A Film Canon

At once Tarr's simplest and most extravagant film - and longer, in its way, than Satantango - The Turin Horse has all the unbearable, apocalyptic heaviness of an auteur condensing, exhausting and annihilating his signature in the name of whatever it was it stood for; still life attenuated one syllable at a time. Detailing six days in the life of an impoverished man and woman living alone in a windswept valley, there's no narrative, hardly any dialogue, and - with the exception of two very brief interludes - only two characters, although the complete absence of any introspection, development or charisma hardly qualifies them as characters, nor the performers as actors, as performance and characterisation are subsumed into the two labourers whose repetitive, physically taxing routines constitute the bulk of the film. Unlike Tarr's previous films, the mere possibility of a crowd, or a collective, is completely absent, dispersed into the gale-force winds that whip around the house and into Vihaly Mig's hypnotic organ soundscape, producing some extraordinarily lyrical possibilities which Tarr, characteristically, refuses to indulge too extensively. This refusal to engage, a distrust of both discursion and depth, has always been part of Tarr's style, but it's pared back here to the disparity between the film and the opening monologue, which describes the story of Nietzsche's encounter with a whipped horse in Turin, and how it precipitated his breakdown. Although Tarr's project could be explained both in terms of Nietzsche's subsequent withdrawal and his anti-discursive philosophy, it seems too discursive to even say that, and makes more sense to understand the horse - which, despite being the subject of the film, is only seen in a few scenes - as the apotheosis of Tarr's career-long use of animals as a surrogate for human suffering; or, as the woman's replacement of the ailing horse at the front of the cart suggests, not even a surrogate so much as a surface upon which common labour leaves a more tangible trace. As a result, the deadening bathos of the film gathers around the almost unbearable beauty and pathos of the horse's face - a pathos that extends to its whole body and propels Tarr's characteristic tracking shots with a more rhythmic gait, as if it were longing to ride the wind. But those tracking-shots are, ultimately, more restrained and invisible than they've ever been, to the extent that the film frequently approaches straightforwardly classical editing. It's an extraordinary, surreal cinematic experience, exponentially more numbing than any of Tarr's previous films, in which it's almost impossible for the viewer to see, rather than dumbly look. As the elusive trailer - a candle burning out - might suggest, it feels as if Tarr simply wants to detail everything that's required to survive - or alternatively, to film a flame or fire until it simply, quietly expires. It's cinema slow enough for pupils to expand and dilate, to become completely accustomed to the blackness of the house, creating an extraordinary, vortical shock whenever the front door is opened and the trip to the well is made, or even whenever a window intrudes on the mise-en-scene, as convulsive and dismaying as the brightness buried beneath potato skins.