The opening scenes of Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), Bela Tarr’s towering, almost monolithic film, serve as a kind of immersive prelude that’s less concerned with immediate narrative engagement than with establishing a world, a space, and a mood—the space of a world that has collapsed under the weight of its own inability to sustain meaning. The sequence that opens the film feels slow—agonizingly so, with long, unbroken takes, sparse interaction, and a weightiness to every gesture that you might initially mistake for inertia. But to do so would be to misunderstand what’s at stake. Tarr’s patient, almost grotesque framing of this world isn't just about stasis; it’s about the existential paralysis that characterizes a civilization on the brink of meaninglessness. It is an exploration of the vacuity at the heart of contemporary existence, an inquiry into how history, personal and collective, can spiral into ungovernable forces, from which there seems no escape. This sequence, like much of the film, resists the narrative conventions of exposition and instead operates as a slow, almost imperceptible buildup of atmosphere—a process of deliberate stagnation that invites the viewer not just to watch but to feel the weight of time passing in a way that is both suffocating and revelatory.

If we examine the first few scenes formally, we notice that Tarr does something utterly counterintuitive from the very first frame: he removes narrative urgency. His camera lingers in a way that invites you to absorb, slowly, the details of a landscape—and not just the landscape in a geographic sense, but the psychological geography of a world that has shed its capacity for clarity. We begin with a long, almost meditative shot of the protagonist, Janos (Lars Rudolph), as he moves through an eerily desolate town.  It’s a town bereft of character, a place that feels entirely hollow, entirely disconnected from the specificity of historical time. It is a town, in a way, that is outside of history—unmoored, floating in a state of perpetual stasis, where the people, much like the buildings, appear weathered and useless. Janos walks, and the camera walks with him. The choreography of the scene is precise: each movement is calculated, deliberate, as if time itself has become something one must patiently endure. The languorous pacing—where each shot is so drawn out that it seems to challenge your sense of what should be happening in a film—does not simply foreground the lack of action but positions inaction as the film’s central subject. This is not a film about dramatic events unfolding; this is a film about the weight of existence in a world that offers nothing but sheer, agonizing presence.

And here, let us bring in a critical point from philosophy: the idea of the banality of existence—an idea that not only echoes throughout existentialism but also draws heavily from late 20th-century postmodern thought. Werckmeister Harmonies dramatizes a world where the profound weight of being does not feel heroic or tragic but simply absurd—this sense of absurdity is starkly present from the very first moments of the film. Sartre and Camus, in their reflections on the absurdity of life, would recognize this atmosphere: a town that exists without clear definition, a protagonist whose action is so passive that it seems almost to defy the very nature of human agency. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness or Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus might not directly speak to the scenes themselves, but their conceptions of nothingness and the human condition offer an illuminating framework for understanding the pointlessness that permeates the film's opening. There is no heroism in Janos’ wandering, no triumph of the will. He is simply existing in a world that has no purpose, no clarity. One might also draw here on the theories of the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who, in his analysis of late capitalism, wrote about the way modernity (particularly after the Second World War) fractured time into a fragmented, disconnected experience that could never be fully reconciled. The sluggish pace of Werckmeister Harmonies, with its muted realism, communicates this fracture in a visceral way: the world presented here doesn’t unfold with the urgency of meaningful events but rather with the quiet inevitability of a world on the brink of collapse. The townspeople, as they shuffle through their daily lives, become mere shadows of their own existence, mechanical in their movements, hollow in their interactions.

The absurdity of the scene becomes particularly acute when we consider its relationship to time. While this is an opening sequence, a moment meant to set the stage for what’s to come, Tarr's manipulation of time here is anything but conventional. The long takes feel timeless, but not in the romanticized way we usually associate with the past. There is no nostalgia here. The camera doesn’t just linger; it drags the viewer into an experience of stasis. Time feels, in this film, not only fragmented but degraded—in this world, we are suspended, as if no one could ever escape the entropy of their own repetitive gestures. As we move through this decaying landscape, time, like everything else, seems to be decomposing. The lack of narrative urgency—or, to put it bluntly, narrative action—becomes a critique of the very idea of progress that defines modern life. This is a place where, much like the physical environment, narrative has rotted, and what remains is the inability to break free from a loop. This fragmentation is not just a stylistic choice; it functions as a critique of linear temporality, the idea that time moves in neat, progressive arcs toward some resolution. The viewer is instead faced with a momentary, unbroken reality—an experience that mirrors the contemporary philosophical crisis of meaning. In a way, Werckmeister Harmonies explores the death of the narrative, invoking existential themes that question whether narrative itself is anything more than an arbitrary construct in a world where events seem to unfold without cause or explanation. This thematic pursuit aligns with postmodern literary theory, particularly in the vein of thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, who emphasized the erosion of grand narratives in a postmodern world. The film provides us with fragments—snippets of life and images—that, while not entirely devoid of meaning, resist the conventional narrative resolution.

There is also a palpable historical dimension to the scene that subtly brings to mind the weight of the past—specifically the weight of historical trauma. The film’s setting in Hungary, a country with its own complicated and traumatic history in the 20th century—specifically under the shadow of Soviet occupation and totalitarianism—resonates throughout the opening scenes. There’s a post-Soviet emptiness at play here, an unspoken history that haunts the characters’ lives even as it remains almost entirely absent from the screen. This absence mirrors the film's refusal to offer any explicit political or historical narrative, opting instead for a more haunting reflection of life after a grand historical rupture, where meaning is deferred indefinitely and history itself is suspended in a state of non-action. Werckmeister Harmonies asks the viewer to experience this absence of history, this repetition without progress, as a condition of modern life—a life irrevocably damaged by its past, adrift in an infinite now.

Fredric Jameson’s theory of the “waning of affect” in postmodern culture—where meaning becomes so diluted that the ability to feel deeply about any particular subject or event becomes almost impossible—aligns well with the world Tarr presents in Werckmeister Harmonies. Here, the characters seem disconnected from the grand emotional registers that usually accompany historical events, personal decisions, or narrative arcs. Their interactions are devoid of affective intensity. Janos’s gestures are precise but empty; his actions seem calculated without desire, driven not by an internal force but by external inertia. He isn’t moving toward something; he’s merely moving. This deadening of affect, or of meaning, is central to the film’s tone. Just as Jameson describes postmodern art as reflecting a certain stylistic exhaustion, so too does Tarr’s world reflect an exhaustion of meaning. Here, people go through the motions without any of the emotional depth or conviction we might associate with personal choices or actions. Life has been reduced to motion, and nothing about that motion can ever seem to break free from the inevitable cycle of decay and repetition. We might also draw upon the work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who talks about the “state of exception” in relation to the suspension of law, order, and structure in modern societies. In Werckmeister Harmonies, we find a similarly suspended world—a town where the social and political order has effectively “broken down,” and where every gesture is imbued with the eerie lack of a larger framework that could provide meaning or direction. Janos’ motion through this town—alone, isolated—seems not just metaphorically but also ontologically suspended in time. It’s a prelude to the larger political and social collapse hinted at throughout the film, though this collapse is never explicitly articulated. Instead, it is felt, acutely, in the very texture of the film’s world.

We can also consider the formal aspect of Werckmeister Harmonies as a visual and thematic reflection of deconstruction—a term that Jacques Derrida used to describe the destabilization of meaning in a text, where what we think is “fixed” is shown to be arbitrary and fluid. Tarr deconstructs the very structure of cinematic narrative—there’s no overarching plot here, no clear resolution or goal. Instead, the viewer is asked to submit to a world where meaning is constantly deferred, where the possibility of insight is always just out of reach. In the most literal sense, the opening scenes depict a world where the human spirit appears to be suffocated under the weight of meaninglessness. Time and space themselves seem to conspire against human agency, creating an environment where every gesture is rendered futile. But in a more profound sense, these opening moments are an invitation to consider the fragility of human purpose in the face of larger, uncontrollable forces—the forces of history, of time, and of the larger cosmos, against which our narratives of meaning and progress seem trivial and ephemeral.

What is ultimately most striking about this opening scene is how it mimics the experience of contemplative paralysis in the modern age. In an era characterized by an overload of information, a saturation of stimuli, there is little room for the deep, reflective stillness that this film demands. And yet, Tarr asks us to engage with this stillness not as a temporary state but as something foundational—a primary condition of human experience that is, in itself, as meaningful as any action or event. The tension lies not in a forward-moving plot but in the deliberate non-action that subverts expectations. It suggests that the true drama in life is not in what happens, but in what does not happen: in the fraying of meaning, in the impossibility of understanding, and in the eerie calm of a world that is simultaneously decaying and waiting for something to shatter it.