The Turin Horse
Apr 20 - Apr 26, 2012
(Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011, Hungary, France, Germany, Switzerland, 35mm, 146 min)
Seattle Premiere!
Announced as Béla Tarr’s last film, The Turin Horse is apocrypha fabricated from apocrypha. The story is based on the legend that philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a man abusing a horse in Turin, Italy, which triggered the mental illness that disabled Nietzsche until his death. Knowing what happened to Nietzsche, this film speculates what happened to the horse. Following the family dependent on the aged horse for their livelihood, the film documents the harsh landscape and daily toil of rural life. In thirty long takes over the course of five days, the film meditates on the circumstances that may have caused the farmer’s brutality.
"A film of stark, silvery, daguerreotypic beauty" —Seattle Weekly
"A film of stark, silvery, daguerreotypic beauty" —Seattle Weekly
“…Rarely in the cinema have such lives, such tasks been endowed with so much presence, such a sense of exhausted vitality. The characters' lives may be insignificant in any kind of larger scheme, but as they unfold on the screen, they are everything. If ever a film had a claim to being profound in its banality, The Turin Horse is it.”
—Andrew Schenker, Slant Magazine
—Andrew Schenker, Slant Magazine
