The Turin Horse: Continued Review (2) — Aydin Areta

In this film we see a horse that refuses to submit without resistance to the old man's cruelty and his will to dominate it. The horse refuses to pull the cart and eventually stops eating as well. In many scenes, the daughter's loose hair falling across her back and face recalls the horse. She, too, understands the horse, and eventually she also refuses to eat.

The Gypsies who stop at one point in the film to draw water from the well belonging to the old man and his daughter represent another way of living. Their horses are companionable and lively. In the scene where they descend from their wagon, one of them remains beside the horses and strokes them. They are not all of one kind. One is an elderly religious man who gives the girl a Bible before they leave; another recalls the rebel who, as they depart, cries out, “We will return, and the earth will be ours!” The others are carefree travellers in search of a new land and their dream.

It is as though even the storm does not trouble them. Its intensity seems greater in the presence of the old man than in the presence of these travelling Gypsies. In them one can feel passion, emotion and life, and this has nothing to do with whether they are religious or not.

They embody a passionate way of living life, much as Nietzsche demands of the human being. Yet they place another large question before us: is the person who lives only to master life, oriented entirely toward his own will and emptied of compassion and belief in God, necessarily more full of the passion of life than one who carries a Bible, or than the free Gypsy who is neither master nor servant? Does this not itself suggest that values give meaning to life, rather than life giving meaning to values?

Nietzsche spent his life trying to put an end to philosophical binaries and to overcome the dualisms of the human mind. Yet perhaps he too became caught in another form of dualism, one that helped determine the limits of his philosophy.

I believe Nietzsche correctly recognised that life cannot be separated from moral values, and that destroying life in the name of values does nothing but empty the human being of life. Yet he completed this equation by destroying the concept of values in the name of a value called life, whereas perhaps life itself is nothing other than the human struggle to realise those values.

God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In this film the storm and the human struggle continue for six days; afterwards everything sinks into darkness, and the storm itself comes to an end. It is as though, once God leaves the scene, everything passes beyond the reach of human understanding. Before that there is suffering and struggle, and an opportunity to choose how to live; afterwards there is only silence and darkness.

At one point, as the girl reads the Bible, we encounter these words: “When a holy place has been defiled by an act of injustice, no prayer offered there will any longer be accepted unless sorrow and grief are felt for what has been done. If that grief is felt, the day will end in a dark night, but the night too will finally come to an end.”

These lines again confront us with the question of whether what makes a place sacred is the place itself, or the value that made it sacred in the first place. If that value is no longer realised, the place is no longer sacred—just as life acquires value not simply because it is life, but because justice and what is virtuous and valuable can be realised within it.

When the realm of life is contaminated by injustice, life becomes little more than a futile and unfulfilled struggle. And when the sorrow and grief of what has occurred are truly understood, a dark night will arrive—but that night too will come to an end.

In the final scene, grief reaches the old man as well. He too stops eating, and everything disappears into darkness and silence. Yet the daughter's voice can still be heard reading from the Bible: “A dark night will come, but that night too will come to an end.”