Friday, August 17, 2012
"The Turin Horse": Nietzsche, and then the end of the world
I missed “The Turin Horse”, (“A Torinoi Io”) when it showed
recently at the West End in Washington and was able to get if off short wait at
Netflix (from another city). The film,
directed by Bela Tarr and now Agnes Hranitzky,
is said to be Tarr’s last. And it
follows his practice of black and white, long takes, a slow pace, and a
desolate environment.
The film really has two aspects. For me, the most obvious was that this is
another presentation about “the end of the world”. Around 1889, a farmer (and his grown daughter)
in rural Hungary (it doesn’t look like Italy), tend to their dying horse, and
realize that the world around them is failing.
Near the end, in fact, even oil lamps at night don’t work. This is a world without residential
electricity so an electromagnetic pulse attack idea isn’t possible, but it
seems that their world is getting blown away from them in an endless
windstorm. The mayhem is hard to see. Perhaps existence itself, or
the laws of physics, are failing. The
final scene, with where the 50-something farmer (Janos Derzsi) sits with his daughter
(Erika Bok) in a dark room and he tries to eat a bite of potato, is as conclusive
as the end of “Melancholia”. It is the
end of the world, which didn’t happen.
The film is slow and intimate. In one early scene, the farmer peels a potato
with his fingernails. Later, we see the
daughter helping him with his longjohns.
Not only is the horse decaying, but so is he.
In the middle of the film, just before the gypsies appear,
there is an existential conversation with a townsperson about moral decay and how
humans don’t deserve a good fate.
There is a brooding cello music score by Mihaly Vig, wich
features a permanent ground bass in 6/8 time.
The other aspect of the film is its motivation. In 1889, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
intervened when, while in Turin, he witnessed a farmer starting to whip an old
horse. (This introduction is not shown.)
Shortly thereafter, Nietzsche became
disabled and spent the last ten years of his life under the care of his mother
and sister (he was only 45 at the breakdown).
Reagarding Nietzsche, the psychiatrists at NIH wrote this
about me when I was am “inpatient” in 1962: “He avoided all heterosexual
contacts and his relationships with girls was of the most casual sort. He was
goven to philosophical ruminations and following the age of 16, obsessive
thinking about the Nietzechean supermen whome he both idolized and hated… He
questions and wonders and he puts under constant scrutiny these contemporaries
to see if they come up to his standards for an ideal man.”
The official site (from Cinema Guild) is here.
The DVD includes a crude short film “Hotel Magnezit”, made
by Tarr in 1978. The short depicts a man
fighting eviction from a group apartment.
The DVD has a 46-miinute press conference at the Berlin Film
Festival.
Labels:
apocalyptic plots,
Bela Tarr,
foreign language,
horses,
indie drama
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