Rumble "The Horse of Turin" (1)

The Turin Horse

We first hear the sound and then enter to see: a horse. A horse is enslaved, driven. It didn't seem like a good day, and the strong wind blew up the fallen leaves on the ground. And a horse is enslaved, driven, it walks steadily, and it seems tired. The previous voices imply to us: this is the horse of Turin, this is what Friedrich Nietzsche rescued from that coachman named Giuseppe, Carlo or Edolle in Turin on January 3, 1889 that horse. Horse of Turin. "Mother, I'm so stupid." These were the last words of Nietzsche's life.

Béla Tarr presents us with such a scene at the beginning of her final film, A Torinói ló. Here, he gave the "horse of Turin" a long shot of 4 minutes and 31 seconds. Of course, we have reason to doubt whether Bella Tarr has pointed out the reference to the image of "The Horse of Turin" at this moment, because the historical anecdote of "Nietzsche and the Horse" obviously constitutes an important aspect of the film's connotation. The intertextual basis of , although this event appears only as a narration before the entry of the image and is absent as a text in the subsequent narrative. Jacques Rancière believes that the horses here condense multiple roles:

It was a tool for work, a means of survival for Old Olsdorf and his daughter. It is also the whipped horse, the abused animal that Nietzsche cuddled in the streets of Turin before he went mad. But it is also a symbol of the survival of the disabled groom and his daughter, like Nietzsche's camel, a being used to carry all possible burdens. (Jacques Rancière, "Béra Tal: The Time After", translated by Wei Guangji)

It is worth noting that Bella Tarr actually blurred the boundary between reality and fantasy at the very beginning: Nietzsche is reality, the Horse of Turin is fantasy; sound is reality, image is fantasy. Using a clever montage of sound-directed images, the director suggests that the horse of Turin is the same horse that Nietzsche encountered in Turin. But if we take a closer look, the director's suggestion is nothing but a deception to the audience. Nietzsche was clearly a real historical figure - he cried while holding an old horse in Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, and then went mad, this is also a real "event"; however the world did not really after this destroy. Old Olsdorf must be the groom Giuseppe or Carlo or Edol? Neither. Therefore, "The Horse of Turin" is actually independent of the previous sound in the video part. Bella Tarr lets the sound appear first, thereby eliciting the event/text of "Nietzsche and the Horse", and making it overlie and suspend on the image that enters the viewer's field of vision, forming a scene with the image. A real-virtual intertext game.

Sound still lives in the dominating realm. Even in the video part, the sound also occupies an extremely important position. The sound is no longer a subsidiary of the image, but is directly presented; it replaces part of the image function and provides the "real" within the "virtual" image. For example, the sound of water, wind, and exaggerated environmental sounds; for example , the soundtrack of Mihály Víg , which is completely separated from the image, but at the same time increases the emotional expression of the image. According to Michel Chion, sound in film is actually an "additional value" to the image:

It refers to the expressive and informative values ​​with which sound can enrich a given image to produce an exact impression. (Michelle Sion, "The Voice", translated by Zhang Aigong)

From this perspective, Bella Tarr's use of voice (other than the score) in "The Horse of Turin" coincides with that of French director Robert Bresson . The latter believes that the sound of the film can extend the meaning of the image, or even completely replace the image. With the nuanced voices in "The Horse of Turin," it's hard not to be reminiscent of a similar performance by Robert Bresson in his films Pickpocket or L'argent . The difference is that Bresson adopts a deliberately evasive attitude towards images and soundtracks. Bella Tarr juxtaposed them in parallel.

Let's go back to the long shot of "The Horse of Turin" at the beginning of 4 minutes and 31 seconds. The long takes in Bella Tarr's films have always been different from those of other directors. Comparing Tal 's "The Horse of Turin" with Miklós Jancsó 's "Red Army and White Army" (Csillagosok, katonák) , ​​we can find that it is also a long shot, and Jancsó uses this process to enrich image (like the long takes in most films, such as Bi Gan 's Roadside Picnic ), while Bella Tarr tries to cut it down. In the extension of the shot, Bella Tarr completed the dilution of the image. But at the same time, the horse (and groom) that the lens is aimed at, as the only "object" in the lens, has received most of the viewer's attention, and the image itself still maintains a high degree of compactness, so the process of dilution does not cause the lens to relax with fatigue. When the camera only focuses on pure "things" rather than time, a rhythmic delay effect occurs, which also lengthens the narrative time of the camera. As Andrei Tarkovsky said:

The continuous stream of time, dense or slow, can be called time-pressure, so editing can be seen as arranging and combining them according to the time pressure within the shot. (Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting Time: Tarkovsky's Cinematic Reflections, translated by Chen Ligui and Li Yongquan)

"Horse of Turin" uses the "slowness" of long shots to emphasize this "time pressure", and thereby highlights the stillness and emptiness of the image. A repressed, dull, dull silence.

Horses are both virtual and real. Rancière believes that the animals in Bella Tarr's films all exist "as images through which man experiences his own limits" , the dog in Kárhozat , the cow in Sátántangó , The whale from Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister harmóniák) is now the horse from The Horses of Turin. As the well dries up and the light fades away, the horse goes to irreversible death and decay, just as the whole world dies out in an endless cycle of touch-reduction-possession and touch-possession-reduction. The horse is the embodiment of the loneliness and powerlessness of the Olsdorfs and their daughters in the face of the degeneration of the world. In Christian mythology, God took seven days to create the world, and Bella Tal also took six days to destroy the world: on the first day, the moths stopped eating the wood; on the second day, the horse was no longer driven by humans; on the third day, the horse refused to eat, Water refused; on the fourth day the well was dry; on the fifth day all the light was gone; on the sixth day "everything was in ruins, everything was eroded". In this fictional apocalypse, the Olsdorfs and their daughter fall together with the world. They reject rebellion and believe in redemption and obedience because they believe the end of the world is the original sin of the human self. Isn't this exactly what Nietzsche denounced as Christian morality? Under Christianity, you can only obey, not resist. And it is such decadent values ​​that ultimately lead to the destruction of everything. Bella Tarr told the truth through the mouth of the mysterious wine buyer:

It is people's own choices, about themselves. Of course, God must have facilitated the choice - no, dare I say it: God was involved in the choice. Any choice he was involved in was the most terrifying creation imaginable.

Nietzsche said: "God is dead." In the real world, he held the horse of Turin and wept bitterly, deploring the tediousness of life. The flogging on the Horse of Turin is actually the same as the whipping by Old Olsdorf in the movie "The Horse of Turin", and both represent the strength of religious moral restraint. Nietzsche resented the monotonous, boring, meaningless life (dressing, eating potatoes, fetching water, feeding horses, undressing) that the Olsdorfs and their daughters had repeated before the disaster, and at the same time pity those who chose to refuse to eat. The "horse of Turin" that fights against fate. Among the virtual and the real, Bella Tarr chooses to sympathize with Nietzsche. He uses pure sound-image presentation to emphasize the quintessence of a thoroughly materialistic world. He does not think that "The Horse of Turin" will be an other The present moment of the future without any hope, because Nietzsche still firmly believes in the value of life, the value of man, as he saw in the horse of Turin, that kind of "superhuman" spirit that even human beings rarely have, that even In the face of hopelessness and suffering, there is still happiness that is not timid.

References: ① Tan Xiaohan, "The Horse of Turin: Long Shot Films and Philosophy of Life", "Journal of Changchun University", 2016 ② Fan Luxue, "The Rich Implications of Minimalism: On the Connotation of Bella Tarr's Films" Sound Design", "Sound Studies in Film", 2018 ③ Shen Yang, "Shaping of Women in Bella Tal's Horse of Turin", Art Technology, 2019 ④Pu Po , "Bella Tal" "The Movie" , 2016 ⑤ Liu Yunguo, "On the Philosophical Symbolism of the Film "The Horse of Turin" through Nietzsche, "Young Writers", 2017 ⑥ Wang Wei, "Bella Tarr's Film Time and Space Research", 2019

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