Béla Tarr’s hypnotic parable about the trials of human existence, filmed in thirty shots, is an apparently simple record of a week in the life of the farmer and pálinka distiller Ohlsdorfer. The minimalist drama opens with a brief text about the anecdote that Nietzsche went insane in 1889 in Turin after seeing a coachman brutally beat a horse. The introduction ends with the remark that we do not know what happened to the horse. The Turin Horse (2011) answers that question.Read More »
A switchman at a seaside railway witnesses a murder but does not report it after he finds a suitcase full of money at the scene of the crime.Read More »
Quote:
After witnessing a crime during his night shift as railway switchman near the docks, a man finds a briefcase full of money. While he and his family step up their living standards, others start looking for the disappeared case.
Sight and Sound wrote:
Béla Tarr’s latest film may initially appear to be his most conventional work to date, but the Hungarian director hasn’t softened his uncompromising worldview in ‘The Man from London’.By Michael Brooke
The extinction of the aesthetically and intellectually rigorous European art film has been predicted for so long (in the early 1980s, a Sight & Sound columnist called for the creation of a Society for the Protection of the Art Movie) that the mere fact of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr continuing to direct films without making the smallest concession to popular fashion is a cause for celebration.Read More »
Synopsis
Maloin leads a simple life without prospects at the edge of the infinite sea; he barely notices the world around him, has already accepted the slow and inevitable deterioration of life around him and his all but complete loneliness.
When he becomes a witness to a murder, his life takes a sudden turn.
He comes face to face with issues of morality, sin, punishment, the line between innocence and complicity in a crime, and this state of scepsis leads him to the ontological question of the meaning and worth of existence.Read More »
SYNOPSIS:
1889.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse while travelling in Turin, Italy. He tossed his arms around the horse’s neck to protect it then collapsed to the ground. In less than one month, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with a serious mental illness that would make him bed-ridden and speechless for the next eleven years until his death. But whatever did happen to the horse? This film, which is Tarr’s last, follows up this question in a fictionalized story of what occurred. The man who whipped the horse is a rural farmer who makes his living taking on carting jobs into the city with his horse-drawn cart. The horse is old and in very poor health, but does its best to obey its master’s commands. The farmer and his daughter must come to the understanding that it will be unable to go on sustaining their livelihoods. The dying of the horse is the foundation of this tragic tale.Read More »