reid-hawk I guess I don't understand art and should stick to playing Call of Duty games or watching whatever movie Michael Bay comes up with next while he's masturbating to nuclear bomb footage. I really don't understand the praise for this film, it's as if watching the same events over and over again is appealing. I get it, Tarr is making a point about the repetitive and boring lives of these characters. I get it, this isn't supposed to be a fun movie. I get it, I just don't think it's as important as people think it is. Nobody likes to listen to the same soundtrack on loop. Nobody *should* enjoy watching someone eat a potato with his hands in at least three separate scenes. Most importantly, nobody should get the idea that this film is some amazingly shot masterpiece because it does a lot of long takes. Nothing of value goes on in these scenes until over an hour into the film. The dialogue is simple enough that anybody can do it (and these actors still struggle to convincingly pull off their lines), and anybody can cut wood and wash clothes in front of a camera for 2 and a half minutes. Sure the scenes involving the horse took talent and a trained horse to do, but if a scene of a horse is what I'm supposed to look forward to the fvck that sh!t. Movies like "Hard to be A God" and "the Tribe" have long take scenes that actually have things going on in them, like dialogue or multiple things happening on screen, which makes their one takes impressive. And don't even try to compare this to the hour and a half long single take movie "Victoria". Here, the one take feels overly long and dull. Maybe I'm just easily bored. I know this director isn't for everyone, but to me this movie feels like it is meant for people who enjoy monotony to a sadistic extent. At 2 and a half hours this begins to feel more like a waterboarding session than an art-film viewing. The philosophy here is weak and bare bones. The characters here are unfleshed out and bare bones. This movie is bare bones. Skip it for any other art film on your list

Lou Cyan I am surprised I did finish this film, there were many times when I wanted it to end. For me, this film had no point whatsoever, I read positive reviews after watching it because I couldn't believe how high it was rated. Now, I understand even though I didn't enjoy it in the least. There wasn't a single action during 2 and a half hour ! And when something did happen ( for example, a group of gypsies or something like that ) , it was right away forgotten and they were back at eating potatoes, dressing up, fetching water, not talking. It was painfully dull, it was worse that routine !! Maybe that was the all point, portraying what a dull insignificant life most people have and if so, why would you like that ? Why would you like to be reminded of your own insignificance ? Why watching some girl cleaning up stables, dressing up her father, doing boring stuff is fascinating to watch ? Persons which have liked this film are lucky, because they didn't waste two and a half hour watching this.

tieman64 "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent. But if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light." - Stanley Kubrick "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" - Albert Camus Everyday is the apocalypse in Bela Tarr's "The Turin Horse". It opens with a parable about philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who encountered a horse being beaten in Turin, Italy, in 1889. The horse refused to work, refused to move, leading to repeated whippings by its owner. This sight led to Nietzsche spiralling into mental illness, depression and finally death. But why? "The Turin Horse" has been compared to Robert Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthazar", a film in which a donkey is incessantly abused by human beings. Tarr's horse is similarly treated, but its response is radically different. Bresson's donkey accepts and largely doesn't understand its fate. Tarr's horse, however, is a perceptive steed with the disposition of a four legged philosopher. His horse slips into depression, suffers an existential crisis and refuses to work, eat or even continue living. The horse, in short, rebels against its owners and life itself; it will not play.Suicide is also the final act of the horse's owners, an elderly cab driver (Janos Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bok). They live in a stone cottage which is incessantly pummelled by powerful gusts of wind. Inside the house, father and daughter huddle in the flickering light of lanterns. Outside the house, reality reveals itself to be malevolent, violent, dark and cold. The wind never steps, there is no respite, and the duo seem to expend all their energy attempting to resist it. Eventually, like the horse, they give up. Tarr's early films were explicitly political. As his career progressed, his films became increasingly abstract and metaphysical. For Tarr, a pessimist, politics offers no solution to humanity's problems. It is not simply that the horse is both beaten and exploited by others, but that a hostile universe, for Tarr, necessitates or causes man to exploit man, father to exploit daughter, man to exploit animal. Indeed, sharing water and brandy with "neighbours" and "strangers" is partially what leads to the father and daughter's demise. For Tarr, the sheer nature of Nature corrupts everything, everyone and every relationship. Everyone is at war, the film's nihilism echoing Schophenahuer and Nietzsche at their worst."The Turin Horse" is comprised of thirty long takes. Most of the film's action is intentionally repetitive, Tarr's characters trapped in their private Sisyphus myth. As is typical of Tarr, the film's shot in inky blacks and austere whites. Its cast, with their magnificent beards and sad eyes, recall Dreyer's "Ordet", and the spiritual but existentially brutal films of Bergman, Bresson and Tarkovsky. Tarr's outlook is much more defeatist, though. One character speaks of civilisation's drive to "acquire", "corrupt" and "debase", but the film's scorn goes far beyond systems of social organisation. "Everyday is the same, then you just disappear," Tarr would say in interviews. "There is no apocalypse...this is all I wanted to say." Such a stance was routinely espoused by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who viewed the world as a penal colony in which pain must outweigh enjoyment, an assertion which he recommended be tested by comparing the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."Turin" itself ends with "eating". Here the father and daughter sit at a table. "Even the embers went out," she says, referring to a dead lamp. "We have to eat," he recommends. But they don't. After all, what's the point? Fittingly, the film is structured as a series of "six days", reversing the Old Testament's six days of creation and seventh day of rest. Here, the Earth slides toward oblivion, followed by a day of total silence."The Turin Horse" was released in 2011, a year in which many similarly themed films were released, most notably Lars von Trier's kitschy "Melancholia", Abel Ferrara's "Last Day on Earth" and Brad Anderson's humble "Vanishing on 7th Street". Documentary cinema at the time was similarly rife with flicks heralding the apocalypse, usually due to environmental or financial catastrophe. All these films are heavy on doom and light on courses of action. "The Turin Horse" was Tarr's final film before retirement.7.9/10 – See "Ghost World", "A Prairie Home Companion", "Man Push Cart", "Papillon" and "Red Desert".

Monsieur_Arkadin I finally watched The Turin Horse recently. I had been meaning to get around to it for a long time. After seeing Damnation, which just didn't really click with me, I think I may have have subconsciously lowered The Turin Horse's priority level in my viewing schedule. However, the movie really worked for me. The last couple nights I couldn't sleep because I couldn't stop thinking about it. I never seemed to ever drift fully into sleep. I would kind of doze off, still thinking about it, only to quickly be aroused by my own thoughts and immediately struggle to try to fall back asleep. The film was in many ways similar to Jeanne Dielman. It shows the overwhelming claustrophobia of a daily routine. How just making it through the basic chores necessary to live can be almost unbearable. It could become impossible to accomplish anything more, let alone find a way to assign some sort of meaning to our lives. But beyond that, it also had a significant underlying theme about class systems and a certain ease of life which allows us to become intellectuals. Nietzsche had the luxury of being destroyed by his own philosophy. He had the luxury of feeling sympathy for the beaten horse. However, when that very horse is your livelihood and the ability to make it through life is barely possible and completely reliant upon that animal's compliance, the abstract philosophies sort of fade away. Sometimes the harsh realities of the world nullify philosophy. Even if it was coming from the "right" place. There is a Louis C.K. joke in which he talks about the fact that he doesn't believe in hitting his children, even though his mother used to hit him. He notes that the difference is that he is wealthy and his mother wasn't. She couldn't afford the luxury of the moral high ground. She was tired and needed the most immediately effective option available. The same concept applies to the farmer's situation with the horse. In neither C.K.'s joke nor in Béla Tarr's film is this a justification. It is simply revealing that life is more complicated than our philosophies allow for. The final aspect of the film which mystifies me are the meta-cinematic elements. The film is a bleak, pessimistic, and starkly final film. It is in many ways an antithesis to the slight beacons of hope offered in his earlier films. It is a film about giving up. Which is exactly what Tarr has done. He's given up making films. The horse quits working, eating, and living. The girl eventually gives up living. Even the earth appears to have given up. Life is over. The sun refuses to shine, lamps refuse to light, water wells refuse to give water. Tarr refuses to make more movies. There is nothing left to say. Philosophy is dead. Cinema is over. They've been snuffed out by what Tarr calls "the heaviness of human existence." All that remains is existing in a void of meaninglessness. However, even that seems nearly finished.