The Turin Horse (2011)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Turin Horse (2011) – B. Tarr

Perhaps if this were your very first Béla Tarr film (and he suggests that it is his very last), then this would be a more intense and compelling experience -- as I had when I saw Sátántangó as my introduction.  Tarr revisits the tone and style of that earlier seven hour film in this shorter one (only 2 ½ hours but composed of just 30 long shots).  That is to say, this is a bleak but beautiful, slow and hypnotizing, high contrast black and white stare at repetitive peasant life in the midst of an endless possibly apocalyptic windstorm.  Tarr famously refuses to be drawn as to whether there is any deeper meanings to his films, although we are told it is based on an anti-theology and this is an anti-creation film – in the six days of the story, the world fades to black (let there be dark, indeed).  If the starting point of this entire script is the question of what happened to the horse that Nietzsche famously saved from flogging, you might think that his philosophy is somehow a key to unlocking things here – and a visitor seeking palinka (Hungarian fruit brandy) does spout some “beyond good and evil” beliefs – but our lead character calls them “bullshit”.  This may be an example of Tarr’s sense of humor, if he has one.  The horse dies anyway.