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#Post#: 5058--------------------------------------------------
RIP Béla Tarr
By: agate Date: January 17, 2026, 1:35 am
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On January 6 the eminent film director Béla Tarr died, at the
age of 70. As I admire the several films of his that I have
seen (usually with repeat viewings), I'm taking a break from MS
postings today to insert some comments I made a while ago about
his last film, The Turin Horse:
THE TURIN HORSE (2011)
The story about Nietzsche that inspired this movie
may or may not have a basis in fact but that is by the way. In
1889 Nietzsche, then in Turin, is said to have seen a cabman
brutally flogging his horse, whereupon Nietzsche was so outraged
that he flung himself on the horse in an embrace and apparently
prevented more damage to it--but he himself was crazed by the
experience and spent the rest of his life in a mute, demented
state.
Béla Tarr made this film in collaboration with the Hungarian
author László Krasznahorkai, both of whom were wondering what
happened to the horse.
This is the horse's story. And I don't think that I have this
opinion just because I read Black Beauty and wept buckets over
it too often as a child, though that might be the way it is.
I've watched this movie twice now and am thoroughly persuaded
that it's best not to search through it too closely for symbols
or for allegory or for any other element that leads to
over-analysis.
To be sure, the focus of attention is often on the two people
who are responsible for the horse: Ohlsdorfer, the cabman who
is in his late 50s and who is paralyzed in one arm, and his
unnamed daughter, a young woman about whom we find out very
little except that she almost always does her father's bidding
and tries to help in any way she can.
But their lives depend on the horse who is stabled in a
structure with part of its wall gone. Ohlsdorfer and his
daughter live close to the bone. Throughout the six days covered
in this story, a howling wind is raising a furious dust storm
all around them, and perhaps the rock walls of their little
house offer some protection from the cold but they keep the
stove stoked with wood, and Ohlsdorfer manages to split the logs
himself with the use of just one arm. He relies on his daughter
to dress him, and she boils and serves the potato that seems to
be their only food.
We don't ever find out what brought them to this condition.
Their history is left obscure, as if irrelevant. This story
concerns the way in which they get through the six days with
their horse failing in the stable and the wind storm making it
difficult even to get to the well for water--another job of the
daughter's.
We can assume (I think) that we are in Turin in 1889, and
that this is Nietzsche's Turin horse, perhaps just after its
severe beating.
The horse stops eating. The daughter tries to coax it to take
food and water. The days pass. At one point she says to it,
"You're not going anywhere." On the first day she even defies
her father when he starts flogging the horse, who was resisting
being harnessed up. As we see the animal resisting, we can see a
rather sizeable sore on its hip. Perhaps this is a wound from
the recent Turin flogging.
If this is in or near Turin, why wouldn't the cabman have an
Italian name? There is nothing in the film to locate the story
in Turin though there is mention of a town that must not be very
far away. However, the highly unreliable person--the visiting
neighbor--who mentions it speaks of it as if it has been
destroyed. We can take this as a statement of fact but more
likely he is indulging in hyperbole.
Those who made this movie may have wanted to universalize it,
to make it into an Everyman story. There are no crucifixes or
other artifacts of religion anywhere. Nobody prays or says grace
or makes the sign of the cross. If Ohlsdorfer and his daughter
are devout, we don't find that out. And Ohlsdorfer's pet
expletive is an obscenity that might not actually have been in
very common use in the late 19th century, when the
unacceptability of blasphemy led people to take the name of the
Lord in vain but human functions were not so often alluded to in
swearing. But I'm on shaky ground here and am basing this only
on having read quite a few materials written at that time.
Perhaps with these touches--the removal of most evidence of
any precise location for the story and the absence of any signs
of a religious life for the people in it--we are obliged to
think of it as a story for any time and any place.
The visitor who blows in suddenly and accepts some of the
brandy (later apparently paying for it with coins) is meant to
be "a sort of Nietzschean shadow" according to Béla Tarr, and he
does indeed seem to be echoing Nietzsche's "God is dead"
statement ("...had to accept that there is neither God nor
gods"). Ohlsdorfer, however, declares the visitor's statements
to be rubbish.
But what to make of the gypsies' gift to his daughter? It
seems to be a sacred book, and she, who hardly ever does
anything that isn't of practical use so far as we know, spends
quite a bit of time laboring over the words, which have the
appearance of a passage from the Bible but aren't. They also
bear a strong resemblance to some of the gloom-and-doom
sentiments voiced recently by the visitor ("holy places have
been violated by the great injustice of actions ... that
scandalize the congregation..."). When we reach the statement:
"The bishop says to the congregation, 'The Lord was with you,'"
we probably suspect that this isn't from the Old or New
Testament, in which there is probably no mention of bishops, and
"the Lord" in the past tense doesn't sound right either.
In fact, Béla Tarr has said that the book is "an anti-Bible."
What is the book the Gypsies give to the daughter?
It’s an anti-Bible. It’s about how priests close churches
because people are sinning. We have to close the churches. We
have to tear them down. In the text the daughter reads there are
some references to Nietzsche, but the text is original, by
Krasznahorkai.
[from an interview,
HTML https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/198131/]
The gypsies give her the book as payment for the water to
which they have helped themselves in spite of Ohlsdorfer's angry
ranting. Later, when the well has gone dry (and the gypsies may
or may not have had something to do with this new calamity), we
can recall that in their anger they proclaimed that the water is
theirs -- and that the earth belongs to them.
After the well goes dry, Ohlsdorfer announces that they can't
stay there. There is no discussion of a plan but they pack up
their belongings and load them onto a handcart, which his
daughter, now the beast of burden and their only means of
transport, obediently pulls while the ailing horse accompanies
them and Ohlsdorfer walks along by the cart, seeming to do what
he can with his better arm to keep the wheels from sticking in
the mud.
What their plan was isn't made clear. Perhaps they were going
to call on the visitor who was probably a neighbor since he came
on foot. Perhaps they had hopes that he would take them in but
were turned away. They disappear over the horizon, only to
reappear and return to the place they had abandoned. They had
loaded at least one very large sack of potatoes, which they
bring back, and presumably this is what will see them through
for a while. It's not clear whether they have managed to get
some water on their expedition, and there isn't much brandy
left.
On the fifth day they seem to realize that the horse is
dying. We see a very long view of the front of the horse's head
as it stands, nearly motionless, in the stable, no longer eating
or drinking. Ohlsdorfer removes the horse's nosepiece, and then
the stable door is closed. The horse will probably die alone
there.
The sight of Ohlsdorfer's bowed back as he stands silently
and as if in mourning in the house tells us all we need to know.
Their fate has probably been sealed by the loss of their horse.
If he makes his livelihood as a cabman, he will need a horse.
Money is scarce, though perhaps the coins from the visitor are
added to a stash of coins that they can use if they can get to
the town (which may or may not be in ruins) and find a horse.
For them there is some hope even though by day 6, when
neither of them even wants to finish the potato, it looks as if
they are doomed to die there. When their light is failing,
Ohlsdorfer says, "Tomorrow we will try again." And when his
daughter isn't eating at all, but he has eaten some, he commands
her to eat, and again he says, "We have to eat."
Apparently some viewers see this film as about the end of the
world, but that wasn't what was intended. It's a story about the
horse--the horse's death, which was probably caused by the
cabman's brutal flogging, and about the impending death of the
cabman and his daughter.
When they made this magnificent movie they kept it simple.
Is the end of the film your vision of the apocalypse?
The apocalypse is a huge event. But reality is not like that. In
my film, the end of the world is very silent, very weak. So the
end of the world comes as I see it coming in real life – slowly
and quietly. Death is always the most terrible scene, and when
you watch someone dying – an animal or a human – it’s always
terrible, and the most terrible thing is that it looks like
nothing happened.
[from the interview cited above]
The world shown here is a world with God/gods stripped away.
But what remains is a world where even doomed people can be
kind, as the daughter is kind to the horse in ways that her
father is not.
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