Hungarian Potatoes

While writing my previous post, 'Religion, Nihilism, and Nothingness,' I associated nihilism with Nietzsche, and Nietzsche with director Béla Tarr's 'The Turin Horse' (2011, Hungary/France/Switzerland/Germany).

I was struck by a sense of 'what exactly am I being shown?' and drawn into a strong feeling of otherness. It shared common ground with awe-inspiring cinematic experiences like Theo Angelopoulos's 'The Travelling Players' (1975, Greece), Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life' (2011, USA), and Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' (1979, USSR).

A father and daughter live in isolation on a desolate, wind-swept land. The father stares at his daughter as she helps him dress, his arm disabled. Their only meal is a single boiled potato. The horse stops eating its fodder. A man who comes to ask for alcohol tells them, 'The town was destroyed by the wind. Everything is corrupted. God is complicit.' The well runs dry, the fire goes out, and there is nothing left on the table but raw potatoes.

Monochrome, long takes, very few people, a horse, and minimal dialoguedialogue.

Béla Tarr, who retired as a film director after this work, is from Hungary. Emmanuel Todd, whom I introduced in my previous post, described Hungary as 'unique.' Despite being an EU member state that clearly supports Ukraine, Hungary does not align with the others and is criticized by fellow member states.

When I was a student, I was taught that Hungarians were descendants of the Huns who came from Central Asia. Their language belongs to the Uralic family, not the Indo-European, and the name Béla Tarr, like in Japanese, follows the surname-given name order. According to Emmanuel Todd, because the Protestant Calvinists accounted for about 20 percent of the population, the nation did not fall into anti-Semitism.

From distant Japan, the individual characteristics of European countries, especially those in Eastern Europe, are not visible. Triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, countries like Hungary, Turkey, and India are pursuing independent diplomacy, and we are catching a glimpse of something inherent and underlying in them.

In Japan, too, a mosaic-like world flows endlessly, invisible in business or inbound tourism. While Japan expressed support for Ukraine alongside the West, one could clearly see the Japanese sentiment of criticizing Israel in the Gaza conflict. That is not the case in the US or Germany. How does modern Japan, which reveres a symbolic Emperor who declared his humanity, appear from the outside? Japan also has its own peculiar 'something.'

The potato, the only meal in 'The Turin Horse,' was a new crop brought to Europe from South America in the 16th century, yet it spread across the continent because it could grow even in cold, barren soil. The sound of the word 'potato' carries a northern sorrow. The Great Famine in Ireland (1845–) and Van Gogh's early work, 'The Potato Eaters' (1885).

Shuji Terayama liked to use the word 'potato.' There, too, one cannot help but feel a hope like steam rising from a northern wilderness, and its sorrow. Along with Chekhov, troikas, gas pipes, lamps, and black bread, it tries to carry us off to the north.

Regardless of Béla Tarr's intentions, 'The Turin Horse' is permeated by the same nothingness that existed 17 years after 'Sátántangó' (1994). Yet, why am I drawn to it, and why does it leave me with the feeling that I am glad I watched it?

In film, I seek 'otherness' rather than 'empathy.' I seek direct authorship rather than something processed by the intentions of stakeholders. Erika Bók, who played the daughter, played the young girl who drank rat poison and took her own life in 'Sátántangó.' She usually works part-time and only appears in Béla Tarr's films. Not a homogeneous quality with deception, but an otherness without deception. Their films and our daily lives are connected by a thick pipe, making us realize that nothingness is within us. After all, weren't the long takes and minimal dialogue part of our daily lives?

Nothingness is a side effect of desire, and religion was the cure for nothingness. But since religion is also a desire, it creates nothingness. God and nothingness cycle and become the joker in a game of Old Maid.

For a nothingness we cannot understand, there is only a medicine we cannot understand, and to this day, there is no substitute for the invention called religion. The temptation of a religion that can be understood, a visible religion, gave birth to the pseudo-science of Aum Shinrikyo.

We live knowing that we will die without understanding. The rotating vortex of struggle brings centrifugal force like Koji Murofushi's hammer throw, and we are released. Is there no rest there? Perhaps Béla Tarr is not a nihilist.