The Turin Horse (2011) László Krasznahorkai/ Béla Tarr
(Hungarian)
The Turin Horse: Witnessing Collapse in a Post-Divine World
“In
Turin on January 3rd 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the Door of number
six Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post
office to collect his mail. Not far from him, or indeed very far removed from
him, a cabman is having trouble with his stubborn horse. Despite all his
urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the cabman - Giuseppe? Carlo?
Ettore? - loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to
the throng and that puts an end to the brutal scene of the cabman, who by this
time is foaming with rage. The solidly built and full-mustached Nietzsche
suddenly jumps up to the cab and throws his arms around the horse neck,
sobbing. His neighbor takes him home, where he lies still and silent, for two
days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words: "Mutter, ich
bin dummm." ("Mother, i'm fool.") and lives for another ten
years, gentle and demented, in the care of his mother and sisters.
Of
the horse... we know nothing.” (Prologue:
The Turin Horse)
Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse,
co-written with László Krasznahorkai, is not a film in the conventional
sense—it is a metaphysical ritual, a cinematic dirge. Inspired by the
apocryphal story of Friedrich Nietzsche’s collapse in Turin after witnessing a
horse being whipped, the film stages not the event itself, but its aftermath:
the slow erosion of meaning, vitality, and structure in a world where God is
dead and no new values have risen to take His place. In choosing this film, we
do not seek entertainment or catharsis—we seek to witness the texture of
collapse, the rhythm of entropy, and the silence that follows prophecy.
Nietzschean Framework: Collapse, Anti-Prophecy, and the
Post-Divine World
The film’s Nietzschean echoes are
unmistakable. The neighbor’s monologue—delivered with clarity and
despair—functions as a kind of inverted prophecy, a diagnosis of metaphysical
ruin without the courage of affirmation. He is a failed Übermensch: one who sees
through illusion but cannot create new meaning. The wind, ever-present and
unrelenting, becomes a Dionysian force—chaotic, invasive, indifferent. Against
it, the house stands as a fragile Apollonian gesture: routine, boiled potatoes,
silent endurance. But this semblance of order is brittle. It does not hold. The
horse refuses to move. The well dries. The light fades. We are left not with
transcendence, but with post-divine silence.
False Prophets and Anti-Saviors: A Krasznahorkai
Constellation
The neighbor belongs to a lineage
of Krasznahorkai’s threshold figures—Irimiás in Sátántangó, the Prince in The
Melancholy of Resistance, and the elusive mystic in Baron Wenckheim’s
Homecoming. These are not leaders or redeemers. They are anti-saviors, false
prophets whose speech disrupts but does not heal. They speak once, then recede
into silence. Their centrality lies not in action, but in failure—in the void
they reveal. The neighbor’s brandy request is emblematic: not of vitality, but
of numbing insight. He is lucid, but ineffectual. He is the residue of
Nietzsche’s dream, not its fulfillment.
Inversion and Recursion: Beckettian Parallels
When the father and daughter pull
the cart themselves—replacing the horse—they enact a Beckettian inversion. Like
Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot, whose roles reverse in Act II, this
gesture marks not progress but entropy. The new house they arrive at is not
elsewhere—it is the same. “No one comes, no one goes.” Movement becomes
repetition. Inversion becomes revelation. The world does not evolve—it decays.
Tarr’s cinema, like Beckett’s theatre, stages the exhaustion of form, the
collapse of narrative, and the futility of gesture.
The Gypsies and Ecosystem Collapse
The gypsies’ arrival at the well
introduces a moment of vitality—music, movement, community—but it is met with
hostility. The old man’s reaction is steeped in racial contempt, a fear of the
Other that mirrors his fear of disorder. His attempt to drive them out is not
justice—it is a last gasp of Apollonian control. But the ecosystem is already
failing. The well dries. The food dwindles. The horse refuses. The gypsies do
not destroy the world—they merely reveal its fragility. In Tarr’s universe,
community is impossible, and even water becomes a site of conflict.
Witnessing Collapse
The Turin Horse is not a film to
be understood—it is a film to be endured. Like
Nietzsche’s embrace of the horse, it stages a moment of rupture: a
confrontation with suffering that unravels ideology. It asks us not to
interpret, but to witness. To sit with silence. To feel the erosion of meaning.
In doing so, it becomes not a story, but a gesture—a cinematic act of mourning
for a world that no longer believes in redemption.
https://alittlesomethings.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-turin-horse-2011-laszlo.html
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