The Turin Horse

"There is nothing to do and nowhere to go, There is nothing to be and no one to know" -Thomas Ligotti

I just got lost in this film. In a good way. Utterly transfixed by the 2 family members struggling to survive in a shack while a gale blows outside. It's mesmerizingly beautiful and minimal, just like other Tarr films I've seen. It's a very pessimistic film - most things in it refuse to work or live at some point (probably not a coincidence seeing as Tarr said this would be his final film). And the opening words state that Nietzsche's mind effectively refused to work after seeing a horse being flogged in the streets of Turin. Some may wonder why anyone would sit through nearly 3 hours of slow zooms, pans and leaves blowing, and barely a plot. Some may even call this type of cinema pretentious - but that is Tarr's philosophical nature. The answer is because it's pure cinema. Pure austere, unforgiving visual poetry. Like Tarkovsky and others that came before it, it is the art of film-making shoved in our faces.