Synopsis
A monumental windstorm and an abused horse's refusal to work or eat signal the beginning of the end for a poor farmer and his daughter.
A monumental windstorm and an abused horse's refusal to work or eat signal the beginning of the end for a poor farmer and his daughter.
Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary Vega Film Zero Fiction Film Fonds Eurimages du Conseil de l'Europe TT Filmmûhely Werc Werk Works Movie Partners In Motion Film Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg
Koń turyński, El caballo de Turín
This is a film of the elements.
Between the constant wind, the need for water, the dirt and mud, and the light of small, flickering flames, this film is the sum total of reality. In the midst of all of these is the aether, the fifth element that controls movement and light. In this case, the aether is the camera, which moves fluidly about our sparse subjects and observes, yet also commands their fates in a metatextual way. The aether is Tarr's storytelling.
The wind is the uncontrollable power that sweeps away everything. It is the horse's refusal to work and the inevitability of the end. It is constant, grating, and brutal, and it drives those who attempt to move…
First Day: Food and shelter
Second Day: Touching, acquiring and therefore debasing
Third Day: God watches all over you
Fourth Day: Scarcity
Fifth Day: Darkness and silence
Sixth Day: Mortality
Predominant elements throughout the days: A storm raging outside and moving everything that can be found in the air and on the ground, like trying to reach a destination, shadows, cotidianity occupying three alienated souls (two humans, one animal), a strong wind heard while outside, ghastly and scary wind sounds from the inside, repentance, mysteries unspoken, emotional detachment, water and potatoes.
Bonus feature: Presented in the Second Day: A destructive critique to civilization throughout the centuries against authority and other godly figures attempting to establish their false omnipresence above everybody…
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,…
Some refer to this as a masterpiece whereas I prefer the term "cinematic crack"
A horrible act committed against the only thing keeping their heads above water sets off a chain reaction from which there is no recovery!
Stark, simplistic harsh realities, weathered wood and weathered faces! depressingly bleak, life for them is an exercise in complete and utter futility! Trapped in a prison of their own design! Their lives, hearts and souls are as cold and empty as the bird cage hanging in their decrepit hovel!
Brutal and uncompromising parable at its finest, an ugliness that goes far deeper than skin deep! And it is in this ugliness we find a compelling story, we find truth, we find painfully birthed beauty!
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…
Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr delivers a completely outstanding masterclass in black and white cinematography in this movie. Shot in only 30 long takes, with a one hundred and forty six-minute runtime, it's a philosophical drama in which a rustic farmer is required to confront the mortality of his devoted horse. It's an austere story of melancholy as well as the antithesis of frenetic and fast-paced editing which contains some meticulous attention to detail which accentuates the framing as the proponent of narrative impetus. The Turin Horse may well be the magnum opus of slow cinema.
"what's it all about, papa?"
"i don't know."
"the gale roars relentlessly around the house."
"because everything's in ruins, everything's been degraded, but i could say that they've ruined and degraded everything. because this is not some kind of cataclysm. [...] on the contrary, it's about man's own judgement, his own judgement over his own self."
"the heavens are already theirs, and theirs are all our dreams. theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence. even immortality is theirs, don't you understand? everything, everything is lost forever."
"the storm continues to rage outside; the wind still sweeps relentlessly across the land from the same direction, but now there is nothing in its path to obstruct it. only a great cloud of…
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…
"The heavens are already theirs, and theirs are all our dreams."
long lost post apocalypse Jeanne Dielman cousin we never asked for or deserved, but got anyway. even that seems selling it short; this stuff is like being in the eye of a hurricane. the last gasp of wind water earth and fire. i feel like béla tarr would give really suffocating hugs.
I listen to a lot of Black Metal, especially the music that came out of Norway in the late 80s and early 90s. This was the music infamously made by church burners who took their aesthetic too far, but their intentions were to create soundscapes that represented both their cynical worldview and their brutally cold surroundings. This is why many of their album covers feature either corpses or cold forests. They were artists of intense dedication to a particular style. When winter rolls around I really love listening to their music because tonally it sounds like a dying world. Bela Tarr is the only filmmaker who can convey the tone in imagery that black metal does in sound that I've…
Bela Tarr drops the mic and exits stage left leaving the audience stunned. There is no letting up from a director with such a determined vision, looking at the drudgery of life's routine also proving to be a fitting curtain call to his career.
He imagines what happened to a beaten horse said to have influenced the depression that led to Nietzsche's death. The dense atmosphere of the film links itself to the weighty existential musings of the philosopher creating a far reaching parable. God Is Dead in this ferociously angry land where the sun never shines and the wind batters through the soul.
It is a beautiful film to look at offering no hiding place for the father and…
Pure, grueling, god-level cinema. A ruinous, edge-of-the-world, Nietzschean nightmare that recalls Bresson, Bergman and Tarkovsky, as burnished by Cormac McCarthy. Tarr has never been more convincing and physically chilling. What he presents here is the perfect culmination of all stylistic hallmarks and thematic obsessions that have defined his career, localized to a simplistic setting headed towards the bleakest of destinies. It's a Genesis story told in apocalyptic reverse , where light goes out, embers go out, and with them, the entirety of creation, thrust back into the silent, inky void. This film is immense. And Tarr's best, in my humble opinion.
The post-Christian world is long plundered, with heavy winds and boiled potatoes the artifacts of post-communist existence. In this small, poor,…
This felt longer than Sátántangó 🤔
it was only that it dragged a bit... and yes I know that’s how it’s meant to be, long and slow, but i personally just got a bit bored. Throughout most of it though, I was on the edge of my seat and captivated, especially through the score
Other than the tiny bit of boredom though, I genuinely did really this!
toplumsal gerçeklik ve tarihin üzücü gerçeği kişinin dünya görüşüne dahil edilince, nietzsche'nin felsefesinin nerede başarısız olduğu netleşiyor aslında. pek çok insan için ubermensch olmayı isteme olasılığı sınırsız. yoksulluk ya da hastalık vb. yüzünden çoğumuzun yapabileceği en iyi şey dayanmak ve filmin sonunda söyledikleri gibi “yarın tekrar denemeye” devam etmek.
film boyunca esen rüzgar detayının anlamı da ayrı hoş.
Tarr’s artistry distilled into its purist, and honestly least accessible, form. Best viewed after seeing a good bit of his other filmography. They are specific instantiations of the Tarr apocalyptic formula, while “The Turn Horse” is more ghostly and atemporal, stripping it to its bare essentials.
one of the most bleak things i've ever seen: a man routinely scraping the skin off of a scalding boiled potato with his bare fingernails. holy shit that has to hurt, but what makes it bleak is that the man doesn't seem to mind it. he recognizes that it's too hot, but he's in a hurry to eat it so that he can return back to his window, where he can sit and stare at the empty landscape for the rest of the day.
i love this ultra slow style. i need to find a steady supply of this stuff given that Turin Horse was Bela Tarr's final movie before retiring.
movie reminds me a lot of the play Endgame…
Este é um daqueles filmes que sempre tive receio de ver, mas logo após que os créditos finais estão a rolar só pensava numa coisa: Béla Tarr és um gênio
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