In The Turin Horse (2010), a narrator introduces the event that precedes the story of the film. In 1889 while in Turin, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnesses a situation where the driver of a hansom-cab starts whipping his stubborn horse. While trying to intervene, Nietzsche throws himself in between the driver and the horse and collapses. After the incident, Nietzsche becomes ill and stops publishing. This verbal introduction ends with a remark that summarizes the nature of this film: we do not know what happened to the horse. In The Turin Horse, Tarr follows the fate of the horse and his owners, an elderly man (János Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bók) living in a little cottage, over the course of six days. After the introduction, Nietzsche disappears from the film apart from a later philosophical cameo-appearance. But clearly, the incident with the horse and Nietzsche is very essential. Everything that happens in the story of The Turin Horse is secondary to the Turin incident. In the audiovisual reality of the film, there is no before, but only an afterlife of the early happenings.
20 Orr (2001).
21 Ibidem.
As the narrative of The Turin Horse progresses, we can see how the daughter helps her partly paralyzed father to dress and undress, fetches water from a well and later prepares their dinner, which consists of a single boiled potato for each, eaten by hand. They live in a harsh windswept countryside all alone. Very little happens, and their daily routines seem like religious rites of passage. Later on in the narrative, a neighbour (Mihály Kormos) comes to visit them, seeking to buy a bottle of brandy. He makes a long speech about the moral breakdown of existence. Then again, the routines follow before a bunch of Gypsies try to take water from the well, which then runs dry. Meanwhile, the horse has stopped eating and drinking.
In The Turin Horse, Tarr relies on minimalist means and gestalt-modes of storytelling to convey and develop his ideas. Philosophical views and matters arise. The Turin Horse seems extreme in its dramatic and aesthetic asceticism.
The narrative is carried by a single composition covering the entire soundtrack, and by the same scenes reoccurring day after day. The Turin Horse has a meditative nature with much tension arising between the images and sounds.
The film is a philosophical and phenomenological investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of a certain reality. In a broader scope, it addresses questions and investigates answers, which it presupposes. The metaphysical naturalism of the film has its descriptive and phenomenal features. The nature of space and time is crucial for Tarr. Tarr renders a world out of totality of entities, a system of relations between individual things. He makes vivid our understanding of temporal and spatial relations in a cinematic world. The various states of emotions appear to be linked together by the film’s image-architecture with philosophical and psychological undertones. The film is an imaginative projection into a special situation to capture the relevant spectrum of appearances for aesthetic contemplation. The meaning of this world relates to its being.
“Whatever presents itself in this bodily reality is simply accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself.” (Edmund Husserl).
In The Turin Horse, as in most of his films, Tarr creates an alternative to classical Hollywood-narrative and develops stylistic features to an unprecedented level of aesthetic observation, and nuance. He is reflecting relevant aspects of the dynamics of human experience. He creates his unfashionable tendency to visualize social existence in ordered, balanced and concentrated forms. His filmmaking is symmetrical forming completely regularized arrangements of shots and sequences. His visual balance and order introduce a set of associations to the formal description of narrative, a psychological equilibrium that signals a bias towards historically contingent style. He specifies how by balance we can understand that all parts of cinematic composition undermine the importance of the whole. As The Turin Horse progresses the spectator becomes more accustomed to its intrinsic norms, the stylization is less overwhelming.
The various techniques are exploited as elements of perceptual design, serving a narrative end to create surprise or suspense but organized to a degree that stresses the symmetries of pattern. The overall symmetry of these transitions, along with its minor nuances and surprises, should require only a little commentary. In Tarr’s usage, balance and order mean something more akin to cinematic coherence and unity. In The Turin Horse, the work’s formal properties serve an identifiable purpose and function to express specifiable themes and meanings. This explains the thematic and formal unity of Tarr’s style that utilizes sonic and other formal strategies to increase the interpretative activity of the spectator. Tarr does not imply that the meaning and importance of his film must be readily transparent. As a consequence, he places a high currency on the various types of phenomenological realms that a film may elicit, and, in exploring this, requires the spectator to actively arise their hermeneutic resources in order to comprehend the film’s sophisticated messages. Pointing out a larger compass, Tarr thinks that through the work of his formal system, certain referents and commonplaces become deepened and enriched. These references are only accessible through understanding the compositional dynamics at play in his narrative.
As The Turin Horse vividly exposes, when talking about the varieties of visual coherence in perception we can state out that representational art always re-creates the world around us as a new form of visual organization. From a scholarly point of view we might have an intuitive conception of time’s role in cinema, but when it comes to define it, we might face certain difficulties. If we simply substitute time for space in this definition to give us characterization of time, we end up with something that might feel trivial. It seems, to overcome the difficulty that we need to distinguish between the time of the narration and the time of the characters in the narrative. The characters have a more personal time in cinema, where this is understood as the set of changes going on in the time of the characters, and in their immediate vicinity. The time of the narration is more external, registered by the changes in the narrative. Despite this, external and personal times can go together, or follow different directions and dimensions, for the changes that constitute personal time can also take place in external time.
For Tarr, the composition and audiovisual form of his narrative designate the totality of his approach. Painting a special view on Tarr, perhaps it is possible to find that various aspects of the image combine in presenting the narrative as a pattern of audiovisual forces, of eloquent shapes, forms and meanings. In this sense, every aspect of his film participates in unison to facilitate a deeper apprehension of the work’s theme. Tarr’s filmic compositions act as catalysts for soliciting interpretation on the level of experience.
Expressive properties of a film can constitute concentrated and intensified forms inherent in all perceptual phenomena. The expressive properties have their kinship in certain mental states. As Tarr’s film show, the perceptual stimuli coming from images and sounds create mental processes involved in the experience. He manifests an emotive property as well. These emotive reflections
indicate particular mental states and associations. The existential relationship between expression and the structure of a film is developed. In film, expression operates through psychophysical parallelism with its structural relation between perception and the following mental states. The Turin Horse comprises structural totality where perceptual configurations are carriers of expressive modernism to produce particular effects. Minimal information is provided between main figures. Tarr’s shapes and lines of composition reveal expressive dynamics, which we can witness. By using form carefully, Tarr orchestrates our attention towards the figures in a landscape.
With this in mind, we can state out that Tarr is an experimental filmmaker, always testing the results of his formal decisions and challenging new demands for the viewer. In The Turin Horse, a careful reworking of subjects and themes will emerge offering structural patterns, which emphasize meaning in a labyrinth of form and style probing the deepest possibilities of the medium. The reality of the film-image is always partial, since the audiovisual perception arises from the interaction of the mind’s active, organizing capacities, and the stimuli found in the sensory environment. Tarr uses spectator’s natural human propensities to allow his creative effects their full disposal, gapping our knowledge and encouraging our relationship with the film by putting all actions on an intimate scale of human drama appropriate to Tarr’s filmic tactics.
Our phenomenological and cognitive properties are scanning the images and sounds relationally apprehending their meanings. . On its own way, Tarr’s view of ethical endorsements in The Turin Horse can come to govern behavior of his characters’ actions. Within moral psychology, Tarr can produce original and challenging outcomes concerning the experiences and conscious actions by his characters. The film swarms with parallels of character and setting since these are normal stylistic commitments for Tarr.
Tarr’s phenomenological approach to interpret everyday actions in The Turin Horse is partly derived from his methods to interpret rules that underlie everyday activity and constitute normative basis of a given social order. From this perspective Tarr focuses on mundane activities of his characters, and attempts to reconstruct an underlying set of rules and procedures that are governing the observed activity. To understand these symbolic ideas and practices needs to create an internal perspective on them, and then interpret the interpretations that human subjects give to their actions and practices. This has a lot to do with practical mode of all human existence, its placement in a world that projects various possibilities. Thus, Tarr’s understanding of his characters becomes an interpretation of them.
With respect to these ideas, Tarr’s cinema forms an elusive medium, and is a process by which certain traits of it as such like the indexical character of its visual and aural signs, and the capacity to separate visual and audio tracks and recombine them in various ways, and its ability to incorporate performance, textual and recording media are brought to bear on various tactics and topics.
Insofar as it uses techniques of representation and structures of meaning that are, in certain ways, distinct from other modes of narration, it is accurate to
think of a Tarr-film as a collection of unique aspirations raising specific historical, social, psychological and ethical questions and endorsements of cultural representation. Throughout the film, Tarr creates a play of routines where everything works on very intimate scale which is suitable for Tarr’s human drama with its ethical conclusions. In The Turin Horse, these contexts become its content, and through this special modification of film language we can notice how the outside elements of an artwork become its inside.