This is a dark, pessimistic film which falls into what I call the category of 'extreme art'. It pushes as far as it can into desolation, in the same way that Samuel Beckett's texts and plays do, and as Kurtag does in his opera based on Beckett's 'Endgame'. Also in this category I would put Jean Genet's 'Funeral Rites' and Giacometti's sculptures, where mankind is reduced to its essence of presence. And so it is with this very fine film 'The Turin Horse'. Set on what I think are the Hungarian plains a man and his daughter eke out a living, and to do this they need their horse. The horse is dying, and slowly their lives shrivel into darkness. I am not sure if Bela Tarr signifies the dying of the light of cinema, and especially the kind of film which pleases the art house crowds. Paradoxically if that was his intention, the art house lovers have clearly loved this film as a work of art, which it undeniably is. The score which musically entwines itself around the sparse, but beautifully haunting images is one of the best I have ever heard, and the beginning of the film is enough in itself to make the film a visual masterpiece. An elderly man is driving his horse to its limit, and the grey trees and the fog and mystery will remain in my mind for a very long while. The slow but seemingly 'natural' torture of the man and his daughter's reduced-to-the-minimum lives is repeated over and over again, mesmerising and terrible to watch. They eat boiling hot food with their hands, a daily horror of the suffering of eating which I found hard to bear and had to turn my head away. This is a film at the end of human and animal endurance and after two and a half hours I felt faint. Extreme art it is, but to deny that it is pure art stripped to the bone would be wrong. Fine though it is, it is not for those who could or would not understand it, and to be brutal, extreme art in the examples I have given above are for a certain elite who will be patient with it, and endure it willingly. The more Tarr retreats from art the more art follows him, and my only criticism is that its very self consciousness as being great cinema somehow detracts from its terminal content. It is Tarr's final masterpiece, but others will come with other images that burn the mind, the heart and the senses. Excruciating images that have 'art' written all over them.
Review of The Turin Horse
