Recursion and Rupture: an Anatomy of The Turin Horse

Peerless director Béla Tarr begins his final film The Turin Horse (2011) with an apocryphal story regarding Friedrich Nietzsche: the philosopher, while in Turin, witnessed a horse being whipped by its cruel owner, and, at the site of the animal’s plight, Nietzsche proclaimed “I understand you!” before descending into psychosis, wordlessness, and mental decay—never to recover for the remainder of his life. Tarr’s film speculates on what occurred to that horse, a creature apparently capable of invoking such agony as to fragment one of the greatest minds of the 19th century.

Being the swan song of a director known for his languorous approach to cinema, Turin Horse is a synthesis of his cinematic habits. It obsesses itself on the cyclism of daily life. Much of the film is spent in silence, darkness, and conducting ceremonies of boredom; we watch the boiling of potatoes (à la Jeanne Dielman), the fetching of water from a well, and the insipid form of a farmer gazing out a window towards the Hungarian wasteland.

What seeds the film with intrigue is Tarr’s fictive claim that this horse is the same one that spurred Nietzsche’s mental breakdown. Thus we watch the horse as it grows weak, refuses to eat, and atrophies, all while wondering: what is the relation between the horse and the unrelenting stillness of the film? Why must we fabulate that the horse is some figure from Nietzschean mythology?

We might begin to uncover the horse’s purpose by examining a literary influence of Nietzsche and Tarr, which was one of the seminal works to popularize the horse as an existential figure: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. One of the novel’s most famous passages involves a dream wherein the protagonist Raskolnikov imagines himself as a child, bearing witness to a horse being beaten and whipped to death by a crowd of jeering townsfolk. In the dream, the young Raskolnikov weeps for the slaughtered animal, kneeling at the heap of its body and kissing its hide in lamentation—ironic, given he will be committing the same, titular “Crime” (read: murder) in just two chapters.

Raskolnikov’s name, in Russian, is closely related to the concept of “schism;” it is this inherent quality of duality, transition, and fissure that become integral to understanding his relevance to Turin Horse. Though Raskolnikov experiences many fragmentations of his identity in the novel, his principal moment of rupture—the murder he commits—is directly spurred by the dream of the horse. By invoking Raskolnikov’s story, we observe a correlation between the horse and the idea of rupture: for Nietzsche, the horse initiates the burst from sanity to mania; for Raskolnikov, from man to murderer.

But where might we find evidence of rupture, schism, or fragmentation in a film such as Turin Horse, one that is entirely smooth? A film wherein nothing happens or develops?

At such an impasse, we can examine Turin Horse in direct context of Nietzsche’s own, famous parable of Eternal Recurrence. In his thought experiment, we are told to imagine that we have been sentenced to relive our lives ad infinitum, for the rest of time, without variation or change. An endless cycle. Being handed such a sentence, do we see our fates as a prison or a paradise? Would we be content with the lives we have chosen to live, or would such a sentence urge us to re-enter life with a newfound vigor and direction? Given the numbing tedium of the film, it is clear how Nietzsche’s questions of repetition are relevant.

Perhaps, then, the “schism” that Dostoevsky relates to the horse is not one that we actually witness in the film. The final time Tarr shows us the horse, the Farmer locks it away in the recesses of a dark barn, never to be seen again. If we understand the horse as a vehicle for rupture, change, or transition, the Farmer’s decision to stow it away signals his willful choice to not to disrupt his life; in the face of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, he resigns.

Turin Horse is often seen as a film of apocalypse; the six days of the film gradually descend into darkness as a sort of antithesis to biblical Genesis. Yet, we do not see the seventh day. The week does not conclude. We do not reach God’s day of rest. The story, I argue, has not yet been finalized. Perhaps, on the unseen seventh day, the world will indeed devolve into pure nihility as a result of the Farmer’s inaction. But, perhaps, we can view this saturnine film with a note of optimism, a trace of hope that the seventh day will be different. Perhaps the farmer will decide to free the horse, to unleash the schism, to rupture the cycle of eternal recurrence—to find novelty, joy, and escape in an unrelenting life.