The Turin Horse-A Torinoi ló (2011)

Directed by: Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky | 146 minutes | drama | Actors: János Derzsi, Erika Bók, Mihály Kormos, Ricsi

No, accessible is different. ‘The Turin Horse’ clocks in at 146 minutes, contains a total of 30 shots and not much more lines of dialogue. The film is based on an anecdote from the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. The famous German philosopher once encountered a horse while staying in Turin, which disobeyed its owner and was whipped for it. Nietzsche took this incident seriously, to say the least; he jumped in, had to be carried away crying, and in no time was completely insane. He had to be cared for by his mother and sister for the remaining ten years of his life.

‘The Turin Horse’ isn’t so much about that incident, but rather asks a question that few have thought about since then: what has become of the horse? And so in the film we see an old and tired horse and its (new?) owners, an old and bearded man with a lame right arm and his daughter, who takes both under her wing. The drab farm in which they live is in an environment that really does not remind you of Northern Italy and especially Hungary, the homeland of director Béla Tarr, as a film location. The sky is permanently overcast, the wind howls constantly past the house and itinerant gypsies try to use the family’s well.

If one thing quickly becomes clear in this minimalist film, it is that life has few joys in store for the inhabitants of the farm. Father and daughter barely talk, live on a strict diet of boiled potatoes, and their days are filled with just distilling and consuming the local spirits themselves. As a viewer, you get plenty of time to let this lifestyle sink in as pretty much every one of the long-spun scenes focuses on this.

We follow the father and daughter for six days, during which their situation gradually deteriorates: the horse stops eating and refuses to take another step; the water supply continues to shrink. There is little more to say about the narrative. In ‘The Turin Horse’ Tarr is more interested in an abstract form of film, in which basic elements such as plot, dialogue and character development are pushed aside to make room for the audiovisual; pure watching and listening. This is effective in that the film contains several beautiful scenes, where camera movement, image composition and sound come together to create something impressive.

However, it takes a lot of brain work to arrive at a deeper expressiveness. Is it about Nietzsche, or simply a fairly random horse? Is it an outline of an old, rural Hungarian lifestyle and associated hardships? The power of the human survival instinct? Or is it merely an attempt to get the viewer into a state of trance through that abstraction? Ultimately, the philosopher’s influence does not extend much further than a single monologue of a few minutes. Tarr himself mentions the difficulties of human existence as the most important guideline, but that the protagonists are having a hard time is also reasonably demonstrated within half an hour.

In this type of film, which attempts to set aside any kind of convention in cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky is usually cited as an example. This Russian director became famous in cinephile circles for classic 70s films like ‘Solaris’ and ‘Stalker’, which keep the tempo very slow. Such films, however, contain a deeper, often philosophical layer, a theme worth pondering; a touch of narrative. ‘The Turin Horse’, however, completely lacks that point of departure, making it difficult to extract any vision of the world from it. And then two and a half hours is also very long. At best you could say that it is a reflection on the medium of film itself. Perhaps ‘The Turin Horse’ can be qualified more as (film) science than as art.

Béla Tarr is completely straightforward and uncompromising in his work. ‘The Turin Horse’ is by no means an exception and perhaps even the most extreme example. He himself claims that this will be his last film, and you can see that to some extent. It provides a viewing experience that can hardly be compared to any other form of cinema, and is fascinating to the extent that you will think about its deeper meaning long after seeing it. However, it is very doubtful whether you will ever know the answer.