In Search of Resonance: Harmony and Disharmony in Cinema and Life

We will delve into three evocative films: Beyond the Clouds (1995) by Michelangelo Antonioni, Red (1994) by Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) by Béla Tarr. Each of these films engages the theme of harmony and disharmony—in human relations, in aesthetic form, and in the very structure of experience. Please watch them and join us for a rich discussion.

In Beyond the Clouds, interwoven tales of desire and loss unfold through Antonioni’s signature visual grammar—ephemeral encounters in misty landscapes and decaying cities. Harmony is fleeting, often no more than a mirage trailing behind disconnection. Yet even amidst narrative fragmentation, there is a yearning for coherence, for the possibility that love or art might bind the scattered threads of existence.

Kieślowski’s Red, the final installment of his Three Colours trilogy, centers on a chance encounter between a young model and a reclusive judge who surveils his neighbors. Their unexpected connection reveals how moral ambiguity and emotional estrangement can paradoxically create pathways to intimacy. In Kieślowski’s world, harmony is not the absence of contradiction, but the quiet reconciliation of difference.
FREE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q1klfV61YQ
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In Werckmeister Harmonies, Béla Tarr transports us to a provincial Hungarian town descending into chaos. Here, harmony is both a metaphysical yearning and a historical illusion. The film meditates on the limits of rational systems (whether tonal scales or political ideologies) to contain the disharmony of human life. Beauty, in Tarr’s cinematic language, is not order restored, but order slowly unraveling to reveal a deeper truth.
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Together, these films pose fundamental questions:
What is the role of form—in cinema, in society, in the self—in organizing or obscuring harmony?
Can dissonance be generative, even necessary, for revelation and renewal?
Is the experience of harmony an aesthetic ideal, a moral horizon, or a fragile illusion?

These films invite us to listen—to silence, to rhythm, to the tension between the seen and the unspeakable—as we search for moments of resonance amidst the ambient noise of modern life.