The Turin Horse

Bela Tarr, king of transforming existential bleakness into cinematic beauty, surpasses himself in his reputedly last film, The Turin Horse.  While the 7.5 hour Sátántangó remains his masterpiece and one of the crown jewels of cinema, Tarr’s finale consummates his grim vision and is, perhaps, the most relentlessly perfect depiction of monotony and futility on screen, blended through the bleak fusion of music, image and word.

Musically, the same droning bars drone in the endless wind—ponderous, becoming almost unheard in their heavy repetition, a litany of endless necessity.  Imagistically black and white with Tarr’s characteristic long takes, the unredeemable darkness of existence is redeemed only through the beauty of artifice the creator constructs, the gap being infinite—our source of irony, despair, hope and emptiness.  Verbally, silence dominates—a silence so rich in its persistent presence, so wholly aligned with the grave muteness of the father’s and daughter’s eyes, that dialogue between them, when it sparsely happens, broaches comedy.

Yet comedy, of a kind, assumes center stage during the three intrusions from the external world:  the vatic booze-obtaining Nietzsche-paraphrasing neighbour; the bawdy vaudevillian descent of the gypsies; and the rough reading of the book, seemingly a manual for cleansing violated sacred spaces.  Prophecy, violation, procedural cleansing—perhaps a mythic allusion to the 120 years between Nietzsche’s collapse and the filming of Tarr’s slow minimalist serene finale.

But little shocks from within the hopelessly enclosed world of the two protagonists remain scattered around the three larger ones:  the almost perverse eroticism of the daughter putting on her stockings, the endless potatoes and the variations of their eating, the reversals and blendings (the horse once leading is now led, the occasional merging of daughter and horse through empathy, the shift from looking through the daughter’s eyes through the window to looking through the window at her following the escape failure, the binding of father and horse through struggle, the insular union of father and daughter), and perhaps most intensely the father’s face (perfectly chosen, it embodies the film’s central theme of chiseled void and, like the theme, like the void itself, one encounters each time a kind of vertigo upon seeing it).

The six days of the film mirror the six days of biblical creation, but unlike the latter account—for which the final creative day is the climactic transcendent production of humans—The Turin Horse’s final day is brief, encased in darkness, portending death, the trees of knowledge and life withered and silent.

Tarr’s films demand deep empathy and attention; there is no escape, as in Hollywood, from the stark brutalities of existence.  Like reading The Four Quartets, one escapes instead to life’s poetic center—which only feels like an escape from life because we so frequently devote ourselves to sheltering ourselves from it.

Ostensibly, by being in the title and dominating the opening take, the horse that Nietzsche wept over (in Turin just prior to his descent into madness) is the film’s protagonist.  As the story progresses, however, the viewer begins to suspect that—no—the father and daughter jointly share the lead.  But by the end, when nothing has happened and everything has happened, it’s hard not to conclude that futility itself plays the central role—as in some of the great works of Western literature:  The Iliad, Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, and Blood Meridian.  Which curiously brings us back to the horse as the obscure center:  dumb, violated, forever irredeemably monotonously itself.

Does art, does beauty, provide the grace required to redeem necessity’s omnipresent horrors?  We know what Simone Weil would say.  But I might only allow Tarr to respond with his films.