The Turin Horse (2011)

I get real tired of pretentious critics trying to make something out of nothing. Experimental/artistic film makers get away with producing drivel only by using the naiveté and over-active imagination of viewers too afraid to look unsophisticated by telling the truth. I've gone to a number of such festivals and all I can say is that if you ever worry about having psychological problems, watch some of these experimental films. You will suddenly realize how normal you are.

I would love to see a movie based on Nietzsche's life. That's the lure that got me to watch the film. Don't be fooled. This is a misinterpretation of Nietzsche as looked at through the lens of existentialism. Nietzsche looked upward, not downward. Read Zarathustra. Sure, he criticized the fact that noble natures have been subsumed by Christian values, but that was because he reached for those higher values. This film glorifies the mundane. Nietzsche would never have done that.

After an hour of watching people eat a potato (utter nonsense), or enjoying the thrill of a wild trip to the well to get water, the film's most dramatic moment arrives. On a particularly exciting evening when the near-mute father and daughter are watching clothes dry (I only wish I was making this up) a guest arrives. He spouts off some viewpoints that are obliquely Nietzshean and leaves. Then, it's back to the potatoes, wind, dismal music, and clothes drying. The film follows six days in the lives of the world's most vegetative humans. In truth, you would get more emotional angst from a celery stalk. It is not filmed in real time, but it feels as though it is.

Oh yeah, the horse. The horse supplies the intellectual content for the film. The horse dreams of having an opposable thumb so that he can pick up a pistol and shoot himself. Since he cannot, he develops an elaborate scheme of making his owner so angry that the owner will do this for him. Alas, the plan goes awry when the owner realizes he is trapped in a huge philosophical dilemma: If I shoot the horse, I have no horse. To be or not to be, that is the farmer's question. Eventually, the horse, being a true stoic, understands that he can only control himself and not others. He, thus, decides to starve himself to death, as death by boredom would take too long. Does the horse succeed? Watch this two and a half hour film to find out.

So, in short, if you feel you have done something wrong and deserve to be punished, watch this film. Your sins and those of all your ancestors will be forgiven. Thus spake Zarathustra.

Fmovies: It is rare to see movie walk outs; people will usually stick out rough films until the end because they willingly paid to be there. It is rarer still to see walk outs in an art house theater because the patrons typically have more experienced expectations on contemplative and metaphorical features. The Turin Horse will split audiences right down the middle. Some will be mesmerized with the incredibly long takes, crisp black and white cinematography, and the relentless but futile struggle of the characters. The other half of the audience will groan, comment to their neighbors, drop their head in the hands, and a few baffled theater-goers will just give up and leave.

The beginning monologue describes the alleged events which led to Friedrich Nietzsche's mental collapse. He walks out of his house in Turin and witnesses a cabman whipping his horse for being disobedient. Nietzsche runs up to the horse, hugs it, and then spends his next 10 years in the care of his mother and sisters deep in mental illness. The film asks, "But what happened to the horse?" Nietzsche is not a character in The Turin Horse nor is it set in Italy; the majority of the time, you will only see an old man, his daughter, their obstinate horse, and their rural Hungarian farm house.

The opening scene is a single shot held for minutes with no interruptions. An old man, Janos Derzsi, rides on a cart pulled by a horse in a truly blinding wind storm. Dirt flies in his face and stings his eyes. The horse sometimes stumbles and trips as he is not whipped by the man on the cart, but by the wind trying to push him backwards. The camera watches them from the side, moves back behind some leafless trees, pushes all the way up until it almost brushes the horse's nose and then repeats the process. All the while, a monotonous organ and string melody repeats itself as if it is a cadence for the distressed travelers.

Back at the farm, the man's daughter, Erika Bok, meets him, separates the horse from the cart, and they then spend the next two and a half hours of the film taking care of the horse, fetching water, boiling potatoes, getting dressed and undressed, and then doing all of that again. There is precious little dialogue between anyone except when a neighbor drops by to borrow alcohol and wax philosophy, and when a band of gypsies briefly invade the family's water supply.

The audience waits for something to happen, expects something to happen, and little by little begin to realize that what is happening is just everyday life. The director, Bela Tarr, says The Turin Horse is about the "heaviness of human life." Life does seem particularly heavy for these two characters as they fumble about in the wind storm to get water, try to get the horse to eat, and carry out even the simplest chore. Tarr does not just glance over these chores either. After 146 minutes, the audience will know exactly who boils the potatoes, how each of them will eat them, where they hang their clothes, and how to hook the horse up to the cart. In 146 minutes of film, there are only 30 takes. In an era when most movie scenes may last for an average of seconds, the scenes in The Turin Horse average almost five long minutes each.

The description here sounds harsh, but I assure you it is accurate. Also, I was one of the audience members who was more mesmerized by the routine movements than exasperated. I will not recommend very many people go and sit through The Turin Horse, but I warn you not to run away from it either. It is a ver

Someone said before me: "Cinema dies with Béla Tarr". I believe this to be completely reasonable view; and I'm afraid it is mostly true. If this the last Tarr I will ever see, I just can't express my profound sadness. Sadness that whispers me gently into sleep in a dark and hollow room I call home.

Béla Tarr is the voice in the wilderness, wilderness of most humane nature. He is the wind and wailing of - not only the lonely human, but also - the turbulent tides of Hungarian history and for that matter, the whole of Europe. The essence of Béla Tarr is in the way he creates macrocosm inside the microcosm of a single human being.

The wind in plateau keeps on screaming, silently whispering. Telling truths about ourselves, of other humans. Who we never quite seem to connect with. And the world keeps going on, after we are gone - the wind will be there. Probably the gypsies will also be there - still.

Tarr's human is almost always and everywhere lonely, he is strong and weak, but apart from all that he (or she) is always of the most nietzschean in stature. Proud and lost; lost because of his own inescapable condition. It's also about the eternal return and it's also about the potatoes. They sure are nice and warm, bring the warmth back into your freezing body.

I'm a huge fan of his Werckmeister harmóniák (2000) and Sátántangó (1994), though there is nothing wrong with his other work also - rest of his work just doesn't reach the highest peak of filmmaking. A torinói ló is a magnificent, almost indescribable finale to his career if that is how it's going to be.

The Turin Horse fmovies. Tarr's self-proclaimed last film is as open to interpretation as any movie ever was. The film follows a man, his daughter, and their horse as they struggle to survive during hard times in the late nineteenth century. It's a simple, practically minimalist movie with all the repetition that aesthetic implies, gradually coming to a crescendo that's somewhat reminiscent on a small scale of the disharmony the develops in a previous film, Werckmeister Harmonies.

The idea for the movie came from an apocryphal story (Tarr doesn't label it as such) about Nietzsche's time in Turin, which relates how the philosopher broke down upon witnessing a carriage driver whip his horse. The filmmakers were interested to look at what happened next for the horse. They also see the incident as representing a sincere recantation of all his works by the philosopher (or heavily imply so). One can apprehend from listening to Tarr that he believes Nietzsche was little more than a psychotic, responsible for promulgating a decline in values. The film depicts such a decline, though any actual link to Nietzsche other than by free association and any substantive intellectual link to the Turin episode are tenuous at best.

Tarr announced in the Q&A following the UK Premiere of Turin Horse at the Edinburgh International Film Festvial, that he felt "something's wrong", in a grand sense. The Turin Horse reflects this concern. What exactly is wrong is left almost entirely up to you as the viewer to determine. There's one clear allusion to watching television, but other than that the symptomatology and etiology of modern malaise is open to question. You could say that was a weakness of the movie, someone who believes that free migration and rights for gays are the cause for societal decay, would be equally at home watching this movie as someone who points towards revolutions in social media and the society of spectacle.

Patricularly given that no root cause is identified, Tarr and co leave themselves open to charges of the familiar canard of archaism - supposing that the past was a safer more moral and ingenious place. The artist Jeff Koons has perhaps the best counterarguments to Tarr's perspective on modern life. His stated mission is to "remove bourgeois guilt and shame in responding to banality" (highlighting the snobbery of those who cling to traditional values), whereas Tarr's is perhaps to stoke it. I suppose what side you take depends on whether you see someone fragging on a PlayStation and think "good for them", or whether you bemoan their lack of appetite for self-improvement or meaningful interaction with others. In the Q&A at the Edinburgh Film Festival Tarr said that he thinks that people spend too much time stuck in front of screens waiting forlornly for something to happen, part of a sort of technological cargo cult if you will.

On a gut level I felt the film went quickly; although empirically it's well over two hours long, it's definitely mesmerising. I've felt for a time that the best way to appreciate Werckmeister Harmonies is as narrative music, as a kind of prelude and fugue, similarly The Turin Horse works well simply in terms of rhythm and visual tone, as a meaningless sketch of the interaction of three hardy entities.

Bela Tarr claims this will be his last film, and damn does it have finality written all over it. I guess there's few ways to be more final than to devote a work to the end of humanity. And I've never seen a film that struck me as more authentically apocalyptic than this one. It is immediately strange to say then, that one of the things that most impressed me about this juggernaut is its ultra-sly humor. Tarr really is a nihilist and a misanthrope, at least philosophically. The fall of our silly little species really is funny to him, in the darkest way possible, and in half audible beats he makes it funny for us too. All of the other species have sensed the death of the world and have, reasonably, stopped trying to survive. Only homosapiens, represented by a half-functioning horse-carriage driver and his daughter, are clueless enough to continue their wretched routine in the face of a blatant apocalypse. We, along with Tarr, laugh at, pity, and admire the duo for this all at the same time. This is why I call Tarr a misanthrope in philosophy only. In practice, he has love for his fools, even as he leads them towards annihilation. The film includes many references to cinematic finality as well. Fading lanterns, windows that show a world that is becoming not, opaque, all suggest an abandoned cinema. The empty shell of a cinematic artist imagining his own abandoned corpse.

I watched Turin Horse the very day (2.April.11) and heard the director warning the already clapping audience "do not before you watch the movie". I was among the ones who were moved by the piece, not just because its originality, excellent cinematography, impressive music, the acting but because it really touched me from the very heart. I am not a fan of Nietzsche or literate on his works but probably I was in the right state of mind to get a meaning out of the movie in my life. Two main characters were holding on to life, in a loop-like setting. Despite the desperation of the situation, they were carrying on almost mechanically or instinctively to survive. The horse was everything for a living and when the horse was no longer, the universe would fall apart.

Special thanks to the director and the ones who financially supported this piece because it is one of rare films with originality value. And a comment for Ms. Alvarez's review, with respect to his opinion, it is clearly a flaw, his generalizing his point of view to majority of the audience in that theater. And where else audiences be able to see such films if not even at film festivals. If there are people seeing this movie as a torture they are always free to leave the theater.

While the director humbly accepts the existence of second opinions, why some audiences can't?