[2012 Movie Review] The Turin Horse

I watch "The Turin Horse" (Béla Tarr / 2011).

There is a house and a stable on a wasteland, where a father and daughter live. There is a horse. There is nothing else around. There are hills, trees, colorless land, and fallen leaves, and the fallen leaves are constantly moving, blown by a gale. The environment is harsh and unforgiving, and there is a life that is only completed and continued by repeating the same things every day.

In the raging wind, the father returns in a horse-drawn carriage. The daughter welcomes him, unhitches the horse and puts it in the stable, puts away the harness, and stores the carriage in the shed. Then she returns to the house, helps her father, who has a disabled right hand, change his clothes, and boils potatoes in a meager kitchen. Once they light the lamp and finish their meal of one potato each, they go to sleep. When dawn breaks, the daughter leaves the house to fetch water from the well. When she returns to the house, her father is awake. She helps him change his clothes. Before starting the day's work, the father and daughter drink pálinka (brandy). The daughter takes only a sip, while the father drinks two glasses. He drinks more in the second glass. Under the morning light, shadows fall over his eyes. And so, the day begins.

In Turin in 1889, Nietzsche embraces a whipped carriage horse, bursts into tears, and loses consciousness. There is a famous anecdote that this was the last moment of sanity for the philosopher who argued that compassion is the root of all evil. The horse embraced by Nietzsche then headed home. This film begins from there.

The repetition of the depiction of the monotonous life of the father and daughter on the wasteland seems at first glance to be a negation of Nietzsche's philosophy. Compared to the darkness and heaviness of their lives, Nietzsche's philosophy of the Übermensch begins to look like a sophistry cooked up by a clever young man. However, it seems it is not that simple.

A decisive change is about to visit the world and era of the father and daughter that has continued for decades. One day, a man visits the house on the wasteland and asks to buy some pálinka. The father asks the man why he doesn't buy it in town. The man replies that the town has been ruined by the raging wind. He says that everything has become corrupted.

This man, who appears only once, talks a lot. In this film, which has extremely sparse dialogue, he talks unnaturally much. Why has sublimity been lost? Why have the gods disappeared? Why did people realize that there were no gods to begin with? Why do humans who act on impulse always win, while those who believe in sublimity and live quietly continue to be defeated? The man's verbosity is like a jester for Nietzsche. He is just like an impostor of Zarathustra. The father says to the man, "Stop talking nonsense. Go home now."

The depiction of the lives of the father, daughter, and horse is persistently repeated in long, long one-shots. The well, the stable, the kitchen, the boiling potatoes, the meals, the lamp, the sound of the wind. Even if their actions are not exactly mechanical, the purpose of their actions is always the same. And the position of the camera capturing those actions changes every day. A cut from the front of the daughter boiling potatoes is replaced the next day by a shot of her right side from the front, with a glimpse of the daughter's room beyond. The changes in camera angles that continue to capture their monotonous life fill every corner of the screen with rich moments that capture the entirety of the world. Even though that world is about to end.

I was surprised that I could watch a film like this in 2012. It is not an old film. It is not a retrospective screening. It is a film made in 2011. This is a contemporary film.

The verbose man's long-winded lines in the film say many things, but they pass through my mind and I don't remember them well. However, there are some I do remember. "I thought everything was determined and would proceed accordingly. But I was wrong." The man is not allowed to continue this. Because the father turned him away.

The line "I was wrong" is also my impression of watching this film. I never thought a film like this would be made even in the 2010s. I honestly thought that film is amazing.

Perhaps Nietzsche's famous words, "God is dead," also...