From crying to discouragement
He says he retires from cinema and
that will leave us a huge void. Béla Tarr is one of the
greatest minds of European cinema and at a time when the death of Theo Angelopoulos has
left us orphans of poetry and social criticism, the announced withdrawal
of Tarr this orphanhood enlarges.
His latest film is The Turin Horse, winner of
the Silver Bear-Grand Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at Berlinale 2011. A
story based on a real experience of the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche, or so it’s said, on January 3, 1889, when he saw the driver
of a cart maltreating his horse in the street because it, exhausted,
refused to move. As the story goes, Nietzsche could not help crying
and hugging the animal so the shock was such that he
lost his speech and consciousness until his death ten years
later.
Tarr wonders about the other
part of the story, the one of the horse and the cart driver. Tarr focuses
on the narrative of the life of that man, surrounded by misery with
her daughter and the horse on a farm in the middle of a bleak and
stormy landscape, isolated, and almost at the gates of apocalypse.
The direction of Béla Tarr is
based on a script written between himself and László Krasznahorkai, and
it has the powerful cinematography work of Fred Kelemen, the best translation in
images of Tarr’s film language as in the previous collaborations
Journey to the Plain, 1995 ,and
The Man from London, 2007. Film
director and writer, his work is delicate and powerful at a
time, being able of interpreting the path of Béla Tarr becoming
his wonderful dance partner. The same goes for the music by Mihály Vig, also a
regular contributor to Tarr’s films like Damnation, Satantango, in which he also performed the main
role, Werckmeister Harmonies and
The Man from London.
This is a new artistic triumph for
the Hungarian director, loneliness, domestic violence as the
result of helplessness and the misery of the environment, acting as hopeless communicating
vessels that shown starkly, returned us all the ghosts
we hide in our mind. If it is truly the last, thanks
for all you have given us, master.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo courtesy of PacoPoch Cinema. All rights reserved