This film is part of our winter series, running at De Uitkijk throughout December and January. This year, our winter series focuses on loneliness, but don’t worry, you can still enjoy warmth and good company at De Uitkijk…!
Béla Tarr’s hypnotic parable about the trials of human existence, filmed in thirty shots, is an apparently simple record of a week in the life of the farmer and pálinka distiller Ohlsdorfer. The minimalist drama opens with a brief text about the anecdote that Nietzsche went insane in 1889 in Turin after seeing a coachman brutally beat a horse. The introduction ends with the remark that we do not know what happened to the horse. The Turin Horse (2011) answers that question.
The distiller lives with his daughter in a wooden house on a windswept plain, with the horse in the stable. Father and daughter carry out their tasks, cook a potato, and listen to the storm. The well runs dry, the horse neither eats nor drinks, the daughter reads aloud a text in which the Bible is taken to task, and the days grow darker and darker: the last potato remains uncooked.
The Turin Horse is the un-creation of the world, with which the Hungarian Béla Tarr brings not only earthly life but also his own work as a filmmaker to an end