The Turin Horse: Eternal Recurrence and the Cessation of the Universe

The very nature of time is a confounding notion. Superficially, it seems reasonably straightforward – quite literally, in fact, considering that humans have a tendency to process it completely linearly. There is the feeling of things moving from point A to point B, much like in a simple storybook. Whatever else may be, time marches inexorably onward, unshakeable in its perfectly even path – sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five a year, ten of those to a decade – it would be difficult to find something more predictable in its structure than time, which will surely last forever. Even when life comes to an end, time is constant. Would there not be a simple continuation of this linear chronology, one second following another distinctly separate second onwards into eternity?
            
The self-professed final film by Hungarian director Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse, explores this very notion through its subversion of time’s traditional role in stories dating as far back as the creation myth found in the Old Testament with the incorporation of more contemporary ideas of time’s nature, borne from philosophers and scientists like Nietzsche and Kant. Nietzsche, in particular (and his idea of eternal recurrence) plays a particularly significant role in the structuring of The Turin Horse, which even takes its name from the legendary story of the philosopher throwing himself between the whip of a carriage driver and his beast in the streets of the titular city.

            
Contrary to what some have said, the story of Tarr’s film does not follow the same carriage driver as the notorious antagonist of the tale of Nietzsche and the horse – for one, the Hungarian protagonists and their dilapidated home in the basin of a windswept rural valley are about as far removed from the streets of urban Italy as one could hope to imagine. Nonetheless, parallels appear: there is a savage beating of the horse seen in the film as well, as it obstinately refuses to move for carriage driver Ohlsdorfer. Tarr viscerally captures the vicious nature of the blows of the whip in one of the multitude of the film’s unsettling long-takes. And as the audience hopes the brutality will be soon cut off, there is indeed an intervention – not by any mustachioed philosopher, but the driver’s own daughter, the only other consistent character present for the The Turin Horse’s duration. The cessation of the beating doesn’t send her into a decade long mental breakdown, but perhaps that is merely because both of these characters already seem broken and beaten at the onset – they are known to sit in a near catatonic state before their hovel’s only window, looking out at the desolation that encircles the two and hides the horizon. The film does not depict the characters of the Nietzsche story, but rather keeps true to the form of Nietzschean ideas regarding the nature of time by depicting parallel (if not simultaneous) events as a means of representing the basic principles behind the notion of eternal recurrence. Essentially, “in the great dice game of existence, [the world] must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times” (Will to Power 549). Essentially, Nietzsche’s scene in Turin is repeated in rural Hungary, in turn validating his own theory on this notion of eternal recurrence by the repetition of the same action across time (and presumably space, although the isolated nature of the film’s basin allows it to exist outside of any such specificity).

            
The same idea is reiterated on a microcosmic level in the repetitious, near-drone drift of the daily life of Ohlsdorfer and his daughter. Actions are shown multiple times over to the point of monotony (albeit in a hauntingly hypnotic fashion). Take the eating of the potatoes, which occurs at five different points over the duration of The Turin Horse. Ohlsdorfer is like a madman, limp arm at his side while the other tears ravenously at the skin of the root. He then smashes it with his hand, adds salt from the container in its perennially unchanging position on the table, and devours it as quickly as he can bring his trembling fingers to his mouth. He is shown to follow this exact same pattern time and again – peel the skin, smash the potato, add salt, rabidly devour, peel, smash, salt, devour. Directly across, his daughter sits, peeling reservedly at her own morsel, tenderly pulling off one small piece at a time, and never completely finishing. A chunk of her potato is always scraped into the trash at meal’s conclusion. Each day begins with her stoking the small fire stove with a poker, immediately followed by the addition of another log. She then takes two tin buckets and trudges through the permanently howling wind to the well and fills them with the day’s water, two dips of the bucket each time. Thus, in addition to the grand scale linking different people across countries and through years to the same events, the concept of the eternal recurrence can be found just as easily in the grind of the everyday. The shots themselves are all very extended takes, forcing the viewer to take in every detail of the sparse proceedings, whether it be the tying of a boot, or the removal of the wood plank that rests atop the well when not in use, effectively conveying the endless labor.

            
The Turin Horse is, of course, by no means the only film to emphasize the wearing drudgery of eternally recurring menial tasks. However, unlike Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’s harrowing personal intimacy or The Seventh Continent’s depictions of a distinctly modern sort of nihilism, it displays a very primal sense of existential despair. Once more, Tarr returns to the well of Nietzschean philosophy, this time to the oft-used refrain “God is dead.” In the philosopher’s own words, “Whither is God? … We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers” (The Gay Science 181). Tarr takes this in a quite literal direction, despite Nietzsche’s own “reputation for militant atheism” (Chamberlain 4), depicting the death of God as not just an abandonment of faith, but a true desecration, and thus conceptualized murder, leading to the undoing of the very fabric of the world itself. On the second day of the chronology of the film (announced by an intertitle, one for each of the depicted six days), a stranger knocks at the door of the farmhouse, asking for brandy. As he sits at their table, he launches into a monologue that stands conceptually as the centerpiece of The Turin Horse. This stranger, named in the credits as Bernhard, speaks of how all evil minds in the world go about acquiring all that exists, whatever it’s quality at the time of their taking possession, and by the deceitful means of their taking hold thereby debase everything, while “everything that’s excellent…should not engage in any kind of fight. There shouldn’t be any kind of struggle, just the sudden disappearance of one side, meaning the disappearance of the excellent, the great, the noble.” Through the conquest of the evil, all things good and noble are finally able to understand “that there is neither God nor gods.” And this debasement of all that was once good has led to the destruction of the human world as well, with everything in ruins, everything degraded.

            
However, with the death of God established, the presented apocalypse is not that of Christianity’s Book of Revelation. There are no mythical monstrosities, there are no seals to be opened, and there is no Final Judgment. Rather, The Turin Horse sets up an anti-creation mythos, in which the world recedes into darkness in mockery of the Genesis story of Creation. The aforementioned time span of six days points to this – in the original Creation story, it is said that God rested on the seventh day, after forming the world and all its contents in the previous six. However, God is no longer present, tainted by the evil of the human race. There is no seventh day, because there is no higher being around to rest. And with only the chaos of humanity left to reign, all creation begins to recede. Ohlsdorfer’s horse essentially gives up – refuses to eat, drink, or move. Plants die out – the lone tree seen always through the only window in the house stands leafless and barren. Then the water dries up. The water God created on the third day disappears from the well, and presumably everywhere else in this austerely bleak world on the third to last day. And just as on the first day it is said that God created light, on the sixth day at the conclusion of The Turin Horse, light itself is snuffed out, and the world is cast into darkness once more. The very last thing that can be seen is Ohlsdorfer and his daughter sitting in their usual places at table, staring desolately at the last potatoes they will ever see, as all creation is undone.

            
This ultimate destruction can be seen as the cessation of time itself. In Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he states that notions of time are mere constructs of the human mind to help provide contextual understanding of sensory input. Essentially, time is not a substantive trait, and does not exist separately from the mind. Tarr incorporates this notion alongside that of the eternal recurrence through the use of his notorious extended takes. There are not any cuts between different characters’ viewpoints. Such a technique would force an audience member to associate with the disparate outlooks of the various characters contained within the story. As it is, with the fluid, continuous long-takes, an audience member never assumes the outlook of the characters - there is “a special tension between the actors and the camera” (Tarr) – he or she is forced to perceive the events only through his or her own lens of subjectivity. In essence, the camera is distinct from the actors, a separate entity unto itself, and prevents the audience from trusting absolutely in the events that may appear. The only thing that can be trusted is the sequence of events that occur between each sparse cut. The very first shot sees Ohlsdorfer driving his horse along a deserted road, the second sees him arriving at his home in the natural basin, leading both horse and cart. But there is no evidence to indicate that the two shots take place along the same trip – the opening shot could have been set years prior to its successor, or mere minutes. Even between the cuts, the view never shifts to the outlook of a specific character to give context not present in the images themselves. This is maintained throughout the duration of the film – much in the same way it refutes the linear time theory through it’s use of the idea of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence to provide a cyclicality to the sense of time, so too is it impossible to find a linear link of plot elements, and the film could still make cohesive sense were it assembled in a different order, even if thematically it wouldn’t hold up as well due to the structuring of the anti-creation. Put more simply, there is ostensibly a chronological order to the events, what with the use of intertitles to keep the days structured, but there is no definitive visual proof that this is the case.

            
The Turin Horse utilizes the idea that in infinite time every event will repeat itself indefinitely from the philosophical concepts of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose supposed defense of a whipped horse gave the film its title. Béla Tarr blends this idea with another famous Nietzschean quote, that God is dead, and explores the concept in a literal fashion – in which a God was truly destroyed by man, and thus both man himself and God’s creation along with it, leading to the very cessation of time - according to Immanuel Kant, time does not exist apart from the mind. Essentially, time is infinite until the death of the conscious mind able perceive it. Those sixty seconds in the minute, the sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four a day, seven a week, three hundred sixty-five a year, ten each decade are so much more fragile than they appear.

Citations

Chamberlain, Lesley. Nietzsche in Turin: The End of the Future. London: Quartet Books, 1996. Print.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn. An Electronic Class Series Publication, 2010.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Print.

Tarr, Béla. Interview by Eric Kohn. Indiewire.com. Indiewire. 9 February 2012. Web. 27 January 2014.

The Turin Horse. Dir. Béla Tarr. T. T. Filmműhely, 2011. Film.