was ranked 243rd.

In 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 316.

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Production

The film is an international production whose financing took a long time for Tarr to secure.

The credits indicate that filming took place between 1997 and 2000.

In a 2024 interview, cinematographer Rob Tregenza discussed the film's production, including Tarr's dishonesty about financing: "He basically lied to everybody. He said the film was funded, was financed." Claiming credit for innovating the film's opening scene and hospital sequence, Tregenza stated, "Concerning technology: I think Tarr is probably the most willful, stubborn, and ignorant of all directors I’ve ever worked with." Tregenza nevertheless claims to have taken "a much more sanguine attitude towards it," adding, "It’s now out there and people can watch this; they can look at my two shots that are in that film."