Swanvale Halt Film Club: The Turin Horse (2011)

All right, it was my fault that we even tried to watch this film: I was intrigued by the concept of starting from the incident in 1889 when the philosopher Nietzsche attempted to stop a horse from being whipped in the main square in Turin, suffered some sort of paroxysm and spent the rest of his life silent in an asylum. Director Bela Tarr decided to ask the question, What happened to the horse?

What happens to it at the start of this film is that it pulls a cart along a stretch of misty road towards the tumbledown barn where it lives with a carter who has a dodgy arm and his daughter. Fighting a gale, they unharness the horse and put it and the cart away. This all takes about half an hour. For the next two hours of monochrome 'action' the two of them get up, dress, eat potatoes, and go about dreary daily tasks, enlivened only by the visits of a belligerent man in search of a drink who tells the carter at some length that the world is going to the dogs, and a group of raucous gypsies in a wagon. The horse is a sad-looking nag and not in the best of health though because we were desperately skipping through the footage searching for dialogue, I'm not sure whether it actually dies by the end. The last ten minutes or so of the film is entirely black, with a few lines of speech or directorial voiceover.

Of course this is all an almost clunkingly-obvious slow apocalypse in which the humans face the end of their little world and by implication the world as a whole. Critical opinion of The Turin Horse seems to be near-ecstatic, though I have a suspicion that people who review it positively are largely congratulating themselves for being tough enough to sit through the relentless boredom, while to refuse to do so is to admit you are a superficial philistine. I suppose it might have a sort of hypnotic quality to it if you persevere, though you may equally decide life is too short to bother.

My main problem with it is the fakeness of the whole exercise. The black-and-white cinematography concentrating doggedly on domestic minutiae implies a stern realism, but it's framed within a completely unreal situation. At one point the carter decides they have to leave, and so he and his daughter pack up their meagre goods and set off in the cart. They seem to circle the top of the hill, announce 'there's nothing there', and go back to the housestead again. But there must be something there! The stranger who visits the house talks about going into town; the gypsies, logically, can't emerge ex nihilo. In reality people in bleak situations come up with all sorts of ways of coping, or change them and go somewhere else; the couple in this film, apparently, aren't in a real situation at all. They are there only to dramatise (if such is the word) a nihilist philosophy, and that sense of disconnection from reality makes it very hard to care either about them or about the horse for that matter. And if such a philosophy can only be expressed through such an unreal narrative you have to question whether it can be taken seriously. It certainly has little to do with Nietzsche, who may have announced that God was dead but equally insisted that the death of God was a liberating experience for those human beings brave enough to accept it, and go about creating their own meaning in a world of infinite possibility. His ideas were anything but miserable resignation. The film, on the other hand, is basically an unimaginative presentation of a false proposition.

Sorry!