The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse – You don’t so much watch Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) as endure it. The 147 minute film is constructed from 30 shots. I am a Tarr veteran, have looked forward to the film for a year, and drove to the Walker Art Center to see it; as a consequence, I found the film absorbing and mildly pleasurable – but, of course, I can’t recommend the ordeal to others. Tarr’s picture chronicles the quotidian events comprising 6 days in the life of an old man, his daughter, and their (titular) horse. The happenings at their windswept hermitage are so bleak and mind-numbingly repetitive as to make the narrative of Waiting for Godot, or any of Beckett’s late novels, appear, by comparison, as the blithe stories of socialites and debutantes in the Hamptons. After a portentous voice-over depicting Nietzsche’s celebrated, if apocryphal mental collapse in Turin, the film follows the beleagured horse through a landscape perpetually agitated with hurricane winds. The horse is asymmetrically yoked to a cart meant to be drawn by two beasts. The old man drives the horse to his stone cottage where we are shown the events of the ensuing six days. The old man and his daughter cut firewood, boil and eat potatoes (using their fingers as utensils), pitchfork dung away from the increasingly moribund horse, draw water, and sit silently staring out their window at the endless tempest outdoors. One of the old man’s arms doesn’t work (it seems paralyzed) and so there are long sequences showing the daughter dressing and undressing him; he seems to switch between indoor and outdoor clothes that are inscrutably identical. On the second day, a man shows up and talks about how the city is ruined, explaining that the world represents “the most ghastly creation imaginable.” (The great Hungarian novelist, Laszlo Kraznahorkai, is credited with part of the screenplay and the monologue is quintessentially his work.) The visitor maintains that the “noble, fine, and excellent” have been vanquished, but that they were not bested in a fair fight with their treacherous and ignominious enemies – rather, when the god (or gods) vanished, the “noble, fine, and excellent” just disappeared without a trace. The old man says that this is rubbish and the visitor, like one of Beckett’s clochards limps away in the perpetual gale. On the third day, a cart full of gypsies appears. The cart is drawn by fine white Lippizaner horses that actually prance. The old man’s response is comically similar to Borat’s reactions to gypsies in Sasha Baron Cohen’s film – he tells them to “fuck off” and menaces them with an axe; they offer to take the girl with them to America. On that same day, their horse refuses to eat its hay. On the fourth day, the farm’s well runs dry. The man and his daughter load their few belongings onto a handcart, and hitching their horse behind them, set off for parts unknown. They get about three-hundred yards and, then, return to the farm – in an extraordinary exterior shot, we see the woman’s face appear at the window, pale and spectral, as the camera slowly approaches the crumbling field-stone cottage and the air fills with blowing dust and scraps of withered leaves. It’s probably propitious that the well has run dry; the horse now refuses to drink. On the fifth day, the man and woman can’t keep their lamps lit and the embers in their stove burn to ashes. On the sixth day, the man and woman sit in silence facing one another at their Spartan table. The tempest outdoors has mysteriously ceased and it is silent. They have no fire and can’t boil their potatoes – we hear the crunch as the old man bites into his raw spud. “We have to eat,” the old man says. And, after about four minutes vigil, the screen goes black. At first, it seems that Tarr is scrupulously presenting the dismal daily ennui, the hopelessness, and wretched poverty that Nietzsche and most thinkers omit from their intellectual systems. (In voice-over prologue tells us that Nietzsche’s last words after embracing the beaten horse were, “Mutter, ich bin dumm,” and, then, he became “gentle and mad” the narrator says). Later, however, it appears that Tarr may be demonstrating the misery of the thought that Nietzsche described as his most abysmal – the eternal recurrence of the same. Certainly, the film shows the daily routine in stultifying detail; the only variants in the round of hewing wood, drawing water, cleaning the stable, boiling potatoes are slight, and disturbing – the horse, prescient and showing better sense than the humans, wisely refuses to eat and seems to be committing some form of anorexic suicide, the palinka that characters in Tarr films are always swilling runs out, and fire fails so that the potatoes, which appear to be the character’s sole provender, can’t be boiled. It’s as if Tarr wanted to illustrate the notion of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence not with dramatic events of agony and emotional turmoil, but with the most wretched, creaturely routine possible – the film’s nightmare cycle shows an eternity comprised of staring out a window at a desolate Magyar steppe always engulfed in an immense inland hurricane. (In some respects, the movie resembles Victor Sjostrom’s silent film The Wind starring Lillian Gish as a pioneer housewife driven mad by the endless gale on the Kansas plain). Curiously, the film doesn’t really seem realistic – the cottage where the characters live is too spotless and barren to be naturalistic: it looks like some kind of an austere theatrical set although it is palpably concrete and certainly set in the Hungarian landscape. The old man is movie-star handsome with a majestic beard and head of curled white hair and the young woman is beautiful in a haggard sort of way. Their clothing is scrupulously clean and, even, the farmyard seems to have been well-swept. The gale that afflicts them seems to be always near at hand – often, we can see that more remote grass and shrubs are not affected by the tornado-force winds. It is as if they carry the storm with them as their companion. The house contains one picture on the wall, which we scarcely can see, and a single book – that volume, from which the woman puzzles out a few words, seems to be some somber and minor work of theology that tells us, with sinister import, that “God was with you.” The movie is shot in lustrous black and white with elaborate and stately Steadi-cam tracking shots comprising all but the last scene. At the Walker, the movie was shown in old-style 35 millimeter with black scuff marks in the frame showing reel changes – at one point, the reel has to be changed during a passage of complete darkness with predictably catastrophic consequences; the projectionist missed the reel change and we got to see some leader which was more lively than the images in the movie. The Turin Horse is a late work; it is supremely confident and represents a distillation of the techniques and ideas that Tarr has explored for the last thirty years. But I’m not sure that this represents an advance on his earlier films. In pictures like Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr’s austere camerawork was offset by a bawdy and boisterous Slavic vitality – in Satantango, his hapless farmers swill palinka and dance madly, groping one another’s wives, and getting into extravagant and clumsy fights. There is nothing like that vigor displayed in the enervated terrain of The Turin Horse. Reportedly, this film is Tarr’s last. Someone asked Tarr at the New York Film Festival why he had proclaimed The Turin Horse to be his last picture. He said: “After you have seen it, you will know.”

After seeing the film, I drove back to Austin. On the radio, a public radio announcer advertised the film telling people to go to the Walker Art Center to see the “Touring House”. The announcer sounded perplexed. The film is very solemn and the audience, which was notably sparse on the night that I attended, is very silent and grave. At the fourth iteration of the potato supper – the characters grab the hot potatoes from a kind of bucket, and blowing on their fingers, paw at them – I wanted to shout out at “What’s for dinner?” Of course, I held my tongue.