It's because of the rain.

Aric 2022-03-29 08:01:02

As if I was competing with myself, I turned around from the Pompidou and went to the MK2 Beaubourg to buy a ticket for "The Horse of Turin". This is the final work of Béla Tarr, who was hailed as "the most beautiful film at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011" by Die Welt. Sure enough, under my superficial aesthetic vision, I found the word "beautiful". The film tells the 6-day life of a farmer father and daughter. Getting up, getting dressed, fetching water, dressing the disabled father with one arm, drinking wine, watching horses, boiling potatoes, eating potatoes, lighting a lamp, sleeping. The two-and-a-half-hour film uses 30 shots and presents 6 days of almost cookie-cutter life through different mise en scenes. However, it is each shot that exceeds 5 minutes that creates the film's own rhythm and power, making life suffocating a little bit. The horse was reluctant to leave, the neighbors came to buy wine, the book was presented by the frolicking crowd, the well water was dry, and the little things shocked the audience who were already familiar with the life of the father and daughter. When the wind stopped, we also felt death, because we were used to the sound of the wind, the hot boiled potatoes, and hearing the crisp sound of the old father eating raw potatoes, we couldn't help worrying that on the seventh day, they would will not die.

While watching the movie, one question after another about the film's stereotypes popped up in my mind, and one after another died in the film's steady, hesitant long shots. I even remembered the question about actors in David Mamet's "Director's Homework" that I read today - actors don't need acting skills, they only need to complete the simple actions in each shot required by the director, the simpler the better. . Although Mamey's Eisenstein montage theory doesn't work in this film, the father and daughter are almost indistinguishable from the horse - expressionless and simple, but full of power, and this power comes from What the mise en scene gets is that this mise en scene is very different from what Mamet advocates: it is the ingenious use of Steadicam, and the audience is living the monotonous rural life with father and daughter from various angles in real time. Ma Mei will be very happy to see the almost rigid performance of the two actors, because there is really no need for more connotations, even the only two close-ups of the characters in the film, one is given to the one who buys wine that I can't understand. Neighbors, one gave a horse that was always expressionless.

After watching the movie, it was raining. You can choose to have an umbrella, you can choose to button up your hat, and you can wait in front of the theater for the rain to stop and chat up this lady who smokes. this is your choice. And what makes these choices beautiful is the rain.

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Extended Reading

The Turin Horse quotes

  • Narrator: In Turin on the 3rd of January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his mail. Not far from him, the driver of a hansome cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver - Giuseppe? Carlo? Ettore? - loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene caused by the driver, by this time foaming at the mouth with rage. For the solidly built and full-moustached gentleman suddenly jumps up to the cab and throws his arms around the horse's neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words "Mutter, ich bin dumm!" and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, under the care of his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse.

  • Bernhard: Everything's in ruins, everything's been degraded, but I could say that they've ruined and degraded everything, because this is not some kind of cataclysm coming about with so-called "innocent" human aid, on the contrary, it's about man's own judgment over his own self, which of course God has a big hand in, or, dare I say, takes part in, and whatever he takes part in is the most ghastly creation that you can imagine, because, you see, the world has been debased, so it doesn't matter what I say because everything has been debased that they've acquired and since they've acquired everything in a sneaky, underhanded fight, they've debased everything, because whatever they touch, and they touch everything, they've debased; this is the way it was until the final victory, until the triumphant end; acquire, debase, debase, acquire; or I can put it differently if you'd like, to touch, debase and thereby acquire, or touch, acquire and thereby debase; it's been going on like this for centuries, on, on and on; this and only this, sometimes on the sly, sometimes rudely, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, but it has been going on and on; yet only in one way; like a rat attacks from ambush; because for this perfect victory it was also essential that the other side, that is, everything's that's excellent, great in some way and noble, 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 disappearing of the excellent, the great, the noble, so that by now the winners who have won by attacking from ambush rule the earth and there isn't a single tiny nook where one can hide something from them because everything they can lay their hands on is theirs, even things that they can't reach but they do reach are also theirs; the heavens are already theirs and theirs are all our dreams; theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence; even immortality is theirs, you understand?; everything, everything is lost forever, and those many nobles, great and excellent just stood there, if I can put it that way; they stopped at this point and had to understand and had to accept that there is neither God nor gods, and the excellent, the great and the noble had to understand and accept this right from the beginning, but, of course, they were quite incapable of understanding it, they believed it and accepted it but they didn't understand it; they just stood there, bewildered but not resigned until something, that flash on the mind, finally enlightened them, and all at once they realized that there is neither God nor gods; all at once they saw that there is neither good nor bad; then they saw and understood that if this was so then they themselves did not exist either; you see, I reckon this may have been the moment when we can say that they were extinguished, they burnt out; extinguished and burnt out like the fire left to smolder in the meadow; one was the constant loser, the other was the constant victor; defeat, victory, defeat, victory; and one day, here in the neighborhood I had to realize and I did realize that I was mistaken, I was truly mistaken when I thought that there had never been and could never be any kind of change here on earth; because, believe me, I know now that this change has indeed taken place.