The Turin Horse (A torinói ló), by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky
Zoárd Honéczy
Béla Tarr’s name is known to cinema-lovers all around the world. One of the kings of Arthouse cinema, Tarr's films are slow, depressing, but most importantly - meditative. The Turin Horse (co-directed with his spouse and frequent collaborator, Ágnes Hranitzky) is his final work, the final flourish to a fantastic filmography, leaving its audience in a state of total melancholy.
The Turin Horse portrays the everyday life of an old farmer and his daughter. Their life is simple: they wake up, get dressed, take their horse out to work, go home, undress, eat bland food, stare out the window, and then go to sleep. The first two hours of the film’s 150-minute runtime are focused on illustrating this monotony with scenes of extreme length and detail. For example, we must watch an old man getting dressed for about 5 minutes, multiple times throughout the film. The monotone existence of the protagonists is disturbed by a huge windstorm, which goes on for a large portion of the movie. Due to this storm, the farmers are unable to work, as their horse is not willing to leave its barn. Having to stay away from work, they seem to lose their purpose in life, while the world starts to shatter around them in the last fifth of the film - their horse stops eating and their well is suddenly empty. In the haunting final scene, the Earth loses all that is bright and light, yet our protagonists sit in the darkness, confused but unbothered.
We could best describe the protagonists of The Turin Horse as “apathetic”, since they lead a life without any sensory satisfaction. They eat a bland potato for every meal and their only source of “entertainment” is looking out of the window in silence. They go through the day without communicating more than the bare minimum with each other - discussing only the current status of their work. This might suggest to some that there is no love in this father-daughter relationship, which is quite possible. Their facial expressions remain emotionless throughout and there is no intimate moment between them. Thus, one could even say that what they have is not love, but the necessity of living together, as they seem to care about nothing except their work.
Béla Tarr stated that The Turin Horse details “the heaviness of human existence”. If we juxtapose this assertion with the emotionless but hard-working quality of the film’s characters, we can interpret Tarr’s view of life: while we face constant obstacles and the presence of unhappiness is never-ending, humanity goes forward with their assigned tasks. In The Turin Horse, unhappy characters face the winds of a terrible storm and they continue to work until it is possible. The explanation is unknown, just like in real life. The perfect example of this viewpoint is found in the scene which portrays the end of the first day. The daughter asks about the storm (“What is this whole thing, Dad?”), and the father replies: “I don’t know. Let’s sleep!”. Thus, it does not matter what obstacles life throws at us, we must keep going, no matter how confusing, or even depressing it is. When watching this film, the audience goes through a similar journey.
It takes a committed and strong spectator to finish The Turin Horse in one sitting. The reason for this is the monotone atmosphere with which Tarr operates, in order to imitate the sensory journey of his characters. With this, the audience can see, hear and physically feel the lethargy that surrounds the life of this father-daughter duo. For long, slow minutes all we hear is the howling of the wind and the same pattern of arpeggio-filled music, while we watch detailed scenes of the same courses of action - making up the characters’ day. The scenes involve the father waking up, getting dressed/undressed with the help of his daughter, eating, and getting the horse out to work. However, our emotional reaction can be quite different from the characters (who remain emotionless until the final minutes). After finishing this film, the audience might feel a strong sense of sorrow, even though there are not any emotionally difficult scenes. Tarr evokes this gloominess with a different method: exhaustion. The first 120 minutes are packed with exhausting repetitions - after watching the detailed (5-7 minute-long) depiction of an old man putting clothes on for the third or fourth time, one is bound to feel drained. Tarr uses this to completely destroy the audience emotionally in the last fifth of the film. He starts to shift the scenery calmly, with small steps - leading to an ending of total emptiness (both literally and emotionally). Why is this necessary? - one might ask. The answer to this question lies in the title of the film.
The term “turin horse” is a reference to famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown, which occurred after he watched a stubborn horse getting beat by its owner in Turin, Italy. This story combined with Tarr’s description of his film (“a meditation on the heaviness of human existence”) can be interpreted as an extremely negative view on human life. In Tarr’s view, human existence is so inexplicably heavy, that the smallest inconvenience or unpleasant incidence might turn a man insane. While the characters of The Turin Horse remain unchanged when the movie ends (and do not react to the shift in their surroundings), the audience might experience a dread similar to Nietzsche’s.
Personally, I have never felt so heavy-hearted after watching a film before. The only logical explanation for this is that Tarr’s repetitions and monotony exhausted me to the point where the smallest shift would have been able to disturb me. Thus, watching the world slowly collapsing around them, the fate of these characters was extremely heartbreaking for me. With this, we have the possibility to understand what Friedrich Nietzsche went through on that day in Turin, Italy. His existence was so heavy and continuously difficult until that point, that a small inconvenience (in the shape of a stubborn horse) was able to break him. In this sense, we can interpret an allegorical relationship between Nietzsche’s story and the experience of watching The Turin Horse: the audience is Nietzsche, the first, exhausting 120 minutes of Tarr’s film are the heaviness of existence, while the ending is the horse getting beaten by its owner.
The Turin Horse is most certainly a challenging watch and not everyone will be determined enough to sit through the whole thing. But believe me, this exhausting and wearying trip is worth it, as The Turin Horse is a film-experience unlike any other.