Who would have
thought that the eating of potatoes could hold so much interest for anyone
other than perhaps Andy Warhol?
Potatoes. Potatoes are boiled and
consumed quickly without utensils four times in Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse, each time filmed at one
of the four head-on directions on the same level. And he shows us every second of the process
too. The purpose is to convey the crushing
monotony of the characters’ lives – actions are different but the same, just
like the shots themselves. I make the
comparison with Warhol because like Tarr, he also made films that try our
patience and yet can also become profoundly rewarding. If you feel that “art” filmmakers are
essentially con-artists then you will understandably reject films like this for
trying to make a fool out of you. But if,
like me, you believe that a few filmmakers have some inexplicable vision inside
them that they exorcise through film and thereby attempt to communicate with others,
then you’ll admire how radically and refreshingly different the grammar of The Turin Horse is from everything else
out there, and not only because it is in black-and-white. The time and place would be nearly impossible
to pinpoint if we don’t make the assumption from the opening title card that we
must be in Italy around 1889. That’s
when Friedrich Nietzsche encountered a carriage horse being whipped by its
owner and had a breakdown from which he never recovered. Following this event, presumably, Tarr’s film
focuses on the owner of this horse and his daughter, who live alone in a tiny
farm house in the country. In Tarr’s
vision of the world, civilization is but a minor improvement over wilderness,
as quasi-articulate characters grapple with ceaseless attack by the elements
and the wildness in each other. A
painful-looking wind whips the pair mercilessly whenever they exit their front
door to perform their daily tasks; fetching water from the well and getting
their horse, their livelihood, in and out of the barn. The horse, seemingly aware of the horrible
meaninglessness of it all, has simply refused to cooperate; not only with
working but even with eating. The father
and daughter are baffled, but they don’t know what to do except to keep repeating
the same processes every day. What’s
great about Tarr’s style is that he gets you so into a routine that you become
a little presumptuous and are therefore startled whenever something unusual
happens. When a band of loud and
menacing travelers arrive on the horizon, for example, it is such a contrast
that it becomes as exciting as action scenes in other movies. The same goes for the moment when the father
and daughter decide to move because things are getting so desperate. They pack up their belongings, load the
wagon, and head off up the hill; slowly up and around, out of sight; and then,
sure enough, back the opposite direction along the same path. They have nowhere to go. Either something over the hill made them
realize that the world is equally destitute everywhere or they just decided
that they’re no worse off staying on familiar ground. In the latter part of the film, an almost
supernatural sense of doom takes over.
It’s as though the universe is collapsing. The well dries up without explanation. Lamps refuse to stay lit. The characters are encircled in thick
darkness. So, The Turin Horse may not be my recommendation for your next “guys
movie night” get-together, but for whatever it’s worth it is powerful and
unforgettable in its relentless depiction of atrophy; which is effective not because
of gimmicks but because of Tarr’s confident fusion of style and theme; he makes
them homogenous with each other while remaining distinctly recognizable as his
own, and there aren’t really a ton of filmmakers alive who can boast of that achievement.
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