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 »
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The Passion (original title in Hungarian: Szenvedély) is an adaptation, probably the best one (the uploader’s humble opinion) of James M. Cain’s crime novel: The Postman Always Rings Twice. You might not agree with this but I’m sure it can be matched to Visconti’s Obsession or to the Bob Rafelson’s work preserving the original title of the book.Read More »
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Friedrich Dürrenmatt had written a film script entitled Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Broad Daylight). Not happy with the ending he had devised for the first version, he decided to write a new one. This time he chose the novel format, completely changing the epilogue and the morals implied in the story as he had originally conceived it. In the first version, the events are resolved with sort of a conventional closure, with the main character proved successful, not leaving much space for any further reflection; in the subsequent novel (Das Versprechen, also known as The Pledge in English) the author exploits the story to explore the mechanics of detective fiction and the metaphysics of evil. In Das Versprechen, Dürrenmatt not only changed the ending of the story, he also moved the point of view on the events to another character.Read More »
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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 »
A former inspector on his last day with the department is called in to investigate a child murder. A suspect soon confesses to the crime, but knowing that the confession came only after the man was browbeaten in a relentless, 20-hour interrogation, the inspector’s keen police instincts tell him that the man is not the real murderer and that there is a serial killer at work, with the girl’s murder being related to other child murders that occurred in the area. However, he is alone in his assessment and the police close the case.Read More »