A torinói ló

Béla Tarr (2011)

 It begins with a voiceover:

‘In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse.’

Béla Tarr’s film is about both the afterlife of the Turin horse and, in Tarr’s words, ‘the heaviness of human existence’.  In an interview in Sight & Sound, he explicitly contrasts this with Milan Kundera’s ‘lightness of being’.   In the film, the horse is owned by a middle-aged farmer Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi), whose daughter (Erika Bók) keeps house for him.   Tarr describes in minute detail the Ohlsdorfers’ domestic routine in their remote rural dwelling outside which a gale is blowing continuously.  The black-and-white cinematography by Fred Kelemen is beautifully expressive of the bleak arduousness of the lives of man and beast but I gave up on the film after half an hour or so (I’d got it on ‘Curzon on Demand’).  This may be very unfair but Béla Tarr seemed to have only one point to make and had made it immediately.   The horse looks to be in a sorry state:  Tarr explains in the S&S interview that, when he found the animal, which is called Ricsi, it was, like the original horse, on the receiving end of mistreatment.  Ricsi now has a good home.  The director co-wrote the screenplay with László Krasznahorkai.  Tarr’s wife Ágnes Hranitzky was the assistant director on the film.

13 June 2012