On Screen Now: Béla Tar
The Turin Horse is a film about “the unbearable heaviness of life”, as the director himself has stated. The characters’ repetitive gestures establish a routine in which no comfort is to be found. The depiction of the ordinary is not a reassuring one. There is something disturbing in the endless repetition of actions, rituals and events. There is something painful in the perseverance of the characters, in their insistence on holding on to life.
the horse when she pulls the cart). And the film seems to suggest that this connectedness applies to us all. “Day will become night, and the night will be at the end” – words written in the book that the woman receives from one of the gypsies. Those prophetic words, as well as the cryptic trailer of the film (which only shows the fading lantern light), disclose what the film is ultimately about. The light goes off, and only darkness is left. It is hard to imagine a more definite farewell to cinema.
Béla Tarr’s last film is a return to the essential. Essential are space and time: the camera only shows the farmhouse, the stable, and the immediate surroundings, and the 146 minutes of the film cover only six days. Essential are the plot and the dialogue, both reduced to the minimum. It is also a return to a cinema that counts on the affective power of the image more than on narrative. The story is told through faces, gestures, objects, and their affective power. No exceptional event distracts us from those essential elements. God is dead, and there is no godly or metaphysical entity that saves the characters from their despair. The only element that suggests transcendence, the gale, is a destructive one. Such attention to the particular, however, is meant to allude to something universal. The horse, the father and the daughter are all bound in the same plight (at the end, the daughter even takes the place of 10
Paola Pistone