On January 6 the eminent film director Béla Tarr died, at the age of 70. As I admire the several films of his that I have seen (usually with repeat viewings), I'm taking a break from MS postings today to insert some comments I made a while ago about his last film,
The Turin Horse:
THE TURIN HORSE (2011) The story about Nietzsche that inspired this movie may or may not have a basis in fact but that is by the way. In 1889 Nietzsche, then in Turin, is said to have seen a cabman brutally flogging his horse, whereupon Nietzsche was so outraged that he flung himself on the horse in an embrace and apparently prevented more damage to it--but he himself was crazed by the experience and spent the rest of his life in a mute, demented state.
Béla Tarr made this film in collaboration with the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, both of whom were wondering what happened to the horse.
This is the horse's story. And I don't think that I have this opinion just because I read
Black Beauty and wept buckets over it too often as a child, though that might be the way it is. I've watched this movie twice now and am thoroughly persuaded that it's best not to search through it too closely for symbols or for allegory or for any other element that leads to over-analysis.
To be sure, the focus of attention is often on the two people who are responsible for the horse: Ohlsdorfer, the cabman who is in his late 50s and who is paralyzed in one arm, and his unnamed daughter, a young woman about whom we find out very little except that she almost always does her father's bidding and tries to help in any way she can.
But their lives depend on the horse who is stabled in a structure with part of its wall gone. Ohlsdorfer and his daughter live close to the bone. Throughout the six days covered in this story, a howling wind is raising a furious dust storm all around them, and perhaps the rock walls of their little house offer some protection from the cold but they keep the stove stoked with wood, and Ohlsdorfer manages to split the logs himself with the use of just one arm. He relies on his daughter to dress him, and she boils and serves the potato that seems to be their only food.
We don't ever find out what brought them to this condition. Their history is left obscure, as if irrelevant. This story concerns the way in which they get through the six days with their horse failing in the stable and the wind storm making it difficult even to get to the well for water--another job of the daughter's.
We can assume (I think) that we are in Turin in 1889, and that this is Nietzsche's Turin horse, perhaps just after its severe beating.
The horse stops eating. The daughter tries to coax it to take food and water. The days pass. At one point she says to it, "You're not going anywhere." On the first day she even defies her father when he starts flogging the horse, who was resisting being harnessed up. As we see the animal resisting, we can see a rather sizeable sore on its hip. Perhaps this is a wound from the recent Turin flogging.
If this is in or near Turin, why wouldn't the cabman have an Italian name? There is nothing in the film to locate the story in Turin though there is mention of a town that must not be very far away. However, the highly unreliable person--the visiting neighbor--who mentions it speaks of it as if it has been destroyed. We can take this as a statement of fact but more likely he is indulging in hyperbole.
Those who made this movie may have wanted to universalize it, to make it into an Everyman story. There are no crucifixes or other artifacts of religion anywhere. Nobody prays or says grace or makes the sign of the cross. If Ohlsdorfer and his daughter are devout, we don't find that out. And Ohlsdorfer's pet expletive is an obscenity that might not actually have been in very common use in the late 19th century, when the unacceptability of blasphemy led people to take the name of the Lord in vain but human functions were not so often alluded to in swearing. But I'm on shaky ground here and am basing this only on having read quite a few materials written at that time.
Perhaps with these touches--the removal of most evidence of any precise location for the story and the absence of any signs of a religious life for the people in it--we are obliged to think of it as a story for any time and any place.
The visitor who blows in suddenly and accepts some of the brandy (later apparently paying for it with coins) is meant to be "a sort of Nietzschean shadow" according to Béla Tarr, and he does indeed seem to be echoing Nietzsche's "God is dead" statement ("...had to accept that there is neither God nor gods"). Ohlsdorfer, however, declares the visitor's statements to be rubbish.
But what to make of the gypsies' gift to his daughter? It seems to be a sacred book, and she, who hardly ever does anything that isn't of practical use so far as we know, spends quite a bit of time laboring over the words, which have the appearance of a passage from the Bible but aren't. They also bear a strong resemblance to some of the gloom-and-doom sentiments voiced recently by the visitor ("holy places have been violated by the great injustice of actions ... that scandalize the congregation..."). When we reach the statement: "The bishop says to the congregation, 'The Lord was with you,'" we probably suspect that this isn't from the Old or New Testament, in which there is probably no mention of bishops, and "the Lord" in the past tense doesn't sound right either.
In fact, Béla Tarr has said that the book is "an anti-Bible."
What is the book the Gypsies give to the daughter?It’s an anti-Bible. It’s about how priests close churches because people are sinning. We have to close the churches. We have to tear them down. In the text the daughter reads there are some references to Nietzsche, but the text is original, by Krasznahorkai. [from an interview,
https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/198131/]
The gypsies give her the book as payment for the water to which they have helped themselves in spite of Ohlsdorfer's angry ranting. Later, when the well has gone dry (and the gypsies may or may not have had something to do with this new calamity), we can recall that in their anger they proclaimed that the water is theirs -- and that the earth belongs to them.
After the well goes dry, Ohlsdorfer announces that they can't stay there. There is no discussion of a plan but they pack up their belongings and load them onto a handcart, which his daughter, now the beast of burden and their only means of transport, obediently pulls while the ailing horse accompanies them and Ohlsdorfer walks along by the cart, seeming to do what he can with his better arm to keep the wheels from sticking in the mud.
What their plan was isn't made clear. Perhaps they were going to call on the visitor who was probably a neighbor since he came on foot. Perhaps they had hopes that he would take them in but were turned away. They disappear over the horizon, only to reappear and return to the place they had abandoned. They had loaded at least one very large sack of potatoes, which they bring back, and presumably this is what will see them through for a while. It's not clear whether they have managed to get some water on their expedition, and there isn't much brandy left.
On the fifth day they seem to realize that the horse is dying. We see a very long view of the front of the horse's head as it stands, nearly motionless, in the stable, no longer eating or drinking. Ohlsdorfer removes the horse's nosepiece, and then the stable door is closed. The horse will probably die alone there.
The sight of Ohlsdorfer's bowed back as he stands silently and as if in mourning in the house tells us all we need to know. Their fate has probably been sealed by the loss of their horse. If he makes his livelihood as a cabman, he will need a horse. Money is scarce, though perhaps the coins from the visitor are added to a stash of coins that they can use if they can get to the town (which may or may not be in ruins) and find a horse.
For them there is some hope even though by day 6, when neither of them even wants to finish the potato, it looks as if they are doomed to die there. When their light is failing, Ohlsdorfer says, "Tomorrow we will try again." And when his daughter isn't eating at all, but he has eaten some, he commands her to eat, and again he says, "We have to eat."
Apparently some viewers see this film as about the end of the world, but that wasn't what was intended. It's a story about the horse--the horse's death, which was probably caused by the cabman's brutal flogging, and about the impending death of the cabman and his daughter.
When they made this magnificent movie they kept it simple.
Is the end of the film your vision of the apocalypse?The apocalypse is a huge event. But reality is not like that. In my film, the end of the world is very silent, very weak. So the end of the world comes as I see it coming in real life – slowly and quietly. Death is always the most terrible scene, and when you watch someone dying – an animal or a human – it’s always terrible, and the most terrible thing is that it looks like nothing happened.
[from the interview cited above]
The world shown here is a world with God/gods stripped away. But what remains is a world where even doomed people can be kind, as the daughter is kind to the horse in ways that her father is not.
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