Best of the Decade #14: Werckmeister Harmonies

Tucked into the behemoth body plan of Werckmeister Harmonies is a distressing spiritual-political parable that resists allegorical interpretation even as it solicits such readings, a quality that gives it the hieratic pose and magisterial grandeur of high modern poetry. Whatever affinities might be found between Tarr and Tarkovsky, Janscó, Angelopoulos, or even David Lynch, his closest analogues in the realm of artistic practice might be midcentury novelists like Bruno Schulz (whose hallucinatory realism, especially in Street of Crocodiles, feels bewilderingly sui generis) or Thomas Mann.