everyday life

Madisen 2022-04-06 09:01:06

Overall, this is a fable, expressing abstract ideas isolated from real situations. However, the details of everyday life presented in the film fascinated me.

The story begins with the narration that Nietzsche met the horse of Turin, hugged the horse and cried bitterly, collapsed, and went mad for ten years. So the groom drove the carriage home in the strong wind. The long shot of the horse walking through the fog for five minutes is very moving. The hair on the horse is wet with the fog. The background music keeps repeating the same melody, and this melody is repeated throughout the whole film. The same strong wind rages the whole film until Last scene.

After the groom returned home, the horse refused to pull the cart without food or drink, and the groom and his daughter were trapped at home by the strong wind for six days. These six days are like the reverse process of the six days of God's creation. On the fourth day, they lost water (the well dried up), and on the fifth day they lost light (the oil lamp was broken, the stove was extinguished), and finally they were in a desperate situation.

Every day, my daughter wakes up, puts on seven or eight layers of clothes, and goes out to the well to fetch water; she goes home and puts on layers of clothes for her father who goes out to work (his right hand is broken). Father's breakfast was two glasses of spirits, and then he went out for a horse. After Ma refused, the father returned to the room and changed out of the layers of clothes he had worn for work and put on clothes at home. The daughter boiled water to wash clothes and boiled two potatoes. Then each of them ate a hot potato every day: the father dipped it in a little salt, ate it quickly, and went to the window to watch the wind; the daughter ate it thoughtfully and slowly. Then it gets dark, then sleep. Their daily life seems to be like this, getting up, fetching water, drinking, going out, eating potatoes, watching the wind, and sleeping.

The film uses long shots to faithfully and meticulously record the whole process of doing these things every day in these six days: getting up, fetching water, drinking, watching horses, eating potatoes, and looking out the window. Repeat this for six days. When eating potatoes, how does my father peel off the skin of the hot potatoes with his hands, how to smash the potatoes, quickly pick up the hot potatoes and stuff them into his mouth, blowing continuously, sprinkle salt, and lick his fingers.

Their monotonous life of eating a potato a day looks very poor and hopeless. But I felt comfort and satisfaction from it. How happy it is to eat a potato every day, imagine that these potatoes are growing in the ground at the same time, and then we eat it on different days, like a kind of space to time projection. Everyday life is like the stone house they live in, so strong in the wind, they can safely look through the window at the storm outside. This is probably the comfort of daily life.

This kind of solace may be the opium and cage of the spirit, so the fables told in the film take away these daily life bit by bit, first there is no water, no wine, and finally no fire, so in the last scene, the father can only eat Raw potatoes. The horse in the story seems to recognize the reality from the very beginning, not eating or drinking, and living toward death.

During the period, a wine buyer came and told them that God is dead and the town has been blown away by the wind. Then came a group of gypsies who tried to get water from their wells and gave their daughter a religious book. Yet father and daughter do not seem to accept God or that God is dead, but cling to their water, wine, and potatoes. After the well dried up, they tried to move, the daughter pushed the cart, the father led the horse, and gave up halfway, trapped in the stone house of life forever.

On the last day, the wind finally stopped, the movie finally came to this, I don't know what will happen after that.

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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.