a course of events unrelated to the main point of this post led me into reading
The Melancholy of Resistance.
now that i have finally read that, after i was all the way finished, i went back to its cinematic adaptation,
Werckmeister Harmonies.
Werckmeister Harmonies now makes total sense to me. and you know what, i'm not sure it can make total sense without the book. i do have an example, yes. when the movie's protagonist, János Valuska, is reading a journal. it is of course a long shot, it begins on the other side of a room, pans across the ceiling, and lands on János while he sits on the floor reading. in the movie no other person is in the room with him, while in the book he's where people are being interrogated, he's around other people, and it's quite clear where he gets the journal from, whose journal it is, and what it's talking about. in fact the journal has gorgeous lines ["a moment's victim in an infinitely vast arena"] relating to philosophical concepts being developed by the book. in the movie it's contextualizing the previous scene's violence, that's all it's doing, and i only know it's doing that because i read the book. how could someone just watching the movie know that?
the title switch makes sense because you see, The Melancholy of Resistance is in fact a literal title. to rephrase it, the book is about Life's Fight Being Sad. it sees this concept through to the end, in that acceptance is reached by both central characters at one point, and acceptance is how movies often end, but actually there are about 100 pages left after acceptance is reached in the book, i admit i had been wondering what would happen, and it's almost as if the movie ends republican, funny enough. it's kind of calling everyone a snowflake and saying the best possible course of action is to look at things from a practical perspective. i shall side mention that all characters, including the "republican," find love impossible, and it is a cynical book, in that the "republican" is in some ways not the ideal character, for even with an ideal perspective the absence of spirituality in their life is apparent.
this philosophical perspective is not represented by the movie. rather, the formal idea of Werckmeister Harmonies is indeed worked upon, in terms of the movie's tonal structure, and it is mentioned in the book too. Tarr's long shots parallel Krasznahorkai's long sentences, it's funny how much more sense his long takes make now. frankly as i said, i don't think the movie's logic works independently, but the movie is not trying to convey logic. the movie is conveying a feeling. and, oh: the feelings of the movie find foundation within the filmmaker's logic, that is how that is possible.
in terms of cinematic grammar, it's absurd how impressive Tarr is. that's just really impressive. i read that some shots took a month to put together and i thought, wow, only a month. again, the shots parallel Krasznahorkai, but i believe Tarr had to invent the parallel. i read Tarr described as Tarkovsky without the spirituality.