El caballo de Turín

Bela Tarr claims this will be his last film, and damn does it have finality written all over it. I guess there's few ways to be more final than to devote a work to the end of humanity. And I've never seen a film that struck me as more authentically apocalyptic than this one. It is immediately strange to say then, that one of the things that most impressed me about this juggernaut is its ultra-sly humor. Tarr really is a nihilist and a misanthrope, at least philosophically. The fall of our silly little species really is funny to him, in the darkest way possible, and in half audible beats he makes it funny for us too. All of the other species have sensed the death of the world and have, reasonably, stopped trying to survive. Only homosapiens, represented by a half-functioning horse-carriage driver and his daughter, are clueless enough to continue their wretched routine in the face of a blatant apocalypse. We, along with Tarr, laugh at, pity, and admire the duo for this all at the same time. This is why I call Tarr a misanthrope in philosophy only. In practice, he has love for his fools, even as he leads them towards annihilation. The film includes many references to cinematic finality as well. Fading lanterns, windows that show a world that is becoming not, opaque, all suggest an abandoned cinema. The empty shell of a cinematic artist imagining his own abandoned corpse.

Tarr's self-proclaimed last film is as open to interpretation as any movie ever was. The film follows a man, his daughter, and their horse as they struggle to survive during hard times in the late nineteenth century. It's a simple, practically minimalist movie with all the repetition that aesthetic implies, gradually coming to a crescendo that's somewhat reminiscent on a small scale of the disharmony the develops in a previous film, Werckmeister Harmonies.

The idea for the movie came from an apocryphal story (Tarr doesn't label it as such) about Nietzsche's time in Turin, which relates how the philosopher broke down upon witnessing a carriage driver whip his horse. The filmmakers were interested to look at what happened next for the horse. They also see the incident as representing a sincere recantation of all his works by the philosopher (or heavily imply so). One can apprehend from listening to Tarr that he believes Nietzsche was little more than a psychotic, responsible for promulgating a decline in values. The film depicts such a decline, though any actual link to Nietzsche other than by free association and any substantive intellectual link to the Turin episode are tenuous at best.

Tarr announced in the Q&A following the UK Premiere of Turin Horse at the Edinburgh International Film Festvial, that he felt "something's wrong", in a grand sense. The Turin Horse reflects this concern. What exactly is wrong is left almost entirely up to you as the viewer to determine. There's one clear allusion to watching television, but other than that the symptomatology and etiology of modern malaise is open to question. You could say that was a weakness of the movie, someone who believes that free migration and rights for gays are the cause for societal decay, would be equally at home watching this movie as someone who points towards revolutions in social media and the society of spectacle.

Patricularly given that no root cause is identified, Tarr and co leave themselves open to charges of the familiar canard of archaism - supposing that the past was a safer more moral and ingenious place. The artist Jeff Koons has perhaps the best counterarguments to Tarr's perspective on modern life. His stated mission is to "remove bourgeois guilt and shame in responding to banality" (highlighting the snobbery of those who cling to traditional values), whereas Tarr's is perhaps to stoke it. I suppose what side you take depends on whether you see someone fragging on a PlayStation and think "good for them", or whether you bemoan their lack of appetite for self-improvement or meaningful interaction with others. In the Q&A at the Edinburgh Film Festival Tarr said that he thinks that people spend too much time stuck in front of screens waiting forlornly for something to happen, part of a sort of technological cargo cult if you will.

On a gut level I felt the film went quickly; although empirically it's well over two hours long, it's definitely mesmerising. I've felt for a time that the best way to appreciate Werckmeister Harmonies is as narrative music, as a kind of prelude and fugue, similarly The Turin Horse works well simply in terms of rhythm and visual tone, as a meaningless sketch of the interaction of three hardy entities.

I really liked this film. I didn't like watching this film. Tarr pushes the audience to the limit of their patience but after a while it gets under your skin. You fall into its all-encompassing, hypnotic pattern. It's humanity at its most bare - its most bleak. It is a look into humanity's most raw, pained existence. It emerges you. Philosophically rigourous, Tarr goes to great efforts to make the Nietzsche analogy and whatever you think of Nietzsche, or even if you don't, there's a bitter comedy to the way in which Tarr looks at the human condition here. It laughs in the face of meaning. Yet, paradoxically, it's a film of distinct humanity, as shown to us in the last scene. It won't be for everyone, I know. It's cinema at its most cutting; its most applied.

Girl:What it is Papa? Father:I don't know.. It is my first Bela Tarr movie and I don't think that words can help me to write a review on 'The Turin Horse' and it is my first review. I have been watching movies since my childhood, reading literature and philosophy in order to understand human condition but the visual and sound sensation I have had with 'The Turin Horse' is matchless. There is a modern novel in which a girl commits suicide because she think that she had to brush her teeth everyday with the same brush. Bela Tarr's characters are eating raw potatoes everyday,fortunately they don't commit suicide but what is the point in living? Bela will compel you to think about it. Father: Eat. we have to... To be very honest 'The Turin Horse' is the most powerful work of cinematic art I've ever came across, it is not social but ontological rather cosmological. What it is to be human? Want to know? Go and watch it, the 'heaviness of human existence' to put it in Bela's words.

How can you make someone see what is staring them in the face?

Tarr is nothing if not serious cinema. It may not move, entertain or give you a thrill to the bottom of your popcorn. But it is also, for many cineastes, a standard by which other art cinema can measured. And if that introduction is overweening, perhaps it will deter anyone even vaguely faintly thinking about popcorn - but encourage serious-minded cinema-goers to consider dropping everything to see this.

Hungarian Grandmaster Bela Tarr uses a technique made famous by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky – that of incredibly long takes. We are forced to immerse ourselves in real time, to experience the minutiae of existence (and its totality) in the same way the characters do. But in terms of 'suspension of beliefs', Tarr goes one stage further than Tarkovsky. The latter's films were often connected with metaphysics and decorated with religious iconography; whereas Tarr eschews God and religion in favour of the people, in favour of human rights, in favour of righting wrongs, or simply in favour of what is most basic to any individual. At times seen as heavily political, his films are careful to portray only a 'documentarist' style reality. They are films designed to make you think, rather than make you entertained. In this respect, his work preserves a thread from the fierce artistic integrity of Godard - perhaps by way of Fassbinder, who would also at times exemplify a fierce minimalistic style.

In The Turin Horse, Tarr gives us a six-day prelude to an actual event that we never see. Even in those six days, nothing very much happens – yet you could probably write a Masters philosophy dissertation on that 'nothing very much.' The ontological lynchpin of the film is Nietzsche: in terms of storyline and also the dilemmas a viewer might confront.

Our movie begins by informing us of a well-known tale concerning the German philosopher. Nietzsche had caused a public disturbance – apparently by attempting to save a horse being flogged. Immediately afterwards, Nietzsche collapses and succumbs to mental illness. He will remain that way for the rest of his life. Tarr's film is an imagined reconstruction of the days leading up to the incident. It features the ailing horseman, his grown-up daughter, a visitor who provides the film's only monologue, and a brief visit by a band of gypsies. The horseman and his daughter live in the most spartan of conditions trying to survive, surrounded by a harsh and barren landscape. He probably would have rejected Nietzsche's philosophy, the rejection (or death) of God, and the idea of the 'slave-morality' dominating society. Indeed, the horseman dismisses the reflections of the visitor, whose thoughts are perhaps a shadow of Nietzschean ideas, as "rubbish." We can perceive a shift from classical belief to atheism as the ideas move quite politically: 'man is responsible for his own fate, but there is something greater that takes a hand' - yet that 'something' might be nature, rather than 'God' and it seems undeniably demonstrated in the harsh conditions that gradually drive the horseman and his daughter nearer extinction. Or it could, of course, be 'the ruling classes.' But this is not a film where intellectual arguments are expounded or debated. Most of the dialogue, in the rare instances where dialogue occurs, comprises an occasional monosyllable. The film is in black and white, and consists of merely thirty long takes – that would be excruciating were they not mesmerizingly beautiful. Each shot is perfectly composed, right down to the individual hairs on the horseman's Rasputinish beard. (This is one reason why it could not work as well on a small screen – the other being that its impact depends on being a captive audience.) As in The Man from London, Tarr uses environment as main 'characters' – the buildings, the landscape. They are 'major players.' This gives not only a tremendous sense of grandeur and majesty in simple images, but allows Tarr to convey a more cosmic point, even with such a miniscule budget. The characters each form a microcosm, doing what they do (what Man does) in order to survive. We are aware of the oppression and hardship of the plebiscite – oppression we can say is caused by 'conditions', but equally by the ruling classes. Dirge-like music, a daily meal of boiled potatoes eaten without cutlery, and a bleakness from which there is no apparent escape.

On the Second Day, the horse, once hitched, won't move. The daughter expresses some sympathy for its abject refusal. Yet the horse's gradual deterioration (to a point where it is starving itself to death) almost mirrors the plight of its owners. The horseman and daughter struggle against becoming dehumanised: he by fighting, she by gentleness. What does it mean to be human? As the wind whips dust across the landscape, she reads of the "holy places violated."

The downsides of The Turin Horse are that, given its minority-appeal audience, most people will only see it on DVD. The political landscape about which Tarr is so passionate demands extra study in order to be illuminated by the film. Nietzsche declared that art is the proper task of life, that it is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but a metaphysical supplement to nature's reality. But can The Turin Horse stand philosophically on its own merits? Some may feel that Tarr has indeed flogged his point to death, and fails to offer any man or super-man to triumph at the end of his inevitable Gotterdammerung.

Constant use of steadicam gives the impression that we are personally observing what happens - even when all motion stops and the last light is extinguished. Susan Sontag once championed Tarr as a saviour of the modern cinema. If she had lived to see this, probably his last film, she surely would probably have felt doubly justified.