A Review of The Turin Horse
The Turin Horse (2011)
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky

Aydin Areta

They devalued everything so that they could possess everything, and whatever they possessed they made still more worthless.

Cunningly and through deception, they possessed everything, then stripped it of value, and finally destroyed it. Sometimes through deception, sometimes through violence and cruelty, and sometimes quietly and gently, they lay in wait for everything until they could achieve that final glorious victory they imagined. Along the way toward that victory, nothing in the world remained safe from their touch and possession.

And this world emptied of all value has been destroyed by their hands. This destruction is not a natural disaster, but the verdict of a court humanity has pronounced upon itself.

Everything authentic, great, sacred and higher had first to be emptied of value so it could be acquired; once acquired, it had to be destroyed in order to reach that final victory. Whatever was authentic and great had to surrender without resistance or struggle, because their battle for victory always had to end with the sudden and silent destruction of the other side’s capacity to resist.

And so these victors, through endless raids from their hiding places, finally possessed the entire earth and came to rule it. They mastered even what they had never imagined they could master. They reached for nature, infinity, every transcendent concept and even immortality in order to possess them, and in this way everything was lost.

Those who were authentic and great looked upon what had been lost and realised that there was no longer a God or gods, and only darkness was approaching.

They stood to one side and suddenly a spark illuminated their minds: if God and the gods were dead, then no good and evil existed in the world either. But finally a moment came when they saw before their own eyes that with the collapse of everything good and transcendent, they themselves too would cease to exist.

This was the moment when the one who was authentic and higher burned and went out in a shattering realisation, like a flame left in the rain to be slowly extinguished in its own smoke.

The passages above are a free translation of the neighbour’s speech in The Turin Horse when, on the second day, he visits the old man and his daughter. The film is so filled with silence that a monologue of such force becomes a translation of all the silence surrounding its beautiful, magnificent and painful images.

The film begins by recounting the last day on which Friedrich Nietzsche, the great nineteenth-century German philosopher, was seen in what was regarded as his normal state—the final day before the silence and madness that would forever extinguish his genius in their smoke.

On this final day Nietzsche saw a carriage horse refusing to move while its owner ruthlessly brought his whip down upon the noble, beautiful animal. The philosopher who throughout his life had treated compassion as a weakness to be overcome, in his last act before madness stopped the man, embraced the horse with tears in his eyes and said to it: “Brother, I understand you.”

Nietzsche was then taken home by his neighbour and lay on a sofa for two days without speaking. The final words attributed to him were: “Mother, I am a fool.”

After recounting this story and Nietzsche’s final sentence, The Turin Horse returns to the horse and says: but no one knows what happened to that horse afterwards.

The encounter between Nietzsche and the horse is an extraordinary story that sits at the centre of this film’s meaning and places a large question before us: what happened to Nietzsche that day, and what made his world fall into silence? On the second day, the neighbour tells us: “Finally a moment came when they saw before their own eyes that with the collapse of everything good and transcendent, they themselves too would cease to exist. This was the moment when the one who was authentic and higher burned and went out in a shattering realisation, like a flame left in the rain to be slowly extinguished in its own smoke.”

Nietzsche’s great and unfinished project was the revaluation of all values. In The Antichrist he developed this larger project in greater detail and intended to articulate it fully in the unfinished work The Will to Power, a project he either did not have the opportunity to complete or, more probably, abandoned for reasons that remained unknown to later generations.