The Turin Horse

Monday, July 10 at 6:30 PM — Music Box Theatre — 3733 N. Southport Ave
Tickets: $11 at the door, or purchase in advance

THE TURIN HORSE
Directed by Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky • 2011
In Hungarian and German with English subtitles
The Turin Horse begins with a story. On January 3rd, 1889, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a cabman savagely beating his horse and tried to intervene. Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown on the spot, from which he would never recover. The narrator recounting this possibly-apocryphal bit of history concludes his tale: “Of the horse, we know nothing.” Nietzsche does not appear in The Turin Horse, but this foreboding anecdote hangs heavily over the film as it follows horse, cabman, and cabman’s daughter back to their remote homestead where, over the course of a week, they bear gradual witness to a series of mysterious, apocalyptic episodes. Beginning with 1988’s Damnation, renowned Hungarian director Béla Tarr would develop an immediately recognizable filmmaking style marked by snaking Steadicam work, otherworldly black-and-white imagery, and spellbinding long takes, working alongside a regular team of collaborators with whom he shared a “film by” credit (namely, his wife/editor/co-director Ágnes Hranitzky, screenwriter and acclaimed novelist László Krasznahorkai, and composer Mihály Vig). For Tarr, The Turin Horse was an intentional career terminus, a film concerned with the slow dissolution of simple things like getting dressed, boiling potatoes, and staring out the window, which itself marked the dissolution of Tarr’s filmmaking practice. Released theatrically in the States in 2012, The Turin Horse was also one of the final major arthouse titles to screen primarily in 35mm, a bleakly beautiful herald for the dissolution of an entire way of distributing movies. (CW)
146 min • T.T. Filmmûhely • 35mm from Cinema Guild

Preceded by: “My Name is Oona” (Gunvor Nelson, 1969) – 10 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema