The Turin Horse (2011)

This film is a part of De Uitkijk’s winter series, which focuses on loneliness, while offering warmth and company at the cinema.

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.

The people at De Uitkijk have kindly offered a limited amount of free tickets for Subbacultcha members. Please make a reservation by sending an email to mailinglist@subbacultcha.nl with ‘The Turin Horse (2011)’ in the subject line + your name in the email.