The Turin Horse

26/12/2025

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   Hungarian director Bela Tarr has been one of the most rigorous and demanding of filmmakers around the turn of the millennium. It rests partly on the famous length of his longest film, 1996’s Satantango (almost seven hours), but even more on his work’s complex approach to mise en scene. Working in usually very long takes where information is offered to the viewer incrementally, Tarr and his key collaborator, the editor Agnes Hranitzky, as well as his regular screenwriter, the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and composer Mihaly Vig, offer miserabilist tales within a formal beauty, suggesting the often venal despair of his characters’ lives can be improved beyond the frame but rarely within it. It wasn’t until Werckmeister Harmonies in 2000 that he became a filmmaker whose work seemed easily releasable and, even then, UK distributors started with Damnation, a 1988 film only two hours long, and with a vaguely noirish narrative. Satantango was never released cinematically in Britain. 

       Yet in some ways, his most demanding film is his final one, The Turin Horse. The director announced his retirement upon the film's release and hasn’t gone back on his word thus far. There may be practical reasons for this, and an urge to help other filmmakers by working at a film school in Sarajevo. But it may also rest on a cinema that has exhausted itself, pushed as far as it could go into futility, as we watch a father and his grown-up daughter coping with a climate that moves from the physically demanding to the metaphysically perplexing. Initially, like other Tarr films, The Turin Horse offers the arduous meteorological conditions the characters confront, whether the whirling wind in Satantango, its ferocious force here, or the endless rain in Damnation. physical life works against the characters — but the metaphysical properties aren’t favourable either. The characters talk as though at the mercy of a presence greater than their own personalities and rail against the possibility of hope as if happiness can only be the height of naivety. (Evident here when a neighbour offers a very lengthy rant against the world.) And lest the viewer tries to impose on the film an optimism its characters refuse, Tarr has, since the mid-eighties, insisted on filming in black and white. 

     Such a vision so bleakly administered, so populated with the morally derelict and the hopelessly slothful, could make for an enervating experience even long before Tarr arrives at Beckettian impasse. “You must go on, I can’t go on. I won’t go on”, to paraphrase Beckett. It is close to the claim that the horse, which gives the film its title, might offer if it could speak, as it arrives at a Bartlebyesque preference to prefer not to when it refuses any longer to be a beast of burden. Yet Tarr’s genius, perhaps like Beckett’s, has been to show possibility within impossibility without assuming for a moment that such action constitutes purpose. The best way to understand Tarr’s work is through the incremental eschewal of inertia, and to see a progressive elaboration of intrigue in the form that will generally be missing in the story. His films thus move from the potentially dull to the surprisingly mesmerising. To understand how he does this, we can look at the opening scene of Damnation. A man looks out the window, smoking a cigarette and observes the coal buckets passing along a winch. But that isn’t how the director presents the scene. A shot that could be summed up in a few seconds instead takes several minutes, with Tarr showing us first the coal buckets, then retreating back as he shows the window, then the smoke, then the back of the man’s head. Even if one accepts that The Turin Horse shows a filmmaker who has reached an impasse, this doesn’t mean that the opportunities generated by Tarr’s cinema aren’t capable of constant renewal, perhaps partly why he teaches at Sarajevo, where “I have 35 students from all corners of the world, 35 different reasons, 35 different imaginations and I have to take care of them.” (Mubi) Clearly he doesn’t want them all making films in a Bela Tarr style; just to eschew the mainstream desire to encapsulate meaning as quickly as possible, thus allowing filmmakers to find manifold approaches to revealing visual and audio information.  

     Our question is, how does Bela Tarr reach a limit point with The Turin Horse and yet open up numerous possibilities for other filmmakers? In this sense, he shares similarities with Robert Bresson, even if Bresson’s work was based upon concision and Tarr’s on expansion. Bresson frequently insisted on eliding an action (a fight in a bar and an axe murder in L’argent, for example) while Tarr elaborates on non-action, evident in the opening scene in Damnation. If Bresson’s films were so rigorous, they seemed to reach a refined simplicity that made his work complete by the time he made L’argent, Tarr arrives at a visually elaborate complexity that insists, in opposition to Bresson’s ellipsis,  on the incremental. These are contrasting means of nevertheless making cinema a cerebral medium of feeling, by making us think about the image without immediately becoming aware of its meaning. Film can already appear lazy next to literature as it replaces our imagination with what Andre Bazin called an image-fact (an object in front of our eyes rather than imagined in our mind) as we see the cat, dog, car or coat. Its colour (if the film is in colour) and shape are immediately evident. But that needn’t be so much of a problem, as Bazin well knew. What is much more so, is when we have both the all but unavoidable image alongside an instant connotation of that image. A dog is instantly cute or dangerous; the coat is that of the poor or the rich; the car is a banger or a luxury item. The image-fact meets with the stereotype, and the viewer’s thinking about the image is immediately curtailed.  

       Both Bresson and Tarr insist on refusing this limitation. Bresson does so by sometimes relying on sound without the image, so that we have to imagine what he invokes. In Tarr’s work, we usually see what he shows us, but with such extended concentration, we cannot help but think about what he is presenting to our eyes. In the opening scene of The Turin Horse, we have the simple image of a horse-drawn cart, but while in a strict sense it is just a man riding back from town, this isn’t how Tarr films it. In this several-minute take, he initially shows the horse’s head, allows us to see a hint of the rider, and, in time, shows us the length of the horse and the side elevation of the person riding the cart. The film retreats a little from the horse and cart as the weather deteriorates and they become a blur against the encompassing fog, before the film returns again to a frontal shot of the horse. All the while, we hear the music of Mihaly Vig, capturing the unremitting struggle without the film giving us the purpose behind that effort. We have seen on film numerous images of horses and carts, but how often have the horse’s efforts been contained by the rider’s motivations; the horse no more than a vehicle? Tarr, however, insists we attend to the horse’s existence and forget the thousands of images we have seen of horses in cinema, where the horse has been shown to serve no more than a use function.  

     The director's incrementalism gives back to the image its concreteness, and paradoxically provides it with its mystery. This helps explain the confusion between Tarr’s insistence on saying his films are very concrete and critics’ claims that his work is metaphysical. Jacques Ranciere notes “that Tarr never stops repeating that he does not make allegories and that everything is mercilessly material in this film as in all the others.”( Bela Tarr, The Time After) Yet materiality so exposed takes on a quality of abstraction from a certain point of view. Few watching the many films about a man riding a horse to town will see in the work a metaphysical property, but remove that purpose and you are left with the sort of striving, as Ranciere notes, that was vital to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Speaking of the lead character, who we see at the beginning of Damnation, Ranciere says, “Karrer is Schopenhauerian, he knows the nothingness of the will that is at the heart of things.” (Bela Tarr, The Time After)

        Since cinema is a fact-image, a concrete system of signs as opposed to the symbolic form that literature utilises, Tarr suggests that by concentrating so strongly on the image, by attending to it moment by moment as it reveals itself to us, film can escape the clutter of cliches that has been built up around it, returning cinema to a certain purity. “Make visible what without you might never have been seen.” (Notes on the Cinematographer) Bresson proposed, and would elide aspects of a sequence, all the better to get us to see it, often in our mind’s eye as we construct for ourselves what is missing. Tarr holds to the Bressonian proposition but asks us to see slowly, to deliberate and observe the details of a sequence, all the better to grasp it as a thought and a feeling. In Werckmeister Harmonies, we are introduced to a stuffed whale that comes to town, as Tarr shows it to us in a single take, and we see the central character walking through the square. He weaves through the gathering crowd and witnesses a large truck lifting its rear door, and sees a man coming out with a table and a chair. After the film cuts, we follow Janos as he looks at wonderment, walking around the inside of the truck and gazing at the whale while the film follows his fascination and echoes it by refusing to cut within the shot. In Satantango, the film opens with a lengthy lateral tracking shot showing the texture of a crumbling wall and cows grazing next to a decaying farmhouse. In Damnation, we hear a woman sing in the titanic bar and the camera passes behind the backs of customers before slowly revealing the woman herself.

    The director’s work asks us to see, insisting on detail accumulation rather than expecting instant summation. If in film we look at the images literature can only allude to, then what matters is the steady concentration on these images. In literature, we don’t linger over the word as image, though we might give the image the word generates some time for reflection. But this doesn’t mean film cannot insist on a similar reflective space, even if it shows us what in literature is invoked. It only demands that images are given their due and thus removes the twofold problem that can easily reduce film to a mediocre art form: that it is too quickly presented to our eyes, and part of that haste lies in the cliches we are supposed to recognise instantly. Cinema can be much more than that, and Tarr has been an important contributor to its continuing sustenance. When Susan Sontag mused over the decay of cinema, Tarr was central to its ongoing possibilities, with Sontag saying: “the reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to make them more attention-grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention.” (‘The Decay of Cinema’) By showing an image in its entirety, in demanding that an object of our attention isn’t instant but accumulative, Tarr gives images their breath. It makes sense that The Turin Horse would be the director’s last film, as the image fades out while the father and daughter try to light the lamp before it quickly becomes extinguished. The howling wind disappears too, as if the world has lost the will to go on, and not just the father, the daughter and the horse. We have no images left, Tarr seems to say, and the despondency of the characters is met by the snuffing out of the form. Tarr exhausts his possibilities and retires. Others, in his place, must replenish them.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Turin Horse

   Hungarian director Bela Tarr has been one of the most rigorous and demanding of filmmakers around the turn of the millennium. It rests partly on the famous length of his longest film, 1996’s Satantango (almost seven hours), but even more on his work’s complex approach to mise en scene. Working in usually very long takes where information is offered to the viewer incrementally, Tarr and his key collaborator, the editor Agnes Hranitzky, as well as his regular screenwriter, the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and composer Mihaly Vig, offer miserabilist tales within a formal beauty, suggesting the often venal despair of his characters’ lives can be improved beyond the frame but rarely within it. It wasn’t until Werckmeister Harmonies in 2000 that he became a filmmaker whose work seemed easily releasable and, even then, UK distributors started with Damnation, a 1988 film only two hours long, and with a vaguely noirish narrative. Satantango was never released cinematically in Britain. 

       Yet in some ways, his most demanding film is his final one, The Turin Horse. The director announced his retirement upon the film's release and hasn’t gone back on his word thus far. There may be practical reasons for this, and an urge to help other filmmakers by working at a film school in Sarajevo. But it may also rest on a cinema that has exhausted itself, pushed as far as it could go into futility, as we watch a father and his grown-up daughter coping with a climate that moves from the physically demanding to the metaphysically perplexing. Initially, like other Tarr films, The Turin Horse offers the arduous meteorological conditions the characters confront, whether the whirling wind in Satantango, its ferocious force here, or the endless rain in Damnation. physical life works against the characters — but the metaphysical properties aren’t favourable either. The characters talk as though at the mercy of a presence greater than their own personalities and rail against the possibility of hope as if happiness can only be the height of naivety. (Evident here when a neighbour offers a very lengthy rant against the world.) And lest the viewer tries to impose on the film an optimism its characters refuse, Tarr has, since the mid-eighties, insisted on filming in black and white. 

     Such a vision so bleakly administered, so populated with the morally derelict and the hopelessly slothful, could make for an enervating experience even long before Tarr arrives at Beckettian impasse. “You must go on, I can’t go on. I won’t go on”, to paraphrase Beckett. It is close to the claim that the horse, which gives the film its title, might offer if it could speak, as it arrives at a Bartlebyesque preference to prefer not to when it refuses any longer to be a beast of burden. Yet Tarr’s genius, perhaps like Beckett’s, has been to show possibility within impossibility without assuming for a moment that such action constitutes purpose. The best way to understand Tarr’s work is through the incremental eschewal of inertia, and to see a progressive elaboration of intrigue in the form that will generally be missing in the story. His films thus move from the potentially dull to the surprisingly mesmerising. To understand how he does this, we can look at the opening scene of Damnation. A man looks out the window, smoking a cigarette and observes the coal buckets passing along a winch. But that isn’t how the director presents the scene. A shot that could be summed up in a few seconds instead takes several minutes, with Tarr showing us first the coal buckets, then retreating back as he shows the window, then the smoke, then the back of the man’s head. Even if one accepts that The Turin Horse shows a filmmaker who has reached an impasse, this doesn’t mean that the opportunities generated by Tarr’s cinema aren’t capable of constant renewal, perhaps partly why he teaches at Sarajevo, where “I have 35 students from all corners of the world, 35 different reasons, 35 different imaginations and I have to take care of them.” (Mubi) Clearly he doesn’t want them all making films in a Bela Tarr style; just to eschew the mainstream desire to encapsulate meaning as quickly as possible, thus allowing filmmakers to find manifold approaches to revealing visual and audio information.  

     Our question is, how does Bela Tarr reach a limit point with The Turin Horse and yet open up numerous possibilities for other filmmakers? In this sense, he shares similarities with Robert Bresson, even if Bresson’s work was based upon concision and Tarr’s on expansion. Bresson frequently insisted on eliding an action (a fight in a bar and an axe murder in L’argent, for example) while Tarr elaborates on non-action, evident in the opening scene in Damnation. If Bresson’s films were so rigorous, they seemed to reach a refined simplicity that made his work complete by the time he made L’argent, Tarr arrives at a visually elaborate complexity that insists, in opposition to Bresson’s ellipsis,  on the incremental. These are contrasting means of nevertheless making cinema a cerebral medium of feeling, by making us think about the image without immediately becoming aware of its meaning. Film can already appear lazy next to literature as it replaces our imagination with what Andre Bazin called an image-fact (an object in front of our eyes rather than imagined in our mind) as we see the cat, dog, car or coat. Its colour (if the film is in colour) and shape are immediately evident. But that needn’t be so much of a problem, as Bazin well knew. What is much more so, is when we have both the all but unavoidable image alongside an instant connotation of that image. A dog is instantly cute or dangerous; the coat is that of the poor or the rich; the car is a banger or a luxury item. The image-fact meets with the stereotype, and the viewer’s thinking about the image is immediately curtailed.  

       Both Bresson and Tarr insist on refusing this limitation. Bresson does so by sometimes relying on sound without the image, so that we have to imagine what he invokes. In Tarr’s work, we usually see what he shows us, but with such extended concentration, we cannot help but think about what he is presenting to our eyes. In the opening scene of The Turin Horse, we have the simple image of a horse-drawn cart, but while in a strict sense it is just a man riding back from town, this isn’t how Tarr films it. In this several-minute take, he initially shows the horse’s head, allows us to see a hint of the rider, and, in time, shows us the length of the horse and the side elevation of the person riding the cart. The film retreats a little from the horse and cart as the weather deteriorates and they become a blur against the encompassing fog, before the film returns again to a frontal shot of the horse. All the while, we hear the music of Mihaly Vig, capturing the unremitting struggle without the film giving us the purpose behind that effort. We have seen on film numerous images of horses and carts, but how often have the horse’s efforts been contained by the rider’s motivations; the horse no more than a vehicle? Tarr, however, insists we attend to the horse’s existence and forget the thousands of images we have seen of horses in cinema, where the horse has been shown to serve no more than a use function.  

     The director's incrementalism gives back to the image its concreteness, and paradoxically provides it with its mystery. This helps explain the confusion between Tarr’s insistence on saying his films are very concrete and critics’ claims that his work is metaphysical. Jacques Ranciere notes “that Tarr never stops repeating that he does not make allegories and that everything is mercilessly material in this film as in all the others.”( Bela Tarr, The Time After) Yet materiality so exposed takes on a quality of abstraction from a certain point of view. Few watching the many films about a man riding a horse to town will see in the work a metaphysical property, but remove that purpose and you are left with the sort of striving, as Ranciere notes, that was vital to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Speaking of the lead character, who we see at the beginning of Damnation, Ranciere says, “Karrer is Schopenhauerian, he knows the nothingness of the will that is at the heart of things.” (Bela Tarr, The Time After)

        Since cinema is a fact-image, a concrete system of signs as opposed to the symbolic form that literature utilises, Tarr suggests that by concentrating so strongly on the image, by attending to it moment by moment as it reveals itself to us, film can escape the clutter of cliches that has been built up around it, returning cinema to a certain purity. “Make visible what without you might never have been seen.” (Notes on the Cinematographer) Bresson proposed, and would elide aspects of a sequence, all the better to get us to see it, often in our mind’s eye as we construct for ourselves what is missing. Tarr holds to the Bressonian proposition but asks us to see slowly, to deliberate and observe the details of a sequence, all the better to grasp it as a thought and a feeling. In Werckmeister Harmonies, we are introduced to a stuffed whale that comes to town, as Tarr shows it to us in a single take, and we see the central character walking through the square. He weaves through the gathering crowd and witnesses a large truck lifting its rear door, and sees a man coming out with a table and a chair. After the film cuts, we follow Janos as he looks at wonderment, walking around the inside of the truck and gazing at the whale while the film follows his fascination and echoes it by refusing to cut within the shot. In Satantango, the film opens with a lengthy lateral tracking shot showing the texture of a crumbling wall and cows grazing next to a decaying farmhouse. In Damnation, we hear a woman sing in the titanic bar and the camera passes behind the backs of customers before slowly revealing the woman herself.

    The director’s work asks us to see, insisting on detail accumulation rather than expecting instant summation. If in film we look at the images literature can only allude to, then what matters is the steady concentration on these images. In literature, we don’t linger over the word as image, though we might give the image the word generates some time for reflection. But this doesn’t mean film cannot insist on a similar reflective space, even if it shows us what in literature is invoked. It only demands that images are given their due and thus removes the twofold problem that can easily reduce film to a mediocre art form: that it is too quickly presented to our eyes, and part of that haste lies in the cliches we are supposed to recognise instantly. Cinema can be much more than that, and Tarr has been an important contributor to its continuing sustenance. When Susan Sontag mused over the decay of cinema, Tarr was central to its ongoing possibilities, with Sontag saying: “the reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to make them more attention-grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't demand anyone's full attention.” (‘The Decay of Cinema’) By showing an image in its entirety, in demanding that an object of our attention isn’t instant but accumulative, Tarr gives images their breath. It makes sense that The Turin Horse would be the director’s last film, as the image fades out while the father and daughter try to light the lamp before it quickly becomes extinguished. The howling wind disappears too, as if the world has lost the will to go on, and not just the father, the daughter and the horse. We have no images left, Tarr seems to say, and the despondency of the characters is met by the snuffing out of the form. Tarr exhausts his possibilities and retires. Others, in his place, must replenish them.


© Tony McKibbin