Listen.

The wind blows.

We watch a moving world. We do not move ourselves.
We are Pygmalion in reverse. Our daily routine is the chisel, turning us to stone.
We wait. We ignore. We transform.
Time stops.

The wind blows.
It sucks our breath, it drowns our words.
Actions speak louder. Actions can match the wind.
Nature versus routine. An eternal battle to wear away our stone facade.
Both with the same goal, reward, curse. Stone or dust.
Winner signaled by brief panic, then stone or dust.
Time stops.

The wind blows.

Listen.

***

I'd like to place a reservation on my rating for The Turin Horse for now. Béla Tarr is a director I've long been wanting to experience,…

This is one of those cases where my rating is for the merits of the film and not my preferences. As beautiful as this film is, I could only recommend it to those who are particularly interested in seeing the daily routines and harshness of 19th Century country living, or to serious fans of Tarkovskiy, who are used to slow long shots where not much happens on the screen.

The Turin Horse.

It is gorgeous. Every shot is one of the most beautiful photographs you will ever see.
It sounds beautiful. The score and the harsh wind are almost indistinguishable, both playing the same melody.
The art direction is perfect. Every single dented pot, every crack in the wall, every…

More an experience than a film, Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse is one of the bleakest and most depressing pieces of art I have ever encountered. And at the same time it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

Tarr's film builds on a thought, a musing (taken from the film's synopsis): 1889. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse while traveling in Turin, Italy. He tossed his arms around the horse's neck to protect it then collapsed to the ground. In less than one month, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with a serious mental illness that would make him bed-ridden and speechless for the next eleven years until his death. But whatever did…

The Turin Horse is now on Netflix. Now The Turin Horse is on Netflix. On Netflix now, The Turin Horse. Here is what I wrote about it for my weekly column "This Week On Demand". It's now on Netflix (US). You now have no excuse to not watch it.

Since cementing his signature style of minimal cuts, languid pacing, and monochrome photography with 1988’s Damnation, Béla Tarr has given us some of the greatest cinematic achievements of the last 25 years. He claims The Turin Horse to be his last film, his thoughts on the world now apparently all spoken. The howling winds of the film’s soundscape are as unrelenting as Tarr’s bleakness, his story that of a poor farmer…

How I wish I ‘got’ the films of Béla Tarr; I’d love to share in the enthusiasm yet, with the exception of Werckmeister Harmonies, I am completely apathetic to his style and themes. It is certainly easy enough to admire his great technical abilities from his famous near-endless tracking shots, his eye for detail and texture and how he uses sound (often with the absence of music) in his films, but for me there needs to be more than just a mastery with the camera.

The Turin Horse is a film about a sisyphean human struggle as a farmer and his daughter toil day after day with no reward in sight whilst their horse (the horse rumoured to have caused…

Film 13 of Kyle's Travel through 30 Countries in 30 Days

Country: Hungary

I am somewhat at a loss with my feelings about The Turin Horse. While I can understand and appreciate the praise that the film has garnered, I can equally understand the distaste for it as well. And as this is my first experience with Béla Tarr, I have no way of comparing it with his other works.

The film follows the daily routine of a farmer, whose horse is supposedly responsible for the breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his daughter once their horse has refused to work. The pacing is incredibly slow, and the narrative is repetitive. But these contribute to how hypnotic the film can be.…

There seems to be a paradox, which might not necessarily be really paradoxical: realism and fantasy. At this point, I have to rethink of what the word "realistic" means, as in one lucid dream, I said to my dream companion, "You're not real. You're in my dream." He replied back, "Why am I not real?" Black & White is documentary, as most pioneering street photography is in black and white, many from Stieglitz and Weegie. Black & White is fantasy, as B&W is not actually how we first-handedly perceive the world and most truly "dream-like" movies are in B&W, as in Hitchcock's Psycho and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, along with the recent The Turin Horse.

It is somewhat unfortunate that I have to…

This is apparently the last film from Hungarian director Bela Tarr. Admittedly, I was previously unfamiliar with his work, but now I might have to go back and look at his earlier material based on the strength of this one. The film opens with a narration against a black screen, detailing an incident where Nietzsche saved a horse from being beaten. Apparently after this incident, Nietzsche succumbed to an illness from which he never recovered. The film doesn't follow Nietzsche though; it follows the horse, as it returns with its aging owner to an isolated farm. What follows is six days detailing the lives of the horse, the farmer, and his daughter, as some sort of pending apocalyptic event lurks…

Listen.

The wind blows.

We watch a moving world. We do not move ourselves.
We are Pygmalion in reverse. Our daily routine is the chisel, turning us to stone.
We wait. We ignore. We transform.
Time stops.

The wind blows.
It sucks our breath, it drowns our words.
Actions speak louder. Actions can match the wind.
Nature versus routine. An eternal battle to wear away our stone facade.
Both with the same goal, reward, curse. Stone or dust.
Winner signaled by brief panic, then stone or dust.
Time stops.

The wind blows.

Listen.

***

I'd like to place a reservation on my rating for The Turin Horse for now. Béla Tarr is a director I've long been wanting to experience,…