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I purchased the 4K WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES from Barnes & Noble, and found that there was no essay insert. I went back to B&N to exchange it, and found that their entire 4K inventory of the title had no insert (the insert was clearly visible through the transparent top of the regular Blu-Ray release of the title). Anyone else found this? I emailed Jon Mulvaney about it, so we'll see what happens.

I don't have this release, but I've seen other reports of it missing the insert. I assume Criterion will ship you one.

I bought a copy yesterday that I haven't opened but now that I am looking through the plastic, I can see that there is no insert inside.

Me too.

wow so I wasn't alone. didn't get an insert at all either. definitely a new level of cost cutting!

will email Mulvaney

I purchased my copy from an online store in Canada and it has the insert.

Roscoe wrote: Sun Jun 30, 2024 4:04 pm I purchased the 4K WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES from Barnes & Noble, and found that there was no essay insert. I went back to B&N to exchange it, and found that their entire 4K inventory of the title had no insert (the insert was clearly visible through the transparent top of the regular Blu-Ray release of the title). Anyone else found this? I emailed Jon Mulvaney about it, so we'll see what happens.

Not that it helps your situation, but I purchased it on Saturday from an BN in the metro ATL, and my copy has the insert.

jbeall wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2024 12:08 am

Roscoe wrote: Sun Jun 30, 2024 4:04 pm I purchased the 4K WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES from Barnes & Noble, and found that there was no essay insert. I went back to B&N to exchange it, and found that their entire 4K inventory of the title had no insert (the insert was clearly visible through the transparent top of the regular Blu-Ray release of the title). Anyone else found this? I emailed Jon Mulvaney about it, so we'll see what happens.

Not that it helps your situation, but I purchased it on Saturday from an BN in the metro ATL, and my copy has the insert.

Looks like a lot of folks will be contacting Mulvaney for the insert. Mine should be coming in the next couple weeks. They handled the reply with their customary speed and civility.

Decided to open my copy up that I got from Amazon. It has three inserts in it lol.

What a mess. Hopefully they didn't botch the encode too

That was a fascinating interview with Tregenza, but I've got to say that your new cinematographer arguing with you that you've picked the wrong title for your movie on their first day sounds incredibly obnoxious.

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2024 8:07 pm What a mess. Hopefully they didn't botch the encode too

The encode on the 4K is exceptional and it’s one of Criterion’s best. The grayscale looks absolutely gorgeous in SDR. The BD is rather disappointing in comparison, showing Criterion’s usual blocking with longer films and more data on the disc. The bonus film is in another league of bad and looks worse than a YouTube stream. You’d be pretty much buying this for the UHD alone.

nicolas wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2024 10:43 pm

therewillbeblus wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2024 8:07 pm What a mess. Hopefully they didn't botch the encode too

The encode on the 4K is exceptional and it’s one of Criterion’s best. The grayscale looks absolutely gorgeous in SDR. The BD is rather disappointing in comparison, showing Criterion’s usual blocking with longer films and more data on the disc. The bonus film is in another league of bad and looks worse than a YouTube stream. You’d be pretty much buying this for the UHD alone.

Agreed -- the 4K looks sensational. Fascinating about the mess with the inserts.

Glowingwabbit wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2024 8:06 pm Decided to open my copy up that I got from Amazon. It has three inserts in it lol.

Guess whoever puts them in was like "I can get rid of these faster if I put in THREE at a time!" and just left the rest of the cases empty when they ran out.

I got my copy from B&N delivery and it has an insert, so maybe ordering online is the way to go

nicolas wrote: Thu Jul 04, 2024 10:43 pm The bonus film is in another league of bad and looks worse than a YouTube stream. You’d be pretty much buying this for the UHD alone.

I thought I would start with the earlier film but it took me over five minutes to realize it was from an actual HD transfer. I can't believe that even free software like handbrake could output results this bad on default settings, for certain HD broadcasts of Hungarian films here in Japan (via mpeg2) at half this bitrate look superior! [-(

With Tarr gone and Krasznahorkai enjoying a small resurgence of interest where I live because of his Nobel Prize, watching this film at the beginning of 2026 gives me a bitter after-taste. A lot has changed but too much is still easily recognizable in the kind of world we live in today. The film looks gorgeous, music haunting, performance from the poor errand boy heartbreaking. Tarr's firm hand in welding the political and philosophical themes with his visual-audio techniques leaves me awestruck, groping for words...

Family Nest will have take a rain check, based on the reviews above. Criterion really owe it to us to do it properly, perhaps in a future Eclipse set of Tarr's early films once they are all remastered in HD.

Or get the Curzon set, where it looks great

The Carlotta would suit me better as it conveniently omitted Satantango. But there's the trouble of sideloading English subs, sigh...

My combo was the Carlotta set, the Curzon 4K Werckmeister Harmonies, the Arbelos Sátántangó and Damnation and the Artificial Eye The Turin Horse.

That’s not everything, but I’ve seen everything and it’s everything that I want to keep. And French subtitles hold no fears for me.

Hey I'm late to the party, but it's great to finally find a discussion on this excellent film. Even better if anyone who's also read the book wants to chime in.

The theme I'd love to discuss is the titular Werckmeister Harmonies and how it presents an interesting secret double twist. The film presents the Werckmeister harmonies (which, from this point on I'll refer to as 'equal temperament') as a bad thing--an artificial order that was arbitrarily created to provide convenience. That much is true, but the thing is it was the only way to solve the problem.

More than that, it was a necessary fix without which humankind would remain stunted in a state of musical adolescence (the 5-note ancient scales mentioned by Professor Eszter on his tape recording).

So Eszter tunes his piano to a natural scale, but at the end of the story he realizes that his naturally tuned piano was unworkable, so he reverts to equal temperament. This could be seen as a concessionary defeat--as the book puts it in chapter one: "the dull insensibility that ensues when one has been forced to accept certain facts." But at the same time it's not as simple as that, and there's a hidden twist.

If we go back to what Eszter is saying on the tape recording, the only other alternative, if we wanted true mathematical music purity, would be to cling to the limited 5-note scale, relinquishing any higher musical concepts, leaving it as the "domain of the gods alone", and remain in a sort of Garden of Eden infancy.

So you see, "artificial order" isn't purely a bad thing, despite its flaws. It's what enables humans to progress. And this theme reminds me of the central theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a sort of evolutionary Machiavellianism. Force it through any way you can, just to get past the roadblocks.

If you've read Krasznahorkai's books and seen Tarr's adaptations, you probably noticed immediately that Tarr had a much darker, more nihilistic viewpoint. Krasznahorkai's, though bleak himself, is full of Kafkan humor, and there are moments of genuine optimism--even if that optimism is only a snapshot before everything succumbs to disintegration. The book Melancholy of Resistance ends with a wonderful passage about how all things rot and decay but not without asserting their existence once and once only, including the pages of the book itself.

If you follow what I'm saying, what I believe Krasznahorkai meant with the metaphor, it's that sure man-made order is a disaster on rollerskates, bound to fail, bound to be consumed by a sort of pre-programmed corruption as surely as our cells are pre-programmed to rot, but that it's our yearning to make order of the chaos, any way we can, that makes us divine fools.