The Turin Horse

2/18/2018

In 2011 Béla Tarr, a Hungarian director who had drawn acclaim for his distinctive style of long takes à la Andrei Tarkovsky and a bleak and sardonic view of human existence, released what he stated would be his last film: THE TURIN HORSE. The film's genesis is rooted in a conversation between Tarr and the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai some years before: Krasznahorkai recounted the story Friedrich Nietzsche's famous breakdown in the streets of Turin after watching a cabman cruelly beat his horse. We know, Krasznahorkai noted, that Nietzsche lived on for another decade, mute and demented, in the care of his family, but what happened to the horse? Thus the two decided to make a film, but it would not be a historical film about late 19th-century Turin. Rather, the Nietzsche story onl