On January 3rd, 1889 in Turin, Italy, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, a cab driver is having trouble with a stubborn horse. The horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. After this, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan, until he loses consciousness and his mind. Somewhere in the countryside, the driver of the cab lives with his daughter and the horse. Outside, a windstorm rages.
A sequence steeped in a bleak, monotonous atmosphere, The Turin Horse is a tale which explores the other side of Nietzsche’s tragic descent into madness…it follows the sordid life of the cab driver and his daughter. Though rife with Nietzschean themes, we hear no more of him throughout the rest of the film, instead submerged within the daily happenings of the cab driver and his daughter as they endure their condition of poverty and squalor with bleak resignation.
The tale progresses with a profound lack of dialogue, lack of auditory stimuli which plunges us into the stark reality of their povertyㅡit is as though we are there with them, forced to endure the same austerity, the same dismal tedium. Nothing remarkable happens in their lives, nothing punctures this sense of exhausting monotony; they simply live, toil and suffer. They exist. But this is an existence which is imposed upon themㅡthey have no hand in their fates, they wield no will of their own. Each day spills by at the same sluggish pace…the daughter flits about the house, cooking, working, retrieving water from the well. The father sits in restless silence, staring out of the window, trying fruitlessly to encourage the horse to leave the stable. When they are hungry, they eat the same boiled potatoes, sitting opposite each other in the dim and feeble light of the oil lamp…but rarely do they speak. When they do, the words seem somehow empty, as though they have been drained of all meaning but are only spoken to comply with some kind of expectation to fill the silence. Such is the existence that these two lead…one steeped in bitter monotony, fatal complacency, meek acquiescence. It is this idea of eternal recurrence that Tarr revolves the film around…each day passing in much the same way, a profound lack of will shown by the complacency of the characters. They have submitted to this existence. They do not acknowledge their own will to power.
Eternal recurrence is a notion that appears frequently in Nietzsche’s works; it is the idea that he claimed acted as the source for all other philosophies he gave life to. It appeared first in 1882, in The Gay Science, a text which discloses his most personal philosophical thoughts and aphorisms. Here, he writes:
“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequenceㅡeven this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? … Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 341
Nietzsche proclaims that, to live a life worth living, we must continue to strive and work for those desires and ambitions which inhabit us all…we must live in such a way that we would gladly repeat each day for eternity, satisfied in the knowledge that we have taken hold of the reigns of our own fate. “To live is to suffer; but to survive is to find meaning in the suffering…” In The Turin Horse, Tarr has presented us with a depiction of the worst manifestation of eternal recurrence, one in which life becomes a series of meaningless regurgitations of perpetual toil and hollow of passion. It is an exhausting kind of monotony, though even through this meek resignation, we still see glimmers of hopes, of dreams within the characters. The father is seen to repeatedly take the horse out, over the hills, heading away from this lonely, desolate village…yet each time, he falters and returns, back to predictability, back to comfort, however dismal that may be. The daughter, too, is seen to strive for some change in this life of hersㅡshe stares morosely out of the window, to that hazy distance where some other life resides…but, like her father, she does nothing. The complacency of the two characters within their own fates feed into one another, so that they seem to be perpetually trapped in this hollow existence they each lead.
A glimpse of the alternative is shown at various points throughout the filmㅡa possibility of what life could be if they made the effort to change their minds and attitudes. When the neighbour comes knocking on the door in search of alcohol, he launches into a monologue which disrupts the customary silence of the household. He speaks of the storm which rages outside the window panes, of a town nearby which was ravaged by the fierce winds. “Everything is in ruins, everything has been degraded…” he says. “This is not some kind of cataclysm, coming about with so-called innocent human aid. On the contrary, it’s about man’s own judgement over his own self, which of course God has a hand in…” He goes on to speak of how man has brought this destruction upon himself, how meaninglessness and listlessness have catalysed the world’s dissolution. People have become insipid and beggarly, he claims, waiting for things to happen rather than propelling those happenings themselves. We wait for some external force to be our salvation, rather than taking action and becoming that salvation.
In this sense, a kind of detached Christian symbolism laces the film, an echo of Nietzsche’s own disillusionment with Christianity and the fatal complacency that it appears to invoke. The daughter is once shown to be reading from the Bible, but she stumbles over her words and all meaning seems lost from them. The servility of her role within the house could also be indicative of the Christian emphasis on submission, servitude, whether that’s for God or for husband or father. She works with a slavish persistence, cooking, toiling and serving for them both whilst her father merely watches in mute silence, or goes to handle the horse. When the horse refuses to eat for some reason unknown, he only persists in his attempts to force it to move, to eat, to do something…it is the cycle of eternal recurrence, and we see no change in his methods for dealing with his misfortunes. It seems that he only knows one thingㅡforceㅡand this is displayed in his reactions to the horse’s stubborn inaction, in his whipping of the creature, and even in the way he eats with brute ardour, unlike the meekness of his daughter. When, at the end of the film, the lights go out and the two are plunged into darkness, we see the bleak dangers of this kind of mentality of narrow persistence. They try in vain to light the candle, to no avail, andㅡneglecting to find some other innovative solutionㅡthey eat in darkness. This time, the potatoes are raw, and the daughter stares in mute resignation at this pitiful evidence of their austerity without eating. It is a dismal echo of the horse’s own stubborn refusal to eat…a sombre portrayal of how easily existence could fall into this sordid cycle of eternal recurrence of compliance if one refuses to use the will of their own…
