Movie review • The turin horse : Towards a poetics of the elements by Béla Tarr

A deeply moving work. Upsetting to the point where, we are haunted not only by images and ideas, but by a visceral, physical sensation: the throbbing memory of an experience, of a test of time, by which we lived, amplified a thousand times by the quasi-mystical power of cinema, the most essential emotions to which man, facing the absolute, is confronted..

 

Starting with the wind. This biting wind, symbol of the harshness of this life in which even the horses here seem to lose hope, is the most pregnant, the most obsessive, of the four elements staged in The Turin Horse. When the last light is extinguished, the image itself disappears, the muted whistling of the wind continues to be heard - as a reminder of the implacable, indifferent nature of the world that as well as evil the protagonists of the film seek to inhabit. 

But the whole of the film is actually based on the cyclical movement of the elements: the water that must be fetched every day, the fire in the hearth that must be maintained at all costs in the manner of a staggering hope and the potatoes that are the most bleak anchorage, the dullest of all, to this life to which one survives more than one lives. Like the horse’s body, animal mechanics are exhausting as the formidable foreground of the film flows, the human body resists, then slowly collapses. The man, his painful physical erosion proves it, is an animal like the others.

Capturing the effort of the bodies, this instinctive endurance by which they endure, the camera of the Hungarian filmmaker refuses all artifice in the illustration of this constant sacrifice. This is its most poignant quality: it magnifies only in the manner of a magnifying glass, not attracting attention only by the fact of paying attention to the course of things. It scrutinizes the skeleton of the faces, sculpted by a revealing light whose illumination goes beyond the skin. It is posed on the real, observing the texture of the fabrics for a long time, probing the fine cracks lizing the wood, exposing the resilience of the stones. 

It’s a camera that reveals the essence of matter by lingering there, looking at the environment as it looks at this horse that it films as filming humans. It films these things over time, seeking to reveal the flow of time in the ambient air, the effect of time on matter, the collapse of bodies crushed by the weight of time. Tarr reveals the visible marks of the invisible, making concrete reality the index of abstract ideas. This is how, by the gesture weary of nails seeking to tear the peel of a raw potato, one can summarize the despair of the relentlessness, the heavy disarray of existence.

We must see this ghostly, abandoned air that individuals have as they gaze at the wind as one stares at emptiness: like a consciousness of the absurd taking root before our eyes and to which the horse, the first, is giving up by refusing to work first, then to eat. The Turin Horse is the tragic story of stubbornness giving way to despair: it is mourning for God and his reassuring hold on the world, as well as mourning for the meaning itself. Without this presence, what remains to be seen is the arid emptiness, the dazzling desolation of a landscape whose details fade over the storm. 

It is the entire human tragedy that is evoked by this devastating chiaroscuro, by the violence of the contrast between the interior and the exterior revealed by this apparently innocuous gesture of opening a door; and when the characters try to flee, to escape their fate, when their silhouettes are finally absorbed by the white immensity, it is the absurdity of the very desire for flight that starred by master Béla Tarr.

Suspended between silence and infinity, the protagonists of the Turin Horse are in a certain position in the same position as us, spectators - forced that we are to recognize ourselves in these pieces of flesh in struggle, in search of a reason to be, given over to the contemplation of a nothingness which takes root quietly and becomes everyday. Because in the face of this silence, this asceticism of image and action, our mind free to wander in this austere desert can only cling to the rigor of space, to the rigidity of time. inexorable, to the resilience of a matter which, for lack of consciousness, resists where man ultimately fails because he is too fragile, too sensitive, not to bend under the weight of his dark thoughts. 

If The Turin Horse is really Béla Tarr's latest film, if it really is a final sigh, it has the elegiac aura, the radical gravity of a great artistic testament. Uncompromising film-sum, farewell reassuringly summing up the particular truth of a striking process, The Turin Horse  leaves the spectator to his own fate in a pitiless universe - a cruel gesture, certainly, which nevertheless has the admirable quality of being integrates until the very last moments of the exercise and, even more, until the indelible memory which it engraves in our memories.